THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE 
 
 LIFE AND WORK 
 
 OP 
 
 ST. PAUL 
 
 BT 
 
 FEEDEEIC W. FAEEAR, D.D., F.E.S. 
 
 LATE FELLOW Of TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
 DEAN OF CANTERBURY 
 
 EJ KO! riaf<A.os Jiv a\\' HvBpcairos -ffv. ST. 
 
 WITH 16 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED 
 
 LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK $ MELBOURNE 
 1898 
 
 AIL BIBT MUMVZ0
 
 College* 
 Library 
 
 BS 
 
 TO THB 
 
 RIGHT HEY. J. B. LIGHTFOOT, D.D., 
 
 LORD BISHOP Of DURHAM, 
 
 K) WHOM ILL STUDENTS OP BT. PATJL'S EPISTLES AEE DEEPLY INDEBTED, 
 AND JTBOM WHOM FOB THIBTY YEARS I HATE BiSCBIVED MANY KINDNESSES, 
 
 3T Dedicate 
 
 THESE STUDIES ON THS LIFS AND WORK 
 
 or 
 THS APOSTLS OF TBS GENTILES.
 
 viii PBBVACB. 
 
 all students of St. Fanl most be largely indebted, and I need not say that my 
 own book is not intended in any way to come into competition with theirs. 
 It has been written in great measure with a different purpose, as well as from 
 A different point of view. My chief object has been to give a definite, ac- 
 curate, and intelligible impression of St. Paul's teaching ; of the controversies 
 in which he was engaged ; of the circumstances which educed his statements 
 of doctrine ami practice ; of the inmost heart of his theology in each of its 
 phases ; of his Epistles as a whole, and of each Epistle in particular as com- 
 plete and perfect in itself. The task is, I think, more necessary than might 
 be generally supposed. In our custom of studying the Bible year after year 
 in separate texts and isolated chapters, we are but too apt to lose sight of 
 what the Bible is as a whole, and even of the special significance of its 
 separate books. I thought, then, that if I could in any degree render each 
 of the Epistles more thoroughly familiar, either in their general aspect or 
 in their special particulars, I should be rendering some service however 
 humble to the Church of God. 
 
 With this object it would have been useless merely to retranslate the 
 Epistles. To do this, and to append notes to the more difficult expressions, 
 would have been a very old, and a comparatively easy task. But to make the 
 Epistles an integral part of the life to put the reader in the position of those 
 to whom the Epistles were first read in the infant communities of Macedonia 
 and Proconsular Asia was a method at once less frequently attempted, and 
 more immediately necessary. I wish above all to make the Epistles comprehen- 
 sible and real. On this account I have constantly deviated from the English 
 version. Of the merits of that version, its incomparable force and melody, it 
 would be impossible to speak with too much reverence, and it only requires 
 the removal of errors which were inevitable to the age in which it was 
 executed, to make it as nearly perfect as any work of man can be. But our 
 very familiarity with it is often a barrier to our due understanding of many 
 passages ; for " words," it has been truly said, " when often repeated, do 
 ossify the very organs of intelligence." My object in translating without 
 reference to the honoured phrases of our English Bible has expressly been, 
 not only to correct where correction was required, but also to brighten the 
 edge of expressions which time has dulled, and to reproduce, as closely as 
 possible, the exact force and form of the original, even in those roughnesses, 
 turns of expression, and unfinished clauses which are rightly modified in 
 versions intended for public reading. To aim in these renderings at rhythm 
 or grace of style has been far from my intention. I have simply tried to 
 adopt the best reading, to givo its due force to each expression, tense, and
 
 PREFAOH, IX 
 
 particle, and to represent aa exactly aa is at all compatible with English idiom 
 what St. Paul meant in the very way in which he said it. 
 
 With the same object, I have avoided wearying the reader with those 
 interminable discussions of often unimportant minutiae those endless refu- 
 tations of impossible hypotheses those exhaustive catalogues of untenable 
 explanations which encumber so many of our Biblical commentaries. Both 
 as to readings, renderings, and explanations, I have given at least a definite 
 conclusion, and indicated as briefly and comprehensively as possible the 
 grounds on which it is formed. 
 
 In excluding the enumeration of transient opinions, I have also avoided 
 the embarrassing multiplication of needless references. When any German 
 book has been well translated I have referred to the translation of it by its 
 English title, and I have excluded in every way the mere semblance of re- 
 search. In this work, as in the Life of Christ, I have made large use of 
 illustrations from Hebrew literature. The Talmud is becoming better known 
 every day ; the Mishna is open to the study of every scholar in the mag- 
 nificent work of Surenhusius; and the most important treatises of the 
 Gemara such as the Berachoth and the Abhoda Zara are now accessible to 
 all, in French and German translations of great learning and accuracy. I 
 have diligently searched the works of various Jewish scholars, such as Jost, 
 Gratz, Schwab, Weill, Rabbinowicz, Deutsch, Derenbourg, Munk, and others ; 
 but I have had two great advantages first, in the very full collection of 
 passages from every portion of the Talmud, by Mr. P. J. Herson, in his 
 Talmudic Commentaries on Genesis and Exodus an English translation of 
 the former of which is now in publication and, secondly, in the fact that every 
 single Talmudic reference in the following pages has been carefully verified 
 by a learned Jewish clergyman the Rev. M. Wolkenberg, formerly a mis- 
 sionary to the Jews in Bulgaria. All scholars are aware that references to 
 the Gemara are in general of a most inaccurate and uncertain character, but 
 I have reason to hope that, apart, it may be, from a few accidental errata, 
 every Hebraic reference in the following pages may be received with absolute 
 reliance. 
 
 The most pleasant part of my task remains. It is to offer my heartfelt 
 thanks to the many friends who have helped me to revise the following pages, 
 or have given me the benefit of their kind suggestions. To one friend in 
 particular Mr. C. J. Monro, late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Cambridge I owe 
 the first expression of my sincerest gratitude. To the Rev. J. LI. Davies and 
 the Rev. Prof. Plumptre I am indebted for an amount of labour and trouble such 
 as it can be the happiness of few authors to receive from scholars at once so
 
 X FBKFAfl*. 
 
 competent and so fully occupied by public and private duties. From the 
 Very Rev. Dean Stanley; from Mr. Walter Leaf, Fell, of Trin. Coll., 
 Cambridge, my friend and former pupil ; from the Rev J. E. Kempe, Hector 
 of St. James's, Piccadilly ; from Mr. R. Garuett, of the British Museum ; 
 and from my valued colleagues in the parish of St. Margaret's, the Rev. H. 
 H. Montgomery and the Rev. J. S. Northcote, I have received valuable 
 advice, or kind assistance in the laborious task of correcting the proof-sheets. 
 The Bishop of Durham had kindly looked over the first few pages, and but 
 for bis elevation to his present high position, I might have derived still fur- 
 ther benefit from his wide learning and invariable kindness. If my book fail 
 to achieve the purposes for which it was written, I shall at least have enjoyed 
 the long weeks of labour spent in the closest study of the Word of God, and 
 next to this I shall value the remembrance that I received from so many 
 friends, a self-sacrificing kindness which I had so little right to expect, and 
 am so little able to repay. 
 
 I desire also to express my best obligations to my Publishers, and the 
 gentlemen connected with their firm, who have spared no labour in seeing 
 the, work through the press. 
 
 After having received such ungrudging aid it would be ungrateful to 
 dwell on the disadvantages in the midst of which this book has been written. 
 I have done my best under the circumstances in which a task of such dimen- 
 sions was alone possible ; and though I have fallen far short of my own ideal 
 though I am deeply conscious of the many necessary imperfections of my 
 work though it is hardly possible that I should have escaped errors in a 
 book involving so many hundreds of references and necessitating the exami- 
 nation of so many critical and exegetical questions I still hope that the 
 work will be accepted as furnishing another part of a humble but faithful 
 endeavour to enable those who read them to acquire a more thorough know- 
 ledge of a large portion of the Word of God. 
 
 F. W. FARRAB. 
 
 ST. MARGARET'S RECTORY, 
 
 isrs.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Book I. THE TRAINING OF THE APOSTLE. 
 
 OHAPTEK I. INTBODUCTOBY. VA* 
 
 Various types of the Apostolato St. Peter and St. John The place of St. 
 Paul in the History of the Church His Training in Judaism What we 
 may learn of his Life Modern Criticism of the Acts of the Apostles 
 Authorities for the Biography of St. Paul Records, though fragmentary, 
 suffice for a true estimate Grandeur of the Apostle's Work . 1 
 
 CHAPTER n. BOYHOOD IK A HEATHEN CITY. 
 
 Date of his Birth Question of Birthplace Giscala or Tarsus P The Scenery 
 of Tarsus Its History and Trade Paul's indifference to the beauties of 
 Nature His Parentage Early Education Contact with Paganism Pa- 
 ganism as seen at Tarsus Paganism as it was A decadent culture 
 Impressions left on the mind of St. Paul St. Paul a Hebraist Hia 
 supposed familiarity with Classical Literature shown to be an untenable 
 opinion . . . " . . . . T 
 
 CHAPTER HI. THE SCHOOL OF THS RABBI. 
 
 Roman Citizenship School Life at Tarsus and Jerusalem Gamaliel Perma- 
 nent effects of Rabbiuio training as traced in the Epistles St. Paul's 
 knowledge of the Old Testament His method of quoting and applying 
 the Scriptures Instances Rabbinic in form, free in spirit Freedom 
 from Rabbinic faults Examples of his allegoric method St. Paul a 
 Hagadist The Hagada and the Halacha ....... 2G 
 
 CHAPTER IV. SAUL ran PHARISEE 
 
 Early struggles The Minutiae of Pharisaism Sense of their insufficiency 
 Legal blamelessness gave no peace Pharisaic hypocrisies Troubled 
 years Memories of these early doubts never obliterated Had Saul seen 
 Jesus ? It is almost certain that he had not Was he a married man ? 
 Strong probability that he was . 35 
 
 CHAPTER V. ST. PETEB AHD THE FIBST PENTECOST. 
 
 Saul's First Contact with the Christians Source of their energy The Resur- 
 rection The Ascension First Meeting Election of Matthias The Upper 
 Room Three Temples The Descent of the Spirit at Pentecost Earth- 
 quake, Wind, and Flame Tongues Nature of the Gift Varying opinions 
 Ancient and Modern Views Glossolaly at Corinth Apparent nature of the 
 sign Derisive Comment Speech of Peter Immediate Effects on the 
 Progress of the Church 46 
 
 CHAPTER VI. EABLY PiBSEOtrnoms. 
 
 Beauty and Power of the Primitive Christian Life Alarm of the Sanhedrin 
 Peter and John Gamaliel Toleration and Caution Critical Arguments 
 against the Genuineness of his Speech examined The Tubingen School on 
 tkeAote 58
 
 COA TENTS. 
 
 II. -ST. STEPHEN AND THE HELLENISTS. 
 
 CHAPTEli VII. THE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM Aim HELLENISM. PAI 
 
 Preparation for Christianity by three events Spread of the Greek Language 
 Rise of the Roman Empire Dispersion of the Jews Ita vast Effects- 
 Its Influence on the Greeks and Romans Its Influence on the Jews them- 
 selves Worked in opposite directions Pharisaic Jews Growing Power 
 of the Scribes Decay of Spirituality Liberal Jews Commerce Cosmo- 
 politan Hellenes and Hellenists Classes of Christians tabulated Two 
 Schools of Hellenism Alexandrian Hellenists Hebraising Hellenists 
 Hellenists among the Christians Widows The Seven Stephen . . 6f 
 
 CHAPTER VHL WOBK AND MARTYRDOM or ST. STEPHEN. 
 Success of the Seven Pre-eminent faith of Stephen Clear Views of the 
 Kingdom Tardier Enlightenment of the Apostles Hollow Semblance of 
 Union with Judaism Relation of the Law to the Gospel Ministry of St. 
 Stephen Hellenistic Synagogues Saul Power of St. Stephen Rabbinic 
 Views of Messiah Scriptural View of * Suffering Messiah Suspected 
 Heresies Discomfiture and Violence of the Hellenists St. Stephen 
 arrested Charges brought against him The Trial "The Face of an 
 Angel " The Speech delivered in Greek Line of Argument Its consum- 
 mate Skill Proofs of its Authenticity His Method of Refutation and 
 Demonstration Sudden Outburst of Indignation Lawless Proceedings 
 " He fell asleep "Saul 73 
 
 III. THE CONVERSION. 
 CHAPTER IX. SAUL THE PEBSECUTOB. 
 
 Age of Saul His Violence Severity of the Persecution underrated " Com- 
 polled them to blaspheme " Flight of the Christians Continued Fury of 
 Saul Asks for Letters to Damascus The High Priest Thcophilus Aretas 95 
 
 CHAPTER X. THE CONVERSION OF SAUL. 
 
 The Commissioner of the Sanhedrin The Journey to Damascus Inevitable 
 Reaction and Reflection Lonely Musings Kicking against the Pricks 
 Doubts and Difficulties Noon The Journey's End The Vision and the 
 Voice Change of Heart The Spiritual Miracle Sad Entrance into 
 Damascus Ananias The Conversion as an Evidence of Christianity . 101 
 
 CHAPTER XI. THE RETIBEHBNT OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Saul a "Nazarene" Records of this Period fragmentary His probable 
 Movements guided by Psychological Considerations His Gospel not " of 
 man" Yearnings for Solitude Days in Damascus Sojourn in Arabia- 
 Origin of the " Stake in the Flesh " Feelings which it caused Influence 
 on the Style of the Epistles Peculiarities of St. PauF Language- 
 Alternating Sensibility and Boldness 115 
 
 CHAPTER XII. THE BEGINNING OF A LONG MABTTBDOM. 
 " To the Jew first " Reappearance in Damascus Saul in the Synagogues 
 No ordinary Disputant The Syllogism of Violence First Plot to Murder 
 him His Escape from Damascus Jonrnej to Jerusalem . . . . 125 
 
 CHAPTER XHI. SAUL'S RJSCJBTIOH AT JKBUSALEM. 
 
 Visit to Jerusalem Apprehensions and Anticipations St. Peter's Goodness 
 of Heart Saul and James Contrast of their Character and Epistles 
 The Intervention of Barnabas Intercourse with St. Peter Saul and the 
 Hellenists Trance and Vision of Saul at Jerusalem Plot to Murder him 
 night Silent Period at Tarsus ...... . 12d
 
 CONTENTS. Xfii 
 
 CHAPTER XTV. GAIUS AND Jaws PEACE OF THE CHUBOH. PAOI 
 "Then had the Church rest" Surrey of the Period Tiberius Accession 
 of Gains (Caligula) Herod Agrippa I. Persecution of the Jews of 
 Alexandria Fall of Flaccus Madness of Gains Determined to place 
 his Statue in the Temple Anguish of the Jews The Legate Petronins 
 Embassy of Philo Murder of Gaius Accession of Claudius . . . 187 
 
 Boofe IV. THE RECOGNITION OF THE GENTILES. 
 
 OHAPTEE XV. THE SAMABITANS THE EUNUCH THE OENTUHION. 
 The brightening Dawn of the Church " Other Sheep not of this Fold " Conse- 
 quence of Saul's Persecution Philip in Samaria Simon Magus The 
 Ethiopian Eunuch Significance of his Baptism St. Peter at Joppa 
 House of Simon the Tanner Two Problems : (1) What was the Eolation 
 of the Church to the Gentiles (2) and to the Levitical Law P Christ and 
 the Mosaic Law Utterances of the Prophets Uncertainties of St. Peter 
 The Tanner's Eoof The Trance Its Strange Significance and Appro- 
 priateness "This he said . . . making all meats pure" Cornelius 
 "God is no respecter of persons" Bold initiative of Peter Ferment 
 at Jerusalem How it was appeased . ...... 144 
 
 V. ANTIOCII. 
 CHAPTER XVI. THE SECOND CAPITAL OP CHRISTIANITY. 
 Hellenists boldly preach to the Gentiles Barnabas at Antioch Need of a 
 Colleague He brings Saul from Tarsus The Third Metropolis of the 
 World, the Second Capital of Christianity Site and Splendour of Antioch 
 Its Population Its Moral Degradatioii Scepticism and Credulity 
 D&phne and its Asylum The Street Singou The Name of " Christian" 
 Its Historic Significance Given by Gentiles Christiani and Chrestiani 
 Not at once adopted by ike Church Marks a Memorable Epoch Joy of 
 Gentile Converts . . . , , ; ... ,,; , . . . . . 160 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. A MARTY JQOM AND A RETRIBUTION. 
 
 A Year of Happy Work Another Vision Agabns and the Famine Collec- 
 tions for Poor Brethren of Jerusalem Paul and Barnabas sent with the 
 Qhaluka, The Royal Family of Adiabene The Policy of Herod Agrippa I. 
 Martyrdom of St. James the Elder Seizure and Escape of Peter 
 Agrippa in his Splendour Smitten of God St. Mark . . .171 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. JUDAISM AHD HEATHENISM. 
 
 The Church at Antioch Stirrings of the Missionary Spirit The Prophets and 
 the Gentiles Difficulties of the Work Hostility of the Jews to the 
 Gospel Abrogation of the Law A Crucified Messiah Political Timidity 
 Hatred of Gentiles for all Jews and especially for Christian Jews 
 Depravity of the Heathen World Influx of Oriental Superstitions 
 Despairing Prid? of Stoicism The Voio of the Spirit .... 181 
 
 VI. THE FIBST MI8SIONAEY JOURNEY. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. CTPBUS. 
 
 * Sent forth by the Holy Ghost " Ancient Travelling Prospects of the 
 Future Paul, his Physical and Moral Nature His Extraordinary Gifts 
 Barnabas Mark Arrival at Cyprus The Pagan Population Salamis 
 The Syrian Aphrodite Paphos Sergius Paulus Elymaa Just Denuncia- 
 tion and Judgment " Sad who also is called Paul" 188
 
 *rr CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. AKTIOCH IN PISIDU. 
 
 Perga Defection of Mark Passes of the Taurus St. Paul's Absorption in 
 his one Purpose Pisidian Antiooh Worship of the Synagogue The 
 Parashah and Haphtarah The Sermon in the Synagogue Example of 
 Paul's Method Power of hia Preaching Its Effect on the Jews Imme- 
 diate Results " We turn to the Gentiles " Driven from the City . . 201 
 
 CHAPTER XXL THB CLOSK or TH JOUBNKY. 
 
 loonium Persistent Enmity of the Jews Lystra Healing of the Cripple 
 Unwelcome Honours The Fickle Mob The Stoning Probable Meeting 
 with Timothy Derbe They Retrace their Steps Return to Antioch 
 Date of the Journey Effects of Experience on St. Paul The Apostle of 
 the Gentiles 212 
 
 CHAPTER XXIL THB CONSULTATION AT JEBUSALKM. 
 
 " Certain from Judcea " visit Antioch A Hard Dogma Circumcision A 
 Crushing Yoke Paul's Indignation Reference to Jerusalem The Dele- 
 gates from Antioch Sympathy with them in their Journey The First 
 Meeting The Private Conference The Three won over to St. Paul's 
 Views Their Request about the Poor Titus Waa he Circumcised ? 
 Strong Reasons for believing that he was Motives of St. Paul The 
 Final Synod Eager Debate The Speech of St. Peter St. James : his 
 Character and Speech His Scriptural Argument Final Results The 
 Synod not a " Council " The Apostolic Letter Not a Comprehensive and 
 Final " Decree " Questions still Unsolved Certain Genuineness of the 
 Letter Its Prohibitions 224 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL AT ANTIOOH. 
 Joy at Antioch Ascendency of St. Paul St. Peter at Antioch Arrival of 
 " certain from James " " He separated himself " Want of Moral Courage 
 Unhappy Results Arguments of St. Paul Character of St. Peter A 
 Public Rebuke Effects of the Rebuke Malignity of the Pseudo Clemen- 
 tine Writings Mission-Hunger The Quarrel of Paul and Barnabas 
 Results of their Separation Overruled for Good Barnabas and Mark . 24? 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONABT JOUBNBY 
 
 PAUL, SILAS, TIMOTRT PAUL IN GALATIA. 
 
 i>anl and Silas The Route by Land The Cilician Gates Derbe Where is 
 Barnabas P Lystra " Timothy, my Son " His Circumcision and Ordina- 
 tion The Phrygian and Galatian District Scanty Details of the 
 Record The Galatians Illness of St. Paul Kindness of the Galatians 
 Varied Forms of Religion Pessinus, Ancyra, Tavinm Their course 
 guided by Divine intimations Troaa The Vision " Come over into 
 Macedonia and help us" Meeting with St. Luke His Character and 
 Influence . 256 
 
 VII. CHRISTIANITY IN MACEDONIA, 
 CHAPTER XXV. PHILIPPI. 
 
 The Sail to Neapolis Philippi The Place of Prayer Lydia Macedonian 
 Women Characteristics of Philippian Converts The Girl with a Spirit of 
 Python The Philippian Praetors Their Injustice Scourging The 
 Dungeon and the Stocks Prison Psalms The Earthquake Conversion 
 of the Jailer Honourably dismissed from Philippi ..... 273 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. THBSSALONICA AND BEIUBA. 
 Thessalonica and its History Poverty of the Apostles Philippian Generosity
 
 CONTENTS. XV 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Success among the .Gentiles Summary of Teaching St. Paul's State 
 of Mind The Mob and the Politarcha Attack on the House of Jason 
 Flight to Bercea " These were more noble " Sopater Escape to Athens . 285 
 
 VIII. CHRISTIANITY IN ACHAIA. 
 CHAPTER XXVII. ST. PATO AT ATHENS. 
 
 The Spell of Athens Its Effect on St. Paul A City of Statues Heathen Art 
 Impression produced on the Mind of St. Panl Altar " to the Unknown 
 God" Athens under the Empire Stoics and Epicureans Curiosity 
 excited The Areopagus A Mock Trial -'Speech of St. Paul Its Power, 
 Tact, and Wisdom Its many-sided Applications Mockery at the Resur- 
 rection Results of St. Paul's Visit . . .; . . .. .295 
 
 CHAPTER XXVHI. ST. PAUL AT COBINTH. 
 
 Corinth Its Population and Trade Worship of Aphrodite Aquila and 
 Prisoilla Eager Activity Crispus Character of the Corinthian Converts 
 Effect of Experience on St. Paul's Preaching Eupture with ths Jews 
 Another Vision Gallic Discomfiture of the Jews Beating of Soathenes 
 Superficial Disdain ... - ^ :. ... .. i. ." * . .313 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. THE FIBST EPISTM TO THB THKSSALONIANS. 
 Timothy with St. Paul Advantages of Epistolary Teaching Importance of 
 bearing its Characteristics in Mind Vivid Spontaneity of Style St. 
 Paul's Form of Greeting The Use of " we " and " I " Grace and Peace 
 The Thanksgiving Personal Appeal against Secret Calumnies Going off 
 at a Word Bitter Complaint against the Jews Doctrinal Section The 
 Coming of the Lord Practical Exhortations Unreasonable Fears as regards 
 the Dead Be ready Warning against Insubordination and Despondency 
 Its Reception The Second Advent Conclusion of the First Epistle . 325 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. THB SECOND EPISTLB TO THE THESSALONIANS. 
 News from Thessalonica Effects of the First Letter A New Danger Escha- 
 tological Excitement " We which are alive and remain "St. Paul's 
 Meaning The Day of the Lord Destruction of the Roman and the 
 Jewish Temples Object of the Second Epistle The Epistles Rich in 
 Details, but Uniform in Method Consist generally of Six Sections The 
 Greeting Doctrinal and Practical Sections of the Epistle Moral 
 Warnings Autograph Authentication Passage respecting " the Man ol 
 Sin " Mysterious Tone of the Language Reason for this Similar 
 Passage in Josephns What is meant by " the Checker " and " the Check " 
 The rest incapable of present explanation ..', . . . . SiO 
 
 IX. EPHESU8. 
 CHAPTER XXXI. PAUL AT EPHKSUS, 
 
 St. Panl leaves Corinth Nazarite Vow Ephesian Jews Fourth Viait to Jeru- 
 salem Cold Reception Return to Antioch Confirms Churches of Galatia 
 and Phrygia Re-visits Epheaus Its Commerce, Fame, and Splendour 
 Its Great Men Roman Rule Asylum Temple of Artemia The 
 Heaven-fallen Megabyzi Ephesian Amulets Apollonius of Tyana 
 Letters of the Pseudo-Heraclitus Apollos Disciples of John School of 
 Tyrannus " Handkerchiefs and Aprons " Discomfiture of the Ben! 
 Sceva Burning of Magic Books Trials and Perils at Ephesns Bad 
 News from Corinth The Ephesia Exasperation of the Artisans Artemis 
 Demetrius Attempt to seize Paul Riot in the Theatre Gaiofc and
 
 MM 
 
 Aristarohns Speech of the Recorder Farewell to the Church at Ephesus 
 Present Condition of Ephesus . . . ... . . 851 
 
 CHAFFER XXXII. FIEST LSTTBB TO THE CHTJBOH AT COBIKTH. 
 DifBculties of Converts from Heathenism Letter from Corinth Various En. 
 qniries Disputes in the Church Apollos' Party Petrine Party The 
 Judaic Teacher Disorderly Scenes in Church Assemblies The Agapso 
 Desecration of the Encharistio Feast Condonation of the Notorious 
 Offender Steps taken by St. Paul Sends Titna to Corinth Dictates to 
 Sosthenes a letter to the Corinthians Topics of Letter Greeting Thanks- 
 givings Party-spirit True and False Wisdom Sentence on the Notorious 
 Offender Christ our Passover Christian and Heathen Judges Lawful 
 and Unlawful Meats Marriage Celibacy Widows Divorce Meats 
 offered to Idols Digression on his Personal Self-abnegation, and Inference 
 from it Covering the Head Disorder at the Lord's Supper Glossolalia 
 Charity Rules about Preaching The Resurrection Practical Directions 
 Salutations Benediction ... ... 376 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. SECOND LBTTKB TO THB CHURCH AT OOBINTH. 
 
 Anxiety of St.Paul Short Stay at Troas Meeting with Titus Effect of First 
 Letter on the Corinthians Personal Opposition to his Authority Return 
 of Titus to Corinth Trials in Macedonia Characteristics of the Epistle 
 Greeting Tribulation and Consolation Self-defence Explanations Me- 
 taphors Ministry of the New Covenant Eloquent Appeals Liberality of 
 the Churches of Macedonia Exhortation to Liberality Sudden change of 
 Tone Indignant Apology Mingled Irony and Appeal False Apostles 
 Unrecorded Trials of his Life Vision at his Conversion Proofs of the 
 Genuineness of his Ministry Salutation Benediction .... 401 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. SECOND VISIT TO COBINTH. 
 
 Second Sojourn in Macedonia Brief Notice by St. Luke Ulyricum the furthest 
 point of his Missionary Journey Institution of the Offertory His Fellow 
 Travellers in the Journey to Corinth His Associates at Corinth Condition 
 of the Church Two Epistles written at Corinth 420 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. IMPOBTANCB OF THE EPISTLB TO THB GALATIANS. 
 Judaising Opponents among the Galatian Converts Galatian Fickleness 
 Arguments against St. Paul Circumcision the Battle-ground Christian 
 Liberty at Stake Instances of Proselytes to Circumcision among the 
 Heathen Royal Families Courage and Passion of St. Paul's Argument 
 The Epistle to the Galatians, the Manifesto of Freedom from the Yoke 
 of Judaism 425 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. THB EPISTLB TO THB GALATIAHS. 
 
 Brief Greeting Indignant Outburst Vindication of his Apostolic Authority 
 Retrospect Slight Intercourse with the Apostles Co-ordinate Position 
 Eephas at Antioch Second Outburst Purpose of the Law Its Relation 
 to the Gospel Boldness of his Arguments Justification by Faith Alle- 
 gory of Sarah and Hagar Bondage to the Law Freedom in Christ 
 Lusts of the Flesh Fruits of the Spirit Practical Exhortations Auto- 
 graph Conclusion Contemplates another Visit to Jerusalem, and a Letter 
 to Rome . . . . .^' ,431 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THB 
 
 THEOLOGY or ST. PAUL. 
 
 The Jews at Rome Numbers of the Christian Converts Christianity Intro- 
 duced into Rome Not by St. Peter Was the Church mainly Jewish or 
 Gentile? Solution of Apparent Contradictions Note on the Sixteenth 
 Chapter Probably Part of a Letter to Ephesus Main Object of ths
 
 OONTSHT6. rvH 
 
 MMfl 
 
 Epistle Written in Peaceful Mood Theory of Baur as to the Origin of 
 the Epistle Origin and Idea of the Epistle Outlines of the Epistle . .445 
 
 II. GENERAL THESIS or THE EPISTLE. 
 
 Salutation Thanksgiving Fundamental Theme The Just shall live by Faith 
 Examination of the Meaning of the Phrase ...... 458 
 
 HI. UNIVEBSALITT OF SUT. 
 
 Quilt of the Gentiles God's Manifestation of Himself to the Gentiles in His 
 Works Therefore their Sin inexcusable Vices of Pagan Life The Jew 
 more inexcusable because more enlightened Condemned in spite of their 
 Circumcision and Legal Obedience . . . . . . . . 4G4 
 
 IV. OBJECTIONS AND CONFIRMATIONS. 
 
 Has the Jew an Advantage ? Can God justly Punish P Repudiation of False 
 and Malignant Inferences Jew and Gentile all under Sin Quotations 
 from the Psalms and Isaiah 470 
 
 : V. JUSTIFIOATIOM BI FAITH. 
 
 " The Righteousness of God " explained The Elements of Justification Faith 
 does not nullify the Law Abraham's Faith Peace and Hope the Blessed 
 Consequences of Faith Three Moments in the Religious History of Man-T 
 kind Adam and Christ May we sin that Grace may abound ? The Con-j 
 oeptiou of Life in Christ excludes the possibility of Wilful Sin The Law"f 
 cannot Justify The Law Multiplies Transgressions We are not under \ 
 the Law, but under Grace Apparent Contradictions Faith and Works ! 
 Dead to the Law The Soul's History Deliverance Hope Triumph . 472 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. PBEBBSTHfATIOK AUTO FBM WILL. 
 
 Rejection of the Jews Foreknowledge of God The Resistance of Evil Th 
 Potter and the Clay Man's Free Will Fearlessness and Conciliatoriness 
 of St. Paul's Controversial Method Rejection of Israel Not Total nor 
 Final Gleams of Hope Christ the Stone of Offence to the Jews Pro- 
 phesies of a Future Restoration The Heave-offering The Oleaster and 
 the Olive The Universality of Redeeming Grace Doxology . . . 491 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. FSurra OF FAITH. 
 
 Break in the Letter Practical Exhortation Christian Graces Obedience to 
 Civil Powers Value of Roman Law Functions of Civil Governors Pay- 
 ment of Civil Dues Ebionitio Tendencies Advice to " Strong " and 
 " Weak " Entreaty for the Prayers of the Church Benediction Reasons 
 for concluding that the Sixteenth Chapter was addressed to the Ephesian 
 Church Concluding Doxology . . . ... . . . 501 
 
 CHAPTER XL. THE LAST JOUBNET TO JEBOSALEM. 
 
 Preparing to Start for Jerusalem Fury of the Jews Plot to Murder St. Paul 
 How defeated Companions of his Journey He Remains at Philippi 
 with St. Luke for the Passover Troas Eutychus Y, T alk from Troas to 
 Assos Sail among the Grecian Isles to Miletus Farewell Address to the 
 Elders of Ephesus Sad Parting Coos Rhodes Patara Tyre The 
 Prayer on the Sea Shore Caesarea Philip the Evangelist The Prophet 
 Agabns Warnings of Danger Fifth Visit to Jerusalem Guest of Mnason 
 the Cyprian Assembly of the Elders James the Lord's Brother Presen- 
 tation of the Contribution from the Churches St. Paul's Account of his 
 Work Apparent Coldness of his Reception An Humiliating Suggestion 
 Nazarite Vow Elaborate Ceremonies St. Paul Consents His Motives 
 and Justification Political State of the Jews at this time Quarrels with 
 the Romans Insolent Soldiers Quarrel with Samaritans Jonathan
 
 xviii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Felix Sioarii St. Paul recognised in the Court of the Women A Tumult 
 Lysiaa Speech of St. Paul to the Mob Preparation for Scourging 
 Civis Romanus sum Trial by the Sanhedrin Ananias the High Priest 
 " Thou Whited Wall " Apology St. Paul assorts himself a Pharisee Was 
 this Justifiable ? la told in a Vision that he shall go to Rome The 
 Vow of the Forty Jews Conspiracy revealed by a Nephew St. Paul 
 conducted to Csesarea Letter of Lysias to Felix In Prison . . . 510 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. PAUL AND FELIX. 
 
 Trial before Felix Speech of Tertullus St. Paul's Defence The Trial post- 
 poned Discourse of St. Paul before Felix and Drusilla Eiot in Csesarea 
 Felix recalled Two Years in Prison . . .<-.>> . . .547 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. PAUL BEFORE FESTUS AND AGBIPPA II. 
 
 Fresh Trial before Porcins Festus His Energy and Fairness St. Paul appeals 
 to Caesar Visit of Agrippa II. and Berenice to Festus A Grand Occasion 
 St. Paul' a Address Appeal to Agrippa II., and his Reply Favourable 
 Impression made by St. Paul 552 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. VOYAQK TO ROME AND SHIPWBECK. 
 
 Sent to Rome under charge of Julius The Augustani Prisoners chained to 
 Soldiers Plan of the Journey Luke and Aristarchus Day spent at 
 Sidon Voyage to Myra The Alexandrian Wheat-ship Sail to Crete 
 Windbound at Fair Havena Advice of St. Paul Rejected Julius decides 
 to try for Port Phoenix The Typhoon Euroaqnilo Great Danger Clauda 
 Securing the Boat Frapping the Vessel Other measures to save the 
 Ship Misery caused by the continuous Gale St. Paul's Vision He 
 encourages them They near Land Ras el Koura Attempted Escape of 
 the Sailors The Crew take Food Final Shipwreck The Soldiers Escape 
 of the Crew . ....... 661 
 
 X. ROME. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. PAUL AT ROMB. 
 
 Received with Hospitality by the Natives of Melita A Viper fastena on his 
 Hand Three Months at Malta The Protos The Father of Pnblius healed 
 Honour paid to St. Paul Embarks on board the Castor and Pollux 
 Syracuse Rheginm Puteoli Journey towards Rome Met by Brethren 
 at Appii Forum Tres Tabernaa The Appian Road Enters Rome 
 Afranius Burrus Observatio Irksomeness of his Bondage Summons the 
 Eldera of the Jews Their cautious Reply Its Consistency with the 
 Epistle to the Romans The Jews express a wish for further Information 
 A long Discussion Stern Warning from the Apostle Two Tears a 
 Prisoner in Rome The Constancy of his Friends Unmolestedly . . 573 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. THE FIBST ROMAN IMPBISONMSNT. 
 
 His hired Apartments His general Position His state of Mind His Life and 
 Teaching in Rome Condition of various Classes in Rome I nprobability 
 of his traditional Intercourse with Seneca " Not many noble ' Few Con- 
 verts among the Aristocracy of Rome Condition of Slaves Settlement of 
 the Jews in Rome First encouraged by Julius Caesar Their Life and Con- 
 dition among the Roman Population The Character and Government of 
 Nero The Downfall of Seneca Feniua Rnfns and Tigellinna, Praetorian 
 Prefects 581 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. THE EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY. 
 
 The History of St. Paul's Imprisonment derived from the Epistles of -the 
 Captivity The four Groups into which the Epistles may be divided The
 
 CONTENTS. TIT 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Characteristics of those Groups Key-note of eaoh Epistle The Order of 
 the Epistles Arguments in favour of the Epistle to the Philippians being: 
 the earliest of the Epistles of the Captivity Parallels in the Epistle to 
 the Philippians to the Epistle to the Eomans St. Paul's Controversy with 
 Judaism almost at an end Happier Incidents brighten hia Captivity Visit 
 of Epaphroditns His Illness and Eeoovery The Purity of the Philippian 
 Church " Rejoice " the leading thought in tho Epistle .... 588 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIL THB EPISTLB TO ran 
 
 Greeting Implied Exhortation to Unity Words of Encouragement Even 
 Opposition overruled for good Earnest Entreaty to follow the Example 
 of Christ His hopes of liberation Epaphroditus Sudden break Vehe- 
 ment Outburst against the Jews Pressing forward Euodia and Syntyche 
 
 Syzygus Farewell and Rejoice Future of Philippian Church . . 596 
 
 CHAPTER XL VIII. THB CHUBOHBS OF THE LYOUS VALLBT. 
 
 Colossians, " Ephesians," Philemon Attacks on their Genuineness Epaphras 
 Laodicea, Hierapolis, Oolosssa The Lyons Valley Onesimus Sad News 
 brought by Epaphras A new form of Error An Essene Teaoher St. 
 Paul develops the Counter- truth Christ alone Oriental Theosophy the 
 germ of Gnosticism The Christology of these Epistles Universality and 
 Antiquity of Gnostic Speculations Variations in the Style of St. Paul . 605 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. EPISTLB TO THB OOLOSSIAHB. 
 
 Greeting Christ the Eternal Son Grandeur of the Ministry of the Gospel 
 The Pleroma Warnings against False Teaching Practical Consequences 
 
 A Cancelled Bond A needless Asceticism The true Remedy against 
 Sin Practical Exhortations Personal Messages Asserted Eeaotion 
 against Pauline Teaching in Asia Papias Colossaa ..... 615 
 
 CHAPTER L. ST. PAUL AND ONESIMTJS. 
 
 Private Letters Ouesimns Degradation of Slaves A Phrygian Eunaway 
 Christianity and Slavery Letter of Pliny to Sabinianus A " Burning 
 Question "Contrast between the Tone of Pliny and that of St. Paul . 622 
 
 CHAPTER LI. THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON. 
 Paraphrase of the Epistle Comparison with Pliny's appeal to Sabinianus 
 
 Did St. Paul visit Colossse again ? ........ 628 
 
 CHAPTER LH. THE EPISTLK TO THE "EFHBSIANS." 
 
 Genuineness of the Epistle Testimonies to its Grandeur Resemblances and 
 Contrasts between " Ephesians " and Colossians Style of St. Paul 
 Christology of the later Epistles Doctrinal and Practical Grandeur of 
 the Mystery Recurrence of Leading Words Greeting " To the praise 
 of His glory " Christ in the Church Resultant Duties Unity in Christ 
 
 The New Life Christian Submissivenesa The Christian Armour End 
 of the Acts of the Apostles St. Paul's Expectations The Neronian 
 Persecution . . '. - , . . .,..-,.. . 630 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. THB FIBST EPISTLB TO TMOTHT. 
 
 Did St. Paul visit Spain ? Character of the First Epistle to Timothy Pecu- 
 liarities of the Greeting False Teachers Function of the Law Digres- 
 sions Regulations for Public Worship Qualifications for Office in the 
 Church Deacons Deaconesses The Mystery of Godliness Dnalistic 
 Apostasy Pastoral Advice to Timothy Bearing towards Presbyters 
 Personal Advice Duties of Slaves Solemn Adjuration Last Appeal . 650 
 
 CHAPTER LTV. THE EPISTLB TO TITOS. 
 Probable Movements of St. Paul Christianity in Crete Missions of Tittw
 
 XX CONTENTS. 
 
 Greeting Character of the Cretans Sobermindedness Pastoral Duties, 
 and Exhortations to various classes Warnings against False Teachers 
 Personal Messages " Ours also " Titus . ...... 659 
 
 CHAPTER LV. THB CLOSING DATS. 
 
 Genuineness of the Pastoral Epistlea The Second Epistle to Timothy State 
 of the Church in the last year of St. Paul His possible Movements 
 Arrest at Troas Trial and Imprisonment at Ephesus Parting with 
 Timothy Companions of his last Voyage to Rome Closeness and Misery 
 of the Second Imprisonment Danger of visiting him Defection of his 
 Friends Loneliness Onesiphorus The Prima actio St. Paul deserted 
 " Out of the mouth of the Lion "The Trial Paul before Nero Contrast 
 between the two St. Paul remanded ....... 664 
 
 CHAPTER LVL ST. PAUL'S LAST LBTTBB. 
 
 The Greeting Digressions Christian Energy Warnings against False Teachers 
 Solemn Pastoral Appeals Personal Entreaties and Messages Pudens 
 and Claudia The Cloke The Papyrus Books The Vellum Bolls Parallel 
 with Tyndale Triumph over Melancholy and Disappointment Tone of 
 Courage and Hope . 67S 
 
 CHAPTER LVII. THJE Em>. 
 
 The Last Trial The Martyrdom Earthly Failure and Eternal Success Un- 
 equalled Greatness of St. Paul " God buries His Workmen, but carries on 
 their Work " . . .685 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 EXCURSUS I. The Style of St. Paul as Illustrative of his Character . . 689 
 
 EXCURSUS II. The Rhetoric of St. Paul 693 
 
 EXCURSUS III. The Classic Quotations and Allusions of St. Paul . . .696 
 
 EXCURSUS IV. St. Paul a Hagadist 701 
 
 EXCURSUS V. Gamaliel and the School of Tubingen 704 
 
 EXCURSUS VI. On Jewish Stoning *. 706 
 
 EXCURSUS VII. On the Power of the Sanhedrin to Inflict Capital Punishment 707 
 
 EXCURSUS VIII. Damascus under Hareth 708 
 
 EXCURSUS IX. Saul in Arabia 709 
 
 EXCURSUS X. St. Paul's "Stake in the Flesh" ...... 710 
 
 EXCURSUS XI. On Jewish Scourgings . ...... 715 
 
 EXCURSUS XIL Apotheosis of Roman Emperors ...... 717 
 
 EXCURSUS XIIL Burdens hud on Proselytes 718 
 
 EXCURSUS XTV. Hatred of the Jews in Classical Antiquity . . . .719 
 EXCURSUS XV. Judgment of Early Pagan Writers on Christianity . . 720 
 EXCURSUS XVL The Proconsulate of Sergius Paulus ..... 721 
 
 EXCURSUS XyiL St. John and St. Paul 723 
 
 EXCURSUS XV ill. St. Paul in the Clementines ...... 724 
 
 EXCURSUS XIX. The Man of Sin 726 
 
 EXCURSUS XX. Chief Uncial Manuscripts of the Acts and the Epistles . .730 
 
 EXCURSUS XXI. Theology and Antinomies of St. Paul 732 
 
 EXCURSUS XXIL Distinctive Words and Key-notes of the Epistle. . . 733 
 
 EXCURSUS XXIII. Letter of Pliny to Sabinianua 734 
 
 EXCURSUS XXTV. TKe Herods in the Acts 734 
 
 EXCURSUS XXV. Phraseology and Doctrine of the Epistle to the Ephesians , 739 
 EXCURSUS XXVL Evidence as to the Liberation of St. Paul .... 741 
 EXCURSUS XXVII. The Genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles . . . . 743 
 EXCURSUS XX VIII. Chronology of the Life and Epistles of St. Paul . . 753 
 EXCURSUS XXIX. Traditional Accounts of St. Paul's Personal Appearance . 758
 
 LIST OF 
 
 STATTTB OP ST. PAUL .......... Fronttspwee 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OP TARSUS ......... To face i>'i<i* 10 
 
 OLIVET AND JEBUSALEM ......... . 48 
 
 MARKET AT DAMASCUS ..... . . . . . ,. 113 
 
 EUIKS op THE WALLS OF ANTIOOH . . ." . . . . 162 
 
 THE COLOSSEUM:, BOMB . ...... >. 187 
 
 THE VALLEY o:? THK RIVEB CYDNUS, CILICIA ..... 243 
 
 SALONICA (THESSALONICA) . ........ -. 2SC 
 
 SITE OF THE ABEOPAQUB, ATHENS ..... . . . 301 
 
 ViKW ON THE BOBDEBS OF CAEIA ....... . 365 
 
 EPHESTJS, PBOM AYaSALOUK . . ......... ,,360 
 
 STBEET IN EHODES ...... ..... 517 
 
 THE TOWEB OP ANTONIA, JEEUSALKM .......,, 528 
 
 THB RUINS OF GSSABEA . . . .,, f . ,, 546 
 
 QBEAT MOSQUE AT TABSUS ....... c . 683 
 
 SUBSTBUCTUBES OP THE COLOSSEtTM, ROME . . . , .. ,, 688
 
 THE 
 
 LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 31. 
 THE TRAINING OF THE APOSTLE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTBODtrCTOBY. 
 VOT inXoyrjs poi %<TT\V otros, ACTS iz. 16. 
 
 OF the twelve men whom Jesus chose to be Tfi companions and heraldi 
 daring the brief years of His earthly ministry, two alone can be said to have 
 stamped upon the infant Church the impress of their own individuality. 
 These two were John and Simon. Our Lord Himself, by the titles which He 
 gave them, indicated the distinctions of their character, and the pre-eminence 
 of their gif ts. John was called a Son of Thunder ; Simon was to be known 
 to all ages as Kephas, or Peter, the Apostle of the Foundation stoned To 
 Peter was granted the honour of authoritatively admitting the first uncircum- 
 cised Gentile, on equal terms, into the brotherhood of Christ, and he has ever 
 been regarded as the main pillar of the early Church^' John, on the other 
 hand, is the Apostle of Love, the favourite Apostle of the Mystic, the chosen 
 Evangelist of those whose inward adoration rises above the level of outward 
 forms. Peter as the first to recognise the Eternal Christ, John as the chosen 
 friend of the living Jesus, are the two of that first order of Apostles whose 
 names appear to human eyes to shine with the brightest lustre upon those 
 twelve precious stones which are the foundations of the New Jerusalem. 3 
 
 Yet there was another, to whom was entrusted a wider, a more fruitful, a 
 more Laborious mission; who was to found more numerous churches, to 
 endure intenser sufferings, to attract to the fold of Christ a vaster multitude 
 of followers. On the broad shoulders of St. Peter rested, at first, the support 
 and defence of the new Society ; yet his endurance was not tested so terribly 
 as that of him on whom fell daily the " care of all the churches." St. John 
 was the last survivor of the Apostles, and he barely escaped sharing with his 
 brother ,the glory of being one of the earliest martyrs ; yet even his life of 
 long exile and heavy tribulations was a far less awful trial than that of him who 
 counted it but a light and momentary affliction to " die daily," to be "in 
 deaths oft." * A third type of the Apostolate was necessary. Besides the 
 Apostle of Catholicity and the Apostle of Lore, the Church of Christ needed 
 also " the Apostle of Progress." 
 
 Pt iL 48. J OWL It 9. * BT. xxi. 11 
 
 - 1 Oor. xv. U i S Oor. zL S3.
 
 3 THE LIVX AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 In truth it is hardly possible to exaggerate the extent, the permanence, 
 the vast importance, of those services which were rendered to Christianity 
 by Paul of Tarsus. It would have been no mean boast for the most heroic 
 worker that he had toiled more abundantly than such toilers as the Apostles. 
 It would have been a sufficient claim to eternal gratitude to have preached 
 from Jerusalem to Ulyricum, from Ulyricum to Rome, and, it may be, even to 
 Spain, the Gospel which gave new life to a weary and outworn world. Yet 
 these are, perhaps, the least permanent of the benefits which mankind has 
 reaped from his life and genius. For it is in bis* Epistles casual as was the 
 origin of some of them that we find the earUest uttMance^of^thatjOhristian 
 literature to which the world is indebted for its richest treasures^qf poetry 
 and eloquence, of moral wisdom and spiritual consolation. It is to his 
 intellect, fired by tK^ve^anUllliuninatiBrd^byTEe Spirit of his Lord, that we 
 owe the first systematic statement, in their mutual connexion and inter- 
 dependence, of the great truths of that Mystery of Godliness which had 
 been hidden from the ages, but was revealed in the Gospel of the Christ. 
 It is to his undaunted determination, his clear vision, his moral loftiness, 
 that we are indebted for the emancipation of religion from the intolerable 
 yoke of legal observances the cutting asunder of the living body of 
 Christianity from the heavy corpse of an abrogated Levitism. 1 It was 
 he alone \vho was , God's appointed instrument_to render possible the 
 universal spread of Christianity, and to lay deep in tEeTiearts of European 
 churches the solid bases of Christendom. As the Apostle of the Gentiles 
 he was pre-eminently and necessarily the Apostle of freedom, of culture, 
 of the understanding ; yet he has, if possible, a higher glory than all this, 
 in the fact that he too, more than any other, is the Apostle who made clear 
 to the religious consciousness of mankind the " justification by faith " which 
 springs from the mystic union of^the soul with Christ the Apostle who 
 has both brought home to numberless Christians in all ages the sense 
 of their own helplessness, and pointed them most convincingly to the 
 blessedness and the universality of that redemption which their Saviour 
 wrought. And hence whenever the faith of Christ has been most dimmed 
 in the hearts of men, whenever its pure fires have seemed in greatest danger 
 of being stifled, as in the fifteenth century under the dead ashes of 
 sensuality, or quenched, as in the eighteenth century, by the chilling Waste 
 of scepticism, it is mostly by the influence of his writings thatjeligio*s lif e 
 has-been. revived. 2 It was one of his searching moral precepts "Let us 
 walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in 
 chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying " which became to 
 St. Augustine a guiding star out of the night of deadly moral aberrations. 8 
 It was his prevailing -doctrine of free deliverance through the .merits of 
 Christ which, as it had worked in the spirit of Paul himself to shatter tbs 
 bonds of Jewish formalism, worked once more in the soul of Luther ttv 
 
 * Gal IT. 9 ; Bom. viii. 3. (Heb. vii. 18.) * See Neander. Planting, E.T., p. 78. 
 Atig. Confer. vliL 1218 ; Kreukel, Pauliu dtr Ap. d, ffeidcn, p. 1,
 
 DTTaODTTCTOBT. 3 
 
 burst the gates of brass, and break the bars of iron in sunder with which 
 the Papacy had imprisoned for so many centuries the souls which God 
 made free. 
 
 It has happened not unfrequently in the providence of God that the 
 destroyer of a creed or jsystem has been bred and trained in the inmost 
 bosom of the system which he was destined to shake or to destroy. Sakya 
 Mouni had been brought up in Brahminism; Luther had taken the vows 
 of an Augustinian; Pascal had been trained as a Jesuit; Spinoza was a 
 Jew; Wesley and Whitefield were clergymen of the Church of England. 
 It was not otherwise with St. Paul. The victorious enemy of heathen 
 philosophy and heathen worship had passed his boyhood amid the heathen 
 surroundings of a philosophic city. The deadliest antagonist of Judaic 
 exclusiveness was by birth a Hebrew of the Hebrews. The dealer of the 
 death-wound to the spirit of Pharisaism was a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees ; * 
 had been brought up from his youth at Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel ; ! 
 had been taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers ; 
 had lived " after the most straitest sect " of the Jewish service. 1 As his work 
 differed in many respects from that of the other Apostles, so his training was 
 wholly unlike theirs. Their earliest years had been spent in the villages of 
 Gennesareth and the fisher-huts on the shores of the Sea of Galileo; his 
 in the crowded ghetto of a Pagan capital. They, with few exceptions, 
 were men neither of commanding genius nor strongly marked characteristics; 
 ho was a man of intense individuality and marvellous intellectual power. 
 They were "unlearned and ignorant," untrained in the technicalities, in- 
 experienced in the methods, which passed among the Jews for theologic 
 learning; he had sat as a "disciple of the wise" 4 at the feet of the most 
 eminent of the Rabbis, and had been selected as the inquisitorial agent 
 of Priests and Sauhedrists because he surpassed his contemporaries in 
 burning zeal for the traditions of the schools. 6 
 
 This is the man whose career will best enable ns to understand the 
 Dawn of Christianity upon the darkness alike of Jew and Gentile; the 
 man who loosed Christianity from the 
 
 the world of Paganism with joy and hope. The study of his life wil 
 leave upon our minds a fuller conception of the extreme nobleness of the 
 man, and of the truths which he lived and died to teach. And we must 
 consider that life, as far as possible, without traditional bias, and with the 
 determination to see it as it appeared to his contemporaries, as it appeared 
 to Paul himself. " For if he was a Paul," says St. Chrysostom, "he also 
 was a man," nay, more than this, his very infirmities enhanced his 
 greatness. He stands infinitely above the need of indiscriminate panegyric. 
 
 1 Acts rsiii. 6 (Phil. iii. 5). The true reading, vifc #api<reuv (, A, B, 0, Syr., Vulg.): 
 he was a Pharisee of the third generation, rpufwipto-atoj. 
 
 2 Acts xxii. 3 ; xrvi. 4. 
 
 * Acts xxvi. 5. epi)<TK4a is rather " colt," " external service," than "religion.* 
 
 * The can mfflU of -whose praises and privileges the Talmud Is full. 
 
 * Gal, i. 14, wpoiKovro* tf rf 'IwSaurp* (ie., in Jewish observances), ip, .f.A.,
 
 4 TH LIFB AND WOBK OP 8T PAUL. 
 
 If we describe him as exempt from all human weakness if we look at his 
 actions as though it were irreverence to suppose that they ever fell short 
 of his own ideal we not only describe an impossible character, but we 
 contradict his own reiterated testimonies. It is not a sinless example which 
 we are now called upon to contemplate, but the life of one who, in deep 
 sincerity, called himself " the chief of sinners ; " it is the career of one 
 whose ordinary life (/8foj) was human, not divine -human in its impetuosity, 
 human in its sensibilities, human, perhaps, in some of its concessions and 
 accommodations; but whose inner life (fjj) was truly divine in so far as 
 it manifested the workings of the Spirit, in so far as it was dead 
 to the world, and hid with Christ in God. 1 It is utterly alien to 
 the purpose and manner of Scripture to present to us any of our fellow- 
 men in the light of faultless heroes or unapproachable demi-gods. The 
 notion that it is irreverent to suppose a flaw in the conduct of an Apostle 
 is one of those instances of " false humility " which degrade Scripture under 
 pretence of honouring it, and substitute a dead letter-worship for a living 
 docility. From idealised presentments of the lives of our fellow-servants, 3 
 there would be but little for us to learn ; but we do learn the greatest and 
 most important of all lessons when we mark in a struggling soul the 
 triumph of the grace of God when we see a man, weak like ourselves, 
 tempted like ourselves, erring like ourselves, enabled by the force of a sacred 
 purpose to conquer temptation, to trample on selfishness, to rear even upon 
 sins and failures the superstructure of a great and holy life, to build 
 (as it were) " the cities of Judah out of the ruined fortresses of Samaria." * 
 It may seem strange if I say that we know the heart of St. Paul to its 
 inmost depths. It is true that, besides a few scattered remnants of ecclesi- 
 astical tradition, we have but two sources whence to deiive his history the 
 Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of Paul himself; and the day has gone 
 by when we could at once, and without further inquiry, assume that both of 
 these sources, in the fullest extent, were absolutely and equally to be relied on. 
 Since Baur wrote his Paulus, and Zeller his Apostelyeschichte, it has become 
 impossible to make use of the Acts of the Apostles, and the thirteen Epistles 
 commonly attributed to St. Paul, without some justification of the grounds 
 upon which their genuineness is established. To do this exhaustively would 
 require a separate volume, and the work has been already done, and is being 
 done by abler hands than mine. All that IB here necessary is to say that I 
 should in no instance make use of any statement in those Epistles of which the 
 genuineness can still be regarded as fairly disputable, if I did not hope to state 
 some of the reasons which appear sufficient to justify my doing so ; and that 
 if in any cases the genuineness or proper superscription of any Epistle, or part 
 of an Epistle, seems to me to be a matter of uncertainty, I shall feel no hesita- 
 tion in expressing such an opinion. Of the Acts of the Apostles I shall have 
 various opportunities to speak incidentally, and, without entering on any 
 
 1 Bios, vita mum vivimus ; 6*r,, vita qud vivimus. (Gal. 1L 20.) 
 
 JfeT. zix. 10, > Bonraet (1 Kings xv. 22). Act* xiv. 16.
 
 THTBODTTOTOBT. 5 
 
 separate defence of the book against the assaults of modern critics, I will at 
 present only express my conviction that, even if we admit that it was " an 
 ancient Eirenicon," intended to check the strife of parties by showing that 
 there had been no irreconcilable opposition HHween the views and ordinances 
 of St. Peter and St. Paul ; even if we concede the obvious principle that 
 whenever there appears to be any contradiction between the Acts and the 
 Epistles, the authority of the latter must be considered paramount; nay, 
 even if we acknowledge that subjective and artificial considerations may have 
 had some influence in the form and construction of the book ; yet the Acts of 
 the Apostles is in all its main outlines a genuine and trustworthy history. Let 
 it be granted that in the Acts we have a picture of essential unity between the 
 followers of the Judaic and the Pauline schools of thought, which we might con- 
 lecture from the Epistles to have been less harmonious and less undisturbed; 
 let it be granted that in the Acts we more than once see Paul acting in a way 
 which from the Epistles we should d priori have deemed unlikely. Even 
 these concessions are fairly disputable; yet in granting them we only say 
 what is in itself sufficiently obvious, that both records are confessedly frag- 
 mentary. They are fragmentary, of course, because neither of them even 
 professes to give us any continuous narrative of the Apostle's life. That life 
 is roughly speaking only known to us at intervals during its central and 
 later period, between the years A.~\ 36 and AJD. 66. It is like a manuscript 
 of which the beginning and the end are irrecoverably lost. It is like one of 
 those rivers which spring from unknown sources, and sink into the ground 
 before they have reached the sea. But more than this, how incomplete is our 
 knowledge even of that portion of which these records and notices remain ! Of 
 this fact we can have no more overwhelming proof than we may derive from 
 reading that " Iliad of woes," the famous passage of the Second Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, where, driven against his will by the calumnies of his enemies to 
 an appearance of boastf nlness of which the very notion was abhorrent to him, 
 he is forced to write a summary sketch of what he had done and suffered. 1 
 That enumeration is given long before the end of his career, and yet of the 
 specific outrages and dangers there mentioned no less than eleven are not once 
 alluded to in the Acts, though many others are there mentioned which were 
 subsequent to that sad enumeration. Not one, for instance, of the five scourg- 
 ings with Jewish thongs is referred to by St. Luke ; one only of the three 
 beatings with Roman rods ; not one of the three shipwrecks, though a later one 
 is so elaborately detailed ; no allusion to the night and day in the deep ; two 
 only of what St. Clement tells us were seven imprisonments. 8 There are even 
 whole classes of perils to which the writer of the Acts, though he was certainly 
 at one time a companion of St. Paul, makes no allusion whatever as, for 
 instance, the perils of rivers, the perils of robbers, the perils in the wilderness, 
 the perils among false brethren, the hunger, the thirst, the fasting, the cold, 
 the nakedness. And these, which are thus passed over without notice in the 
 
 Oor. zL 2438, written about A.D. 57, nearly ten yean before hii death. 
 * fcrfett fc<rpA topfoot (Ep. 1 ad Cor. 5).
 
 tHB Lira AND WORK OF 8T. PAUL. 
 
 Acts, are in the Epistles mentioned only so cursorily, so generally, so nn- 
 chronologically, that scarcely one of them can be dwelt upon and assigned with 
 certainty to its due order of succession in St. Paul's biography. If this, then, 
 is the case, who can pretend that in such a life there is not room for a series of 
 events and actions even for an exhibition of phases of character in the 
 narrative, which neither did nor could find place in the letters ; and for events 
 and features of character in the letters which find no reflection in the narra- 
 tive P For of those letters how many are preserved P Thirteen only even if 
 all the thirteen be indisputably genuine out of a much larger multitude 
 which he must undoubtedly have written. 1 And of these thirteen some are 
 separated from others by great intervals of time ; some contain scarcely a 
 single particular which can be made to bear on a consecutive biography ; and 
 not one is preserved which gives us the earlier stage of his views and ex- 
 periences before he had set foot on European soil It is, then, idle to assume 
 that either of our sources must be rejected as untrustworthy because it presents 
 us with fresh aspects of a myriad-sided character ; or that events in the narra- 
 tive must be condemned as scarcely honest inventions because they present no 
 primd facie accordance with what we might otherwise have expected from 
 brief and scattered letters out of the multiplex correspondence of a varied life. 
 If there were anything in the Acts which appeared to me irreconcilable with 
 the certain indications of the Epistles, I should feel no hesitation in rejecting 
 it. But most, if not all, of the objections urged against the credibility of the 
 Acts appear to me f or reasons to be hereafter given both frivolous and 
 untenable. If there are any passages in that book which have been represented 
 as throwing a shade of inconsistency over the character of the great Apostle, 
 there is no such instance which, however interpreted, does not find its support 
 and justification in his own undoubted works. If men of great learning, 
 eminence, and acuteness had not assumed the contrary, it might have seemed 
 superfluous to say that the records of history, and the experiences of daily life, 
 furnish us with abundant instances of lives narrated with perfect honesty, 
 though they have been presented from opposite points of view ; and of events 
 which appear to be contradictory only because the point of reconcilement 
 between them has been forgotten. Further than this, the points of contact 
 between the Acts and the Epistles are numberless, and it must suffice, once for 
 all, to refer to Paley's Horce Paulina in proof that even the undesigned coin- 
 cidences may be counted by scores. To furnkh a separate refutation of all the 
 objections which have been brought against the credibility of the Acts of the 
 Apostles, would be a tedious and interminable task ; but the actual narrative 
 of the following pages should exhibit a decisive answer to them, unless it can 
 be shown that it fails to combine the separate data, or that the attempt to 
 combine them has led to incongruous and impossible results. 
 
 I believe, then, that we have enough, and more than enough, still left to us 
 to show what manner of life Paul lived, and what manner of man he was. A 
 biography sketched in outline is often more true and more useful than one 
 
 1 I do not reckon the Epistle to the Hebrew*, bdlevinf it to be the work of Apolloa.
 
 BOYHOOD III A HKATHBN CITY, 7 
 
 that occupies itself with minute detail. We do not in reality know more of A 
 
 great man because we happen to know the petty circumstances which made up 
 
 his daily existence, or because a mistaken admiration has handed down to 
 
 posterity the promiscuous commonplaces of his ordinary correspondence. 
 
 We know a man truly when we know him at his greatest and his best j we 
 
 realise his significance for ourselves and for the world when we see him in the 
 
 noblest activity of his career, on the loftiest summit, and in the .fullest glory 
 
 of his life. There are lives which may be instructive from their very littleness, 
 
 aiid it may be well that the biographers of such lives should enter into detail. 
 
 But of the best and greatest it may be emphatically asserted that to know 
 
 more about them would only be to know less of them. It is quite possible 
 
 that if, in the case of one so sensitive and so impetuous as St. Paul, a minute 
 
 and servile record had preserved for us every hasty expression, every fugitive 
 
 note, every momentary fall below the loftiest standard, the small souls 
 
 which ever rejoice at seeing the noblest of their race degraded, even for 
 
 an instant, to the same dead level as themselves, might have found some 
 
 things over which to glory. That such must have been the result we may 
 
 infer from the energy and sincerity of self-condemnation with which the 
 
 Apostle recognises his own imperfections. But such miserable records, even 
 
 had they been entirely truthful, would only have obscured for us the true Paul 
 
 ( Paul as he stands in the light of history ; Paul as he is preserved for us in x j 
 
 \ the records of Christianity ; Paul energetic as Peter, and contemplative as [ 
 
 j John ; Paul the hero of unselfishness ; Paul the mighty champion of spiritual \ 
 
 < freedom ; Paul a greater preacher than Chrysostom, a greater missionary than ( 
 
 ; Xavier, a greater reformer than Luther, a greater theologian than St. Thomas \ 
 
 I of Aquinum ; Paul the inspired Apostle of the Gentiles, the slave of the Lord ) 
 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 OBLAPTER H. 
 
 BOYHOOD 1 A HEATHKW CITY. 
 OVK a<rr)/j.ou WXews iro\lri)s. ACTS xxi. 39. 
 
 THOUGH we cannot state with perfect accuracy the date either of the birth 01 
 death of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, both may be inferred within 
 narrow limits. When he is first mentioned, on the occasion of Stephen's 
 martyrdom, he is called a young man, 1 and when he wrote the Epistle to 
 Philemon he calls himself Paul the aged. 1 Now, although the words 
 
 Acts vii. 58. 
 
 3 Philem., Terse 9. It should, indeed, b mentioned that whether we read 
 rfevpvnp or irpecr/JevrTj?, the meaning may be, "Paul an ambassador, ay, and now even a 
 chained ambassador, of Jesus Christ.* Compare the fine antithesis, foip 08 *pt<rprf<*
 
 THB LIFE AND WOBK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 and Trpefffrinys were used vaguely in ancient times, and though the exact limits 
 of " youth " and " age " were as indeterminate then as they have ever been, 
 yet, since we learn that immediately after the death of Stephen, Saul was 
 entrusted with a most important mission, and was, in all probability, a member 
 of the Sanhedrin, he must at that time hare been a man of thirty. Now, the 
 martyrdom of Stephen probably took place early in A.D. 37, and the Epistle 
 to Philemon was written about A.D. 63. At the .latter period, therefore, he 
 would have been less than sixty years old, and this may seem too young to 
 claim the title of " the aged." But " age " is a very relative term, and one who 
 had been scourged, and lashed, and stoned, and imprisoned, and shipwrecked 
 one who, for so many years, besides the heavy burden of mental anguish 
 and responsibility, had been " scorched by the heat of Sirius and tossed by the 
 violence of Euroclydon," 1 might well have felt himself an old and outworn 
 man when he wrote from his Roman prison at the age of threescore years.* 
 It is, therefore, tolerably certain that he was born during the first ten years 
 of our era, and probable that he was born about A.D. 3. Since, then, our 
 received Dionysian era is now known to be four years too early, the birth of 
 Christ's greatest follower happened in the same decade as that of our Lord 
 Himself. 8 
 
 But all the circumstances which surrounded the cradle and 'infancy of the 
 infant Saul wore widely different from those amid which his Lord had grown 
 to boyhood. It was in an obscure and lonely village of Palestine, amid 
 surroundings almost exclusively Judaic, that Jesus "grew in wisdom and 
 stature and favour with God and man ; " but Saul passed his earliest years 
 in the famous capital of a Roman province, and must have recalled, with 
 his first conscious reminiscences, the language and customs of the Pagan 
 world. 
 
 There is no sufficient reason to doubt the entire accuracy of the expression 
 " born in Tarsus," which is attributed to St. Paul in his Hebrew speech to 
 the infuriated multitude from the steps of the Tower of Antonia. 4 To assert 
 that the speeches in the Acts could not have attained to verbal exactness may 
 be true of some of them, but, on the other hand, those who on such grounds as 
 these disparage the work of St. Luke, as a mere " treatise with an object," 
 must bear in mind that it would, in this point of view, have been far more to 
 the purpose if he had made St. Paul assert that he was born in a Jewish town. 
 We must, therefore, reject the curious and twice-repeated assertion of St. 
 
 iv a\v<rei, " I am an ambassador in fetter* " (Eph. vi. 20). The tone of his later writing* 
 is, however, that of an old man. 
 
 1 Jer. Taylor. 
 
 2 Roger Bacon calls himself "senem," apparently at fifty-three, and Sir Walter 
 Scott speaks of himself as & "grey old man at fifty-five. (See Lightfoot, Oolotsians, 
 p. 404.) According to Philo a man was vtavtas between twenty-one and twenty-eight ; 
 but his distinctions are purely artificial It seems that a man might be called vtaviat and 
 even vtav(<nu>s till forty. (Xen. Mem. i. 2, 35; Kriiger, Vit. Zen, 12.) 
 
 3 These dates agree fairly with the statement of the Psendo-Chrysostom (Oral. 
 Encom. in Pet. et Paul., Opp. vlii., ed. Montfauoon), that he had been for thirty -fiv 
 years a servant of Christ, and was martyred at the age of sixty-eight. 
 
 * Acts xxii. a
 
 BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN CUT. 9 
 
 Jerome, 1 that the Apostle was born at Giscala, 2 and had been taken to 
 Tarsus by his parents when they left their native city, in consequence of 
 its devastation by the Romans. The assertion is indeed discredited because 
 it is mixed up with what appears to be a flagrant anachronism as to the 
 date at which Giscala was destroyed.* It is, however, worthy of attention. 
 St. Jerome, from his thorough familiarity with the Holy Land, in which 
 he spent so many years of his life, has preserved for us several authentic 
 fragments of tradition, and we may feel sure that he would not arbitrarily 
 have set aside a general belief founded upon a distinct statement in the 
 Acts of the Apostles. If in this matter pure invention had been at work, 
 it is almost inconceivable that any one should have singled out for distinc- 
 tion so insignificant a spot as Giscala, which is not once mentioned in the 
 Bible, and which acquired its solo notoriety from its connexion with the 
 zealot Judas. 4 We may, therefore, fairly assume that the tradition mentioned 
 by St. Jerome is so far true that the parents or grand-parents of St. Paul 
 had been Galilaeans, and had, from some cause or other though it cannot 
 have been the cause which the tradition assigned been compelled to migrate 
 from Giscala to the busy capital of Pagan Cilicia. 
 
 If this be the case, it helps, as St. Jerome himself points out, to explain 
 another difficulty. St. Paul, on every possible occasion, assumes and glories 
 in the title not only of "an Israelite," 6 which may be regarded as a "name 
 of honour," but also of "a Hebrew" "a Hebrew of the Hebrews." 8 
 Now certainly, in its proper and technical sense, the word " Hebrew " is 
 the direct opposite of " Hellenist/' 7 and St. Paul, if brought up at Tarsus, 
 could only strictly be regarded as a Jew of the Dispersion a Jew of that 
 vast body who, even when they were not ignorant of Hebrew as even the 
 most learned of them sometimes were still spoke Greek as their native 
 tongue. 8 It may, of course, be said that St. Paul uses the word Hebrew 
 only in its general sense, and that he meant to imply by it that he was not 
 a Hellenist to the same extent that, for instance, even so learned and 
 eminent a Jew as Philo was, who, with all his great ability, did not know 
 
 1 Jer. de Virit Ittuttr. 5 : " De tribu Benjamin et oppido Judaeae Giscalis fuit, quo 
 a Komanis capto, com parcntibus suis Tarsum Ciliciae commigravit. " It has been again 
 and again asserted that St. Jerome rejects or discredits this tradition in his Commentary 
 on Philemon (Opp. iv. 454), where he says that some understood the term "my fellow- 
 prisoner " to mean that Epaphras had been taken captive at Giscala at the same time 
 as Paul, and had been settled hi Colossse. Even Neander (Planting, p. 79) follows this 
 current error, on the ground that Jerome says, " Quis sit Epaphras concaptivus Pauli 
 talem fabulam accepimus." But that/o&w/o does not here mean " fake account," as he 
 translates it, is sufficiently proved by the fact that St. Jerome continues, " Quod si ita 
 KST, possumus et Epaphram illo tempore captum suspicari, quo captus est Paulus," &c. 
 
 2 Giscala, now El-Jish, was the last place in Galilee that held out against the Romans. 
 (Jos. B. J. ii. 20, 6 ; iv. 2, 15.) 
 
 8 It was taken A.D. 67. 
 
 4 Jos. B. J. ii. 21, 1 ; Vit. 10. He calls It noXfcv.,. 
 
 5 John i. 47 ; Acts xiiL 16 ; Rom. ix. 4. 
 
 2 Cor. ri. 22 ; Phil. iii. 5. ^ See Ads vi 1, and infra, p. 71. 
 
 " Parentum conditionem adolescentulum Paulum secutum, et sic posse stare illud, 
 quod de se ipso testatur, 'Hebraei sunt? et ego,' etc., quae ilium Judaeum magia 
 indicant, quam Tarsensem" (Jer.). 
 
 a
 
 10 THE LIFE AND WORK OB 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 either the Biblical Hebrew or the Aramaic vernacular, which was still called 
 by that name. 1 Perhaps St. Paul spoke Aramaic with even greater fluency 
 than he spoke Greek itself ; 2 and his knowledge of Hebrew may be inferred 
 from his custom of sometimes reverting to the Hebrew scriptures in the 
 original when the LXX. version was less suitable to his purpose. It is an 
 interesting, though undesigned, 8 confirmation of this fact, that the Divine 
 Vision on the road to Damascus spoke to him, at the supreme moment of his 
 life, in the language which was evidently the language of his own inmost 
 thoughts. As one, therefore, to whom the Hebrew of that day was a sort of 
 mother-tongue, and the Hebrew of the Bible an acquired language, St. Paul 
 might call himself a Hebrew, though technically speaking he was also a 
 Hellenist ; and the term would be still more precise and cogent if his parents 
 and forefathers had, almost till the time of his birth, been Palestinian Jews. 
 
 The Tarsus in which St. Paul was born was very different from the dirty, 
 squalid, and ruinous Mohammedan city which still bears the name and stands 
 upon the site. The natural features of the city, indeed, remain unchanged : 
 the fertile plain still surrounds it; the snowy mountains of the chain of 
 Taurus still look down on it; the bright swift stream of the Cydnus still 
 refreshes it. 4 But with these scenes of beauty and majesty we are the less 
 concerned, because they seem to have had no influence over the mind of the 
 youthful Saul. We can well imagine how, in a nature differently constituted, 
 they would have been like a continual inspiration; how they would have 
 melted into the very imagery of his thoughts; how, again and again, in 
 crowded cities and foul prisons, they would have 
 
 " Flashed upon that inward eye 
 Which ia the bliss ot solitude." 
 
 The scenes in which the whole life of David had been spent were far less 
 majestic, as well as far less varied, than many of those in which the lot of St. 
 Paul was cast; yet the Psalms of David are a very handbook of poetic 
 description, while in the Epistles of Si. Paul we only breathe the air of cities 
 and synagogues. He alludes, indeed, to the Temple not made with hands, but 
 never to its mountain pillars, and but once to its nightly stars. 8 To David the 
 whole visible universe is but one vast House of God, in which, like angelio 
 ministrants, the fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and storm, fulfil His 
 word. With St. Paul though he, too, is well aware that "the invisible 
 things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly visible, being appro- 
 
 1 Philo's ignorance of Hebrew is generally admitted. 
 
 2 Acts xxi. 40 : TJ} 'Eflpottt JiaAticro i.e., of course, the Syriac. These Jews of 
 Palestine would for the most part be able to understand the Bible, if not in the original 
 Hebrew, at any rate through the aid of a paraphrast. 
 
 3 E.g., in 1 Cor. iii. 19 ; 2 Cor. viii. 15 ; 2 Tim. ii. 19. Whether there existed any 
 Volksbibd of extracts besides the T.XX, I will not discuss. See Hilgenfeld, Zeitschr. 
 xviii. (1875), p. 118. 
 
 4 The Cydnus no longer, however, flows through Tersooa as it did (Strabo, xiv. 5) 
 Plin. H. N. vi. 22 j Beaufort's Karamania, 271 tq.), 
 
 Acts xvii. 24 ; 1 Cor. xv. 41.
 
 BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN CITY, 11 
 
 bended by the things that He hath made, even His eternal power and divinity * 
 yet to him this was an indisputable axiom, not a conviction constantly 
 renewed with admiration and delight. There are few writers who, to judge 
 solely from their writings, seem to have been less moved by the beauties of the 
 external world. Though he had sailed again and again across the blue Medi- 
 terranean, and must have been familiar with the beauty of those Isles of 
 Greece 
 
 " Where burning Sappho loved and sung, 
 
 Where grew the arts of war and peace, 
 Where Deloa rose, and Phoebus sprung ;" 
 
 though he had again and again traversed the pine-clad gorges of the Asian 
 hills, and seen Ida, and Olympus, and Parnassus, in all their majesty; though 
 his life had been endangered in mountain torrents and stormy waves, and he 
 must have often wandered as a child along the banks of his native stream, to 
 see the place where it roars in cataracts over its rocky course his soul was so 
 entirely absorbed in the mighty moral and spiritual truths which it was his 
 great mission to proclaim, that not by one verse, scarcely even by a single 
 expression, in all his letters, does he indicate the faintest gleam of delight or 
 wonder hi the glories of Nature. There is, indeed, an exquisite passage in his 
 speech at Lystra on the goodness of " the living God, which made heaven and 
 earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein," and " left not Himself with- 
 out witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful 
 seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness." 1 But in this case 
 Barnabas had some share in the address, which even if it do not, as has been 
 conjectured, 2 refer to the fragment of some choral song, is yet, in tone and 
 substance, directly analogous to passages of the Old Testament. 3 And apart 
 from this allusion, I cannot find a single word which shows that Paul had even 
 the smallest susceptibility for the works of Nature. There are souls in which 
 the burning heat of some transfusing purpose calcines every other thought, 
 <jvery other desire, every other admiration ; and St. Paul's was one. His life 
 was absorbingly, if not solely and exclusively, the spiritual life the lif e which 
 is utterly dead to every other interest of the groaning and travailing creation, 
 the life hid with Christ in God. He sees the universe of God only as it is 
 reflected in the heart and life of man. It is true as Humboldt has shown in 
 his Cosmos that what is called tho sentimental love of Nature is a modern 
 rather than an ancient feeling.* In St. Paul, however, this indifference to the 
 
 Acts xiv. 17. 
 
 2 By Mr. Humphry, ad loc. 
 
 8 Job v. 10 ; Ps. civ. 15 ; cxlvii. 8, 9. 
 
 4 Compare the surprise expressed by the Athenian youth at Socrates' description of 
 the lovely scene at the beginning of the Pftaedrus, 10, 2 Se yt S> davpa<ri< aTon-urai-os T 
 4>atVci. There is an admirable chapter on this subject in Friedlander, Sittengesch. Boms. 
 vii. 5, 3. The reader will recall the analogous cases _of St. Bernard riding all day along 
 tho Lake of Geneva, and asking in the evening where it was ; of Calvin showing no trace 
 of delight in the beauties of Switzerland ; and of WMtefield, who seems not to have 
 borrowed a single impression or illustration from bis thirteen voyages across the Atlantic 
 and his travels from Georgia to Boston.
 
 12 THE LIFE AND WORK OV ST. PAUL. 
 
 outer world is neither due to his antiquity nor to his Semitic birth, but solely 
 to his individual character. The poetry of the Old Testament is full of the 
 tenderness and life of the pastures of Palestine. In the discourses and con- 
 versations of our Lord we find frequent allusions to the loveliness of the 
 flowers, the joyous carelessness of birds, the shifting winds, the red glow 
 of morning and evening clouds. St. Paul's inobservance of these things for 
 the total absence of the remotest allusion to them by way of even passing 
 illustration amounts to a proof that they did not deeply stir his heart was 
 doubtless due to the expulsive power and paramount importance of other 
 thoughts. It may, however, have boon due also to that early training which 
 made him more familiar with crowded assemblies and thronged bazaars than 
 with the sights and sounds of Nature. 1 It is at any rate remarkable that the 
 only elaborate illustration which he draws from Nature turns not on a natural 
 phenomenon but on an artificial process, and that even this process if not 
 absolutely unknown to the ancients was the exact opposite of the one most 
 commonly adopted. 2 
 
 But if St. Paul derived no traceable influence from the scenery with which 
 Tarsus is surrounded, if no voices from the neighbouring mountains or the 
 neighbouring sea mingled with the many and varied tones of his impassioned 
 utterance, other results of this providential training may be easily observed, 
 both in his language and in his life. 
 
 The very position of Tarsus made it a centre of commercial enterprise and 
 political power. Situated on a navigable stream, by which it communicated 
 with the easternmost bay of the Mediterranean, and lying on a fruitful plain 
 under that pass over the Taurus which was known as " the Cilician gates," 
 while by the Amanid and Syrian gates it communicated with Syria, it was so 
 necessary as a central emporium that even the error of its having embraced 
 the side of Antony in the civil war hardly disturbed its fame and prosperity. 8 
 
 1 "For I was bred 
 
 In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 
 
 And saw nought lovely save the sky and stars." 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 8 I allude to the famous illustration of the wild olive graft (Rom. xi. 16 25). St. Paul's 
 argument requires that a wild slip should have heen budded upon a fruitful tree viz., 
 the aypie'Atuos of heathendom on the eAaia of Judaism. But it is scarcely needful to 
 remark that this is never done, but the reverse namely, the grafting of a fruitful scion 
 on a wild stock. The olive shoot would be grafted on the oleaster, not the oleaster on 
 the olive (Aug. in Ps. LxxiL). It is true that St. Paul here cares solely for the general 
 analogy, and would have been entirely indifferent to its non-accordance with the ordinary 
 method of iynevrpi<rii.6s. Indeed, as ho says that it is n-apa AvVtv (xi. 24), it seems needless 
 to show that this kind of grafting was ever really practised. Yet the illustration would, 
 under these circumstances, hardly have been used by a writer more familiar with the 
 facts of Nature. The notion that St. Paul alluded to the much rarer African custom of 
 grafting oleaster (or Ethiopia olive) on olive, to strengthen the latter (cf. Plin. H. N. xvii. 
 18; Colum. De re Rust. v. 9; Palladius; &c.), is most unlikely, if only for the reason 
 that it destroys the whole force of the truth which he is desiring to inculcate. (See 
 Ewbank, ii 112 ; Tholuck, Bom. 617 ; Meyer, 343.) He may have known the proverb, 
 dxapn-oTcpoK dypuXaiov. See, however, a somewhat different view in Thomson, Land and 
 Book, p. 53. 
 
 8 Tarsus resisted the party of Brutus and Oassius, but wa conquered by Lucius 
 Rufus, B.C. 43, and many Tarsians were sold as slaves to pay the fine of 1,500 talents
 
 BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN CITT. 13 
 
 It was here that Cleopatra held that famous meeting with the Roman 
 Triumvir which Shakspeare has immortalised, when she rowed up the silver 
 Cydnus, and 
 
 " The barge she sat in like a burnished throne 
 
 Burnt on the water ; the poop was beaten gold, 
 
 Purple the sails, and so perfumed that 
 
 The winds were love-sick with them." 
 
 Yet it continued to flourish under the rule of Augustus, and enjoyed the dis- 
 tinction of being both a capital and a free city libera and immunis. It was 
 from Tarsus that the vast masses of timber, hewn in the forests of Taurus, 
 were floated down the river to the Mediterranean dockyards ; it was here that 
 the vessels were unladen which brought to Asia the treasures of Europe ; it 
 was here that much of the wealth of Asia Minor was accumulated before it 
 was despatched to Greece and Italy. On the coins of the city she is repre- 
 sented as seated amid bales of various merchandise. The bright and busy 
 life of the streets and markets must have been the earliest scenes which 
 attracted the notice of the youthful Saul. The dishonesty which he had 
 witnessed in its trade may have suggested to him his metaphors of " huckster- 
 ing" and "adulterating" the word of life; 1 and he may have borrowed a 
 metaphor from the names and marks of the owners stamped upon the goods 
 which lay upon the quays, 2 and from the earnest-money paid by the pur- 
 chasers. 3 It may even have been the assembly of the free city which made 
 him more readily adopt from the Septuagint that name of Ecclosia for the 
 Church of Christ's elect of which his Epistles furnish the earliest instances. 4 
 
 It was his birth at Tarsus which also determined the trade in which, during 
 so many days and nights of toil and self-denial, the Apostle earned his daily 
 bread. The staple manufacture of the city was the weaving, first into ropes, 
 then into tent-covers and garments, of the hair which was supplied in 
 boundless quantities by the goat flocks of the Taurus. 6 As the making of 
 these cilicia was unskilled labour of the commonest sort, the trade of tent- 
 maker 8 was one both lightly esteemed and miserably paid. It must not, 
 
 which he inflicted on the city. (Appian, Bell. Civ. iv. 64.) Topvc , . wa BUTOIC riv 
 
 KoliMv afioXo7<i>Tanj jiijrpdiroXis ovtra. (Jos. Anlt. i. 6, 1). 
 
 1 2 Cor. ii. 17, am)Xvovre* ; iv. 2, aoXovir. 
 
 2 Eph. i. 13 ; iv. 30. e<r4>payi<77jTe. 
 8 2 Cor. i. 22, ippa^uv. 
 
 4 bnp r 1 Kings xii. 2 (LXX.) The word "Church," in its more technical modern 
 sense (as in Eph. and Col.), is developed out of the simpler meaning of congregation in 
 St. Paul's earlier Epistles. 
 
 s See Philo, DC Victim. 836 ; Plin. H. N. v. 32. 
 
 ' ovnjvoiroib?, Acts xviii. 3; o-mivoppdjax, Ps. Chrys. Orat. Encom. (Opp. vui. 8, Mont- 
 fauc.). When Chrysostom calls him a vximrrrfpoti "leather-cutter" (Horn. iv. 3, p. 864, 
 on 2 Tim. ii.), this can hardly be correct, because such a trade would not be favoured by 
 strict Pharisees. On the use of cilicium for tents see Veget. Milit. iv. 6 ; Serv. ad Virg. 
 Gcorg. iii. 313. It served for many other purposes, as garden rugs, mantelets, shoes, and 
 beds. (Colum. xii. 46; Liv. xxxviii. 7; Mart. riv. 140; Jer. Ep. 108.) To handle the 
 "dentil barba mariti" could not have been a pleasant trade. It waa "bought from the 
 ehepherds of Taurus, and sold to Greek shippers of the Levant." To this day cilice 
 means hair-cloth in French.
 
 14 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 however, be inferred from this that the family of St. Paul were people of low 
 position. The learning of a trade was a duty enjoined by the Rabbis on the 
 parents of every Jewish boy. 1 The wisdom of the rule became apparent in 
 the case of Paul, as doubtless of hundreds besides, when the changes and 
 chances of life compelled him to earn his own livelihood by manual labour. It 
 is clear, from the education provided for Paul by his parents, that they could 
 little indeed have conjectured how absolutely their son would be reduced to 
 depend on a toil so miserable and so unremunerative. 2 But though we see how 
 much he felt the burden of the wretched labour by which he determined to 
 earn his own bread rather than trespass on the charity of his converts, 3 yet it 
 had one advantage in being so absolutely mechanical as to leave the thoughts 
 entirely free. While he plaited the black, strong-scented goat's hair, he might 
 be soaring in thought to the inmost heaven, or holding high converse with 
 Apollos or Aquila, with Luke or Timothy, on the loftiest themes which can 
 engage the mind of man. 
 
 Before considering further the influence exercised by the birthplace on the 
 future fortunes of St. Paul, we must pause to inquire what can be discovered 
 about his immediate family. It must be admitted that we can ascertain but 
 little. Their possession, by whatever means, of the Pi/oman citizenship the 
 mere fact of their leaving Palestine, perhaps only a short time before Paul's 
 birth, to become units in the vast multitude of the Jews of the Dispersion 
 the fact, too, that so many of St. Paul's " kinsmen " bear Greek and Latin 
 names, 4 and lived in Rome or in Ephesus, 5 might, at first sight, lead us to sup- 
 pose that his whole family were of Hellenising tendencies. On the other hand, 
 we know nothing of the reasons which may have compelled them to leave 
 Palestine, and we have only the vaguest conjectures as to their possession of 
 the franchise. Even if it be certain that ffvyyeve'ts means " kinsmen " in our 
 sense of the word, and not, as Olshausen thinks, "fellow-countrymen," 6 it was 
 so common for Jews to have a second name, which they adopted during their 
 residence in heathen countries, that Androuicus and the others, whom he 
 salutes in the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, may all have been 
 genuine Hebrews. The real name of Jason, for instance, may have been Jesus, 
 
 1 On this subject see my Life of Christ, i. p. 82, n. Gamaliel himself was the author 
 of the celebrated aphorism, that "learning of any kind (mm b3, i.e., even the advanced 
 study of the Law) unaccompanied by a trade ends in nothing, and leads to sin " (Pirke 
 Abhdth, ii. 2). R. Judah said truly that "labour honours the labourer" (Nedarim, f. 
 49, 2) ; R. Meir said, " Let a man always teach his son pure and easy trades " (Tpseft. in 
 Kidd. f. 82, 1) ; R. Judah says, that not to teach one's son a trade is like teaching him 
 robbery (Kidduthin, f. 30, 2). 
 
 2 The reason why he was taught this particular trade may have been purely local. 
 Possibly his father had been taught the same trade as a boy. "A man should not change 
 his trade, nor that of his father," says R. Yochanan ; for it is said, " Hiram of Tyre was 
 a widow's son, . . . and his father was ... a worker in brass " (1 Kings vii. 13, 
 14). (Erechin, f. 16, 2.) 
 
 ' 3 1 Thess. ii. 6, 9 ; 2 Thess. III. 8 ; 1 Cor. ix. 12, 15. 
 
 4 Rom. xvi. 7 ; Andronicus, Jnnia, or perhaps Juntas (= Junianus) ; 11, Herodion ; 
 21, Lucius, Jason, Sosipater (ovyytvels). 
 
 1 See infra, ad loc., for the question whether oh. xvi, ii a genuine portion of the 
 Epistle to the Romans. 
 
 Aa in Rom. ix. 3.
 
 BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN CITT. 15 
 
 just as the real name of Paul was Saul. 1 However this may be, the thorough 
 Hebraism of the family appears in many ways. Paul's father and grandfather 
 had been Pharisees, 2 and were, therefore, most strict observers of the Mosaic 
 law. They had so little forgotten their extraction from the tribe of Benjamin 
 one of the two tribes which had remained faithful to the covenant that they 
 called their son Saul, 3 partly perhaps because the name, like Thesetetus, means 
 " asked " (of God), and partly because it was the name of that unfortunate 
 hero-king of their native tribe, whose sad fate seems for many ages to have 
 rendered his very name unpopular. 4 They sent him, probably not later than 
 the age of thirteen, to bo trained at the feet of Gamaliel. They seem to have 
 had a married daughter in Jerusalem, whose son, on one memorable occasion, 
 saved Paul's life. 6 Though they must have ordinarily used the Septuagint 
 version of the Bible, from which the great majority of the Apostle's quotations 
 are taken, 6 and from which nearly his whole theological phraseology is derived, 
 they yet trained him to use Aramaic as his native tongue, and to read the 
 Scriptures an accomplishment not possessed by many learned Jewish 
 Hellenists in their own venerable original Hebrew. 7 
 
 That St. Paul was a " Hebraist " in the fullest sense of the word is clear 
 from almost every verse of his Epistles. He reckons time by the Hebrew 
 calendar. He makes constant allusion to Jewish customs, Jewish laws, and 
 Jewish festivals. His metaphors and turns of expression are derived with 
 great frequency from that quiet family life for which the Jews have been in 
 all ages distinguished. Though he writes in Greek, it is not by any means in 
 the Greek of the schools, 8 or the Greek which, in spite of its occasional 
 antitheses and paronomasias, would have been found tolerable by the 
 rhetoricians of his native city. The famous critic Longinus does indeed, if 
 the passage be genuine, praise him as the master of a dogmatic style ; but 
 certainly a Tarsian professor or a philosopher of Athens would have been 
 inclined to ridicule his Hebraic peculiarities, awkward anakolutha, harshly- 
 mingled metaphors, strange forms, and irregular constructions. 9 St. Jerome, 
 
 1 When a Greek or Roman name bore any resemblance in sound to a Jewish, one, it; 
 was obviously convenient for the Jew to make so slight a change. Thus Dosthai became, 
 Dositheus ; Tarphon, Tryphon ; Eliakim, Alkimos, &c. 
 
 Acts xxiii. 6. ' ViNtf, Shaft!. 
 
 4 It is found as a Hebrew name in the Pentateuch (Gen. xxnd. 37 ; xlvi. 10 ; Ex. vi. 
 15 ; Numb, xxvi 13 ; but after the death of King Saul it does not occur till the time of 
 the Apostle, and again later in Joscphua (Antt. xjs. 9, 4; B. J. ii. 17, 4; Kreukel, 
 Paulus, p. 217). 
 
 5 Acts Trriii. 16. 
 
 6 There are about 278 quotations from the Old Testament hi the New. Of these 53 
 we identical in the Hebrew, Septuagiut, and New Testament ; in 10 the Septuagint is 
 correctly altered; in 76 it is altered .incorrectly i.e., into greater divergence from the 
 Hebrew ; in 37 it is accepted where it differs from the Hebrew ; in 99 all three differ ; 
 *nd there are 3 doubtful allusions. (See Turpie, The Old Testament in the New, p. 267, 
 and passim.) 
 
 1 V. supra, p. 9. 
 
 8 Among numerous explanations of the >n|Xiicotj ypanftewrtv of GaL vi. 11, one Is that hur 
 Greek letters were so ill-formed, from want of practice, as to look almost laughable. 
 
 9 See infra, Excursus L, "The Style of St. Paul; "and Excursus IL, "Ehetorio 
 <rf St Paul."
 
 16 THE LIFE AND TTOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 criticising the oi> tcarfvapK-naa. vfiuv of 2 Cor. xi. 9, xii. 13 which in our version 
 is rendered, " I was not burdensome to you," but appears to mean literally, " I 
 did not benumb you " speaks of the numerous cilicisms of his style ; and it 
 is probable that such there were, though they can hardly be detected with 
 certainty by a modern reader. 1 For though Tarsus was a city of advanced 
 culture, Cilicia was as intellectually barbarous as it was morally despicable. 
 The proper language of Cilicia was a dialect of Phoenician, 2 and the Greek 
 Spoken by some of the cities was so faulty as to have originated the term 
 " solecism," which has been perpetuated in all languages to indicate impossible 
 constructions. 3 
 
 The residence of a Jew in a foreign city might, of course, tend to under- 
 mine his national religion, and make him indifferent to his hereditary customs. 
 It might, however, produce an effect directly the reverse of this. There had 
 been abundant instances of Hellenistic Jews who Hellenised in matters far 
 more serious than the language which they spoke ; but, on the other hand, the 
 Jews, as a nation, have ever shown an almost miraculous vitality, and so far 
 from being denationalised by a home among the heathen, they have only been 
 confirmed in the intensity of their patriotism and their faith. We know that 
 this had been the case with that numerous and important body, the Jews 
 of Tarsus. In this respect they differed considerably from the Jews of 
 Alexandria. They could not have been exempt from that hatred which has 
 through so many ages wronged and dishonoured their noble race, and which 
 was already virulent among the Romans of that day. All that we hear about 
 them shows that the Cilician Jews were as capable as any of their brethren of 
 repaying hate with double hatred, and scorn with double scorn. They would 
 be all the more likely to do so from the condition of things around them. The 
 belief in Paganism was more firmly rooted in the provinces than in Italy, and 
 was specially vigorous in Tarsus in this respect no unfitting burial-place for 
 Julian the Apostate. No ages are worse, no places more corrupt, than those 
 that draw the iridescent film of an intellectual culture over the deep stagnancy 
 of moral degradation. And this was the condition of Tarsus. The seat of a 
 celebrated school of letters, it was at the same time the metropolis of a 
 province so low in universal estimation that it was counted among the rpta 
 the three most villainous k's of antiquity, Kappadokia, 
 
 1 "Multa sunt verba, quibus juxta morem urbis et provinciae suae, familiarius 
 Apostolus utitur: e quibus exempli gratia pauca ponenda sunt." He refers to 
 
 KartvapKijcra. (2 Cor. 33. 9), Curb ivOpwnivrft ^/x^pas (1 Cor. iv. 3), and Karaj3pa/3ev'rci> (Col. ii. 18) ; 
 
 aixd adds, " Quibus, et aliis multis, usque bodie utuntur Cilices " ( Jer. Ep. ad Algas, qu. 
 10). Wetstein, however, adduces iirovapKaw, from Hut. De Liber. Educ. p. 8, and vopK< 
 occurs in tbe LXX. (Gen. xxsii. 25, 32 ; Job xxxiii. 19) and in Jos. Antt. viii. 8, 5 ; 
 I'dfjKT] is tbe torpedo or yyinrwttis. Since Karapapxaw is only found in Hippocrates, Dr. 
 Plumptre thinks it may have boon a medical word in vogue in the schools of Tarsus. 
 Gregory of Nyssa, on 1 Cor. xv. 28, quotes CK/WOW (Phil. ii. 7), 6fiipdfivoi (1 Thess. ii. 8), 
 irepnepeverat (1 Cor. xiii. 4), tpifleios (Uoin. ii. 8), &c., as instances of St. Paul's autocracy 
 over words. 
 
 2 See Hdt. 1. 74, vii. 91 ; Xen. Anab. b. ii. 26. 
 
 8 2o\otKt<rfi(fc. See Strabo, p. 663; Diog. Laert. 1. 51, But the derivation from Soli 
 b not certain,
 
 BOTHOOD IN A HEATHEN CITY. 17 
 
 and JCreto. What religion there was at this period had chiefly 
 assumed an orgiastic and oriental character, and the popular faith of many 
 even in Borne was a strange mixture of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Phrygian, 
 Phc0niian, and Jewish elements. The wild, fanatical enthusiasms of the 
 Eastern cults shook with new sensations of mad sensuality and weird super- 
 stition the feeble and jaded despair of Aryan Paganism. The Tarsiaa 
 idolatry was composed of these mingled elements. There, in Plutarch's time, 
 a generation after St. Paul, the sword of Apollo, miraculously preserved from 
 decay and rust, was still displayed. Hermes Eriounios, or the luck-bringer, 
 still appears, purse in hand, upon their coins. JEsculapius was still believed 
 to manifest his power and presence in the neighbouring ..ZEgse. 1 But the 
 traditional founder of the city was the Assyrian, Sardanapalus, whose semi- 
 historical existence was confused, in the then syncretism of Pagan worship, 
 with various representatives of the sun-god the Asiatic Sandan, the Phoeni- 
 cian Baal, and the] Grecian Hercules. The gross allusiveness and origin of" 
 this worship, its connexion with the very types and ideals of luxurious 
 effeminacy, unbounded gluttony, and brutal licence, were quite sufficient to 
 awake the indignant loathing of each true-hearted Jew ; and these revolts of 
 natural antipathy in. the hearts of a people in whom true religion has ever been 
 united with personal purity would be intensified with patriotic disgust when 
 they saw that, at the main festival of this degraded cult the effeminate 
 Sardanapalus and the masculine Semiramis each equally detestable wera 
 worshipped with rites which externally resembled the pure and thankful 
 rejoicings of the Feast of Tabernacles. St. Paul must have witnessed this 
 festival. He must have seen at Anchiale the most defiant symbol of cynical 
 contentment with all which is merely animal in the statue of Sardanapalus,, 
 represented as snapping his fingers while he uttered the sentiment engraved 
 upon the pedestal 
 
 " Eat, drink, enjoy thyself ; the rest is nothing." 1 
 
 The result which such spectacles and such sentiments had left upon, 
 his mind had not been one of tolerance, or of blunted sensibility to the, 
 horror of eviL They had inspired, on the one hand, an overpowering 
 sense of disgust ; on the other, an overwhelming conviction, deepened by 
 subsequent observation, that mental perversity leads to, and is in its turn 
 aggravated by, moral degradation ; that error in the intellect involves an 
 ultimate error in the life and in the will; that the darkening of the 
 understanding is inevitably associated with the darkening of the soul 
 and spirit, and that out of such darkness spring the hidden things which 
 degrade immoral lives. He who would know what was the aspect of 
 Paganism to one who had seen it from his childhood upwards hi its 
 
 1 De Def. Orac. 41 ; Hansrath, pp. 7 9. See, too, Plutarch, irepl 
 0e6rr)Tc*, ii. ; Neauder, Ch. Hist. i. 15 sq, 
 
 3 Strabo, xiv. 4; Athen. jrii., p. 529 ; Cic. Tusc. Disp. v. 35. Eausrath, p. 7, finds a 
 reminiscence of this in 1 Cor. xv. 32, which may, however, have bean quite as probably 
 derived from the wide-spread fable of the Epicurean fly dying in the honey-pot,' 
 
 uu /3e'/3/X'jiea (cat iremaica xai A^Aovjuai KO.V arroOarta aiiStv jif'Aei fioi,
 
 18 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL 
 
 characteristic developments, must read that most terrible passage of all 
 Scripture, in which the full blaze of scorching sunlight burns with its fiercest 
 flame of indignation upon the pollutions of Pagan wickedness. Under that 
 glare of holy wrath we see Paganism in all its unnatural deformity. No 
 halo of imagination surrounds it, no gleam of fancy plays over its glittering) 
 corruption. We see it as it was. Far other may be its aspect when thej 
 glamour of Hellenic grace is flung over it, when "the lunar beam of Plato's, 
 genius " or the meteoric wit of Aristophanes light up, as by enchantment, its 
 revolting sorceries. But ho who would truly judge of it he who would see it; 
 as it shall seem when there shall fall on it a ray out of God's eternity, must 
 view it as it appeared to the penetrating glance of a pure and enlightened eye. 
 St. Paul, furnished by inward chastity with a diviner moly, a more potentj 
 haemony, than those of Homer's and Milton's song unmoved, untempted, 
 unbewitched, unterrified sees in this painted Circe no laughing maiden, no 
 bright-eyed daughter of the sun, but a foul and baleful harlot; and, seizing her 
 by the hair, stamps deep upon her leprous forehead the burning titles of her 
 shame. Henceforth she may go for all time throughout the world a branded 
 sorceress. All may read that festering stigma; none can henceforth deceive the 
 nations into regrets for the vanished graces of a world which knew not God. 1 
 
 But besides this unmitigated horror inspired by the lowest aspect of 
 heathen life, St. Paul derived from his early insight into its character hi a 
 deep conviction that earthly knowledge has no necessary connexion with 
 heavenly wisdom. If we may trust the romance of the sophist Philostratus, 
 and if he is not merely appropriating the sentiments which he had derived 
 from Christianity, the youthful Apollonius of Tyana, who was afterwards 
 held up as a kind of heathen parallel to Christ, was studying under the orator 
 Euthydemus at Tarsus at the very time when it must also have been tke 
 residence of the youthful Paul ; 2 and even Apollonius, at the age of thirteen, 
 was so struck with the contrast between the professed wisdom of the city and 
 its miserable morality, that he obtained leave from his father to remove 
 to .ZEgae, and so pursue his studies at a more serious and religious place.* 
 The picture drawn, so long afterwards, by Philostratus, of the luxury, 
 buffoonery, the petulance, the dandyism, the gossip, of the life at 
 Tarsus, as a serious boy-philosopher is supposed to have witnessed it, 
 might have no historical value if it were not confirmed in every particular 
 by the sober narrative of the contemporary Strabo. " So great," he says, " ia 
 the zeal of the inhabitants for philosophy and all other encyclic training, that 
 they have surpassed even Athens and Alexandria, and every other place ono 
 could mention in which philological and philosophical schools have arisen." * 
 
 1 V. infra, on Rom. 1. 1882. s Philostrat. Vit. Apoll. i. 7. 
 
 8 'O & rov /iv SiScUrieoAoc eivero rb M rfjt ir^Xews ^9os 5.TOw6v n riyelro /col ov xP T ) (rr o" 
 ifi4>iXotro$>jcrai. Tpixfirjs r* yap oviafioC ij,a\Xov anrovrat, <TKiam6ka<, rt xal vfipurrai rrai'Tc? 
 
 (Philostr. Vit. Apottvn., i., p. 8. chap. 7, ed. Clear. 1709). 
 
 < Strabo. riv. 4, pp. 672, 673. See, too, Xen. Anaib. L 2, 23 ; Plin. v. 22 ; Q. Curt. 
 Hi. 5, 1. The Stoics, Athenodorus, tutor of Augustus, and Nestor, tutor of Tiberias, 
 lived t Tarsus ; and others are mentioned.
 
 BOYHOOD IN A. HEATHEN CITY, 19 
 
 The state of affairs resulting from the social atmosphere which he proceeds 
 to describe is as amusing as it is despicable. It gives us a glimpse of the 
 professorial world in days of Pagan decadence; of a professorial world, 
 not such as it now is, and often has been, in our English and German 
 Universities, where Christian brotherhood and mutual esteem have taken 
 the place of wretched rivalism, and where good and learned men devote 
 their lives to " gazing on the bright countenance of truth in the mild and 
 dewy air of delightful studies," but as it was also in the days of the Poggios, 
 Filolfos, and Politians of the Renaissance cliques of jealous scwans, narrow, 
 selfish, unscrupulous, base, sceptical, impure bursting with gossip, scandal, 
 and spite. " The thrones " of these little " academic gods " were as 
 mutually hostile and as universally degraded as those of the Olympian deities, 
 in which it was, perhaps, a happy thing that they had ceased to believe. One 
 illustrious professor cheated the State by stealing oil ; another avenged himself 
 on an opponent by epigrams ; another by a nocturnal bespattering of his 
 house ; and rhetorical jealousies often ended in bloody quarrels. On this 
 modifying spectacle of littleness in great places the people in general looked 
 with admiring eyes, and discussed the petty discords of these squabbling 
 sophists as though they were matters of historical importance. 1 We can well 
 imagine how unutterably frivolous this apotheosis of pedantism would appear 
 to a serious-minded and faithful Jew ; and it may have been his Tarsian 
 reminiscences which added emphasis to St. Paul's reiterated warnings that 
 the wise men of heathendom, " alleging themselves to be wise, became fools ; " 
 that " they became vain La their disputings, and their unintelligent heart 
 was darkened ; '' 2 that " the wisdom of this world is folly in the sight of God, 
 for it is written, He who graspeth the wise in their own craftiness." And 
 again, " the Lord knoweth the reasonings of the wise that they are vain." 3 
 But while he thus confirms his tenet, according to his usual custom, by 
 Scriptural quotations from Job and the Psalms, and elsewhere from Isaiah and 
 Jeremiah, 4 he reiterates again and again from his own experience that the 
 Greeks seek after wisdom and regard the Cross as foolishness, yet that the 
 foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God stronger than 
 men, and that God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound 
 the wise, and the base things of the world to cosf ound the mighty ; and that 
 when, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, 
 it pleased God by "the foolishness of the proclamation" 6 for in his 
 strong irony he loves and glories in the antitheses of his opponent's choosing 
 " by the foolishness of the thing preached " to save them that believe. 8 
 If the boasted wisdom of the Greek and Roman world was such as the young 
 
 rt OVTOVJ Sunups i Kvivoc, ty wapoucdGrivTai, Ka.0a.irtp rwy bpi-idiov oi vypoC (Philostr. 
 
 ubi supr.). 
 
 2 Horn. i. 21, 22. 1 Cor. ffi. 1820. 
 
 4 Job v. 13; Ps. xciv. 11; Isa. xiix. 14; xxxiii. 18; xliv. 25; Jer. viii 9: 1 Cor. L 
 1827. 
 
 5 1 Cor. L 21, SLO. rfft Utopias rov mipuwaTos. 
 
 1 Cor. L 1826; ii 14; iii. 19; iv. 10; 2 Cor. jd. 16, 19.
 
 20 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Saul had seen, if their very type of senselessness and foolishness was 
 tkat which the converted Paul believed, then Paul at least so he says in 
 his passionate and scornful irony would choose for ever to be on the side of, 
 to cast in his lot with, to be gladly numbered among, the idiots and the 
 fools. 
 
 " He who hath felt the Spirit of the Highest 
 Cannot confound, or doubt Him, or defy ; 
 Yea, with one voice, world, though thou deniest, 
 Stand thou on that side for on this am I ! " 
 
 St. Paul, then, was to the very heart a Jew a Jew in culture, a Jew in 
 sympathy, a Jew in nationality, a Jew in faith. His temperament was in no 
 sense what we ordinarily regard as a poetic temperament ; yet when we re- 
 member how all the poetry which existed in the moral depths of his nature was 
 sustained by the rhythms and imagery, as his soul itself was sustained by the 
 thoughts and hopes, of his national literature when we consider how the star 
 of Abraham had seemed to shine on his cradle in a heathen laud, and his boy- 
 hood in the dim streets of unhallowed Tarsus to gain freshness and sweetness 
 "from the waving and rustling of the oak of Mamre" 1 we can understand 
 that though in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither circumcision nor 
 uncircuincision, but a new creation, 2 yet for no earthly possession would he 
 have bartered his connexion with the chosen race. In his Epistle to the 
 Romans he speaks in almost the very language of the Talmudist : " Israel hath 
 sinned (Josh. vii. 11), but although he hath sinned," said Rabbi Abba bar Zavda, 
 " he is still Israel. Hence the proverb A myrtle among nettles is still called 
 a myrtle." 3 And when we read the numerous passages in which he vaunts his 
 participation in the hopes of Israel, his claim to be a fruitful branch in the 
 rich olive of Jewish life ; when we hear him speak of their adoption, their 
 Shechinah, their covenants, their Law, their worship, their promises, then- 
 Fathers, their oracles of God, their claim of kinsmanship with the humanity 
 of Christ, 4 we can understand to the full the intense ejaculation of his patriotic 
 fervour, when in language which has ever been the stumbling-block of reli- 
 gious selfishness, but which surpasses the noblest utterances of heroic self- 
 devotion he declares that he could wish himself accursed from Christ 5 for his 
 brethren, his kinsmen, according to the flesh. 6 The valiant spirit of the Jews 
 
 1 Hausrath, p. 20. * mV, Gal. vi. 15; iii. 28. 
 
 3 Sanhedrin, f. 44, 1. Rom. iii. 2; be., passim. 
 
 4 Rom. ix. 1 5 ; x. 1 ; xi. 1. * Rom. ix. 8. 
 
 6 Any one who wishes to see the contortions of a narrow exegesis struggling to 
 extricate itself out of a plain meaning, which is too noble for its comprehension, may see 
 specimens of it in commentaries upon this text. This, alas ! is only one instance of the 
 spirit which so often makes the reading of an ordinary variorum Pauline commentary, 
 one of the most tedious, bewildering, and unprofitable of employments. Strange that, 
 with the example of Christ before their eyes, many erudite Christian commentators, 
 should know so little of the sublimity of unselfishness as to force us to look to tho 
 parallels of a Moses nay, even of a Danton in order that we may be able to conceive 
 of the true nobleness of a Paul I But there are cases in which he who would obtain from 
 the writings of St. Paul their true, and often quite simple and transparent, meaning, 1 
 must tear away with unsparing hand the accumulated cobwebs of centuries of error.
 
 BOYHOOD IN A HEATHEN OITT. 21 
 
 of Tarsus sent them in hundreds to die, sword in hand, amid the carnage of 
 captured Jerusalem, and to shed their last blood to slake, if might be, the very 
 embers of the conflagration which destroyed the Temple of their love. Tho 
 same patriotism burned in the spirit, the same blood flowed in the veins, not 
 only of Saul the Pharisee, but of Paul the prisoner of the Lord. 
 
 It will be seen from all that we have said that we wholly disagree with 
 those who have made it their favourite thesis to maintain for St. Paul the early 
 acquisition of an advanced Hellenic culture. His style and his dialectic method 
 have been appealed to in order to support this view. 1 His style, however, is 
 that of a man who wrote in a peculiar and provincial Greek, but thought in 
 Syriac ; and his dialectical method is purely Rabbinic. As for his deep know- 
 ledge of heathen life, we may be sure that it was not derived from books, but 
 from the fatal wickedness of which he had been a daily witness. A Jew in a 
 heathen city needed no books to reveal to him the " depths of Satan." In this 
 respect how startling a revelation to the modern world was the indisputable 
 evidence of the ruins of Pompeii I Who would have expected to find the 
 infamies of the Dead Sea cities paraded with such infinite shamelessness in 
 every street of a little provincial town P What innocent snow could over hide 
 the guilty front of a life so unspeakably abominabie P Could auything short 
 of the earthquake have engulfed it, or of the volcano have burnt it up ? And 
 if Pompeii was like this, we may judge, from the works of Aristophanes and 
 Athenaeus, of Juvenal and Martial, of Petronius and Apuleius, of Strato and 
 Meleager which may be regarded as the " pieces justificative " of St. Paul's 
 estimate of heathendom what Tarsus and Ephesus, what Corinth and Miletus, 
 were likely to have been. In days and countries when the darkness was so 
 deep that the very deeds of darkness did not need to hide themselves in days 
 and cities where the worst vileuesses of idolatry were trumpeted in its streets, 
 and sculptured in its market-places, and consecrated in its worship, and stamped 
 upon its coins did Paul need Greek study to tell him the characteristics of a 
 godless civilisation ? The notion of Baumgarten that, after his conversion, 
 St. Paul earnestly studied Greek literature at Tarsus, with a view to his mission 
 among the heathen or that the " books " and parchments which he asked to 
 be sent to him from the house of Carpus at Troas, 2 were of this description 
 is as precarious as the fancy that his parents sent him to be educated at Jeru- 
 salem in order to counteract the commencing sorcery exercised over his 
 imagination by Hellenic studies. Gamaliel, it is true, was one of the few 
 Rabbis who took the liberal and enlightened view about the permissibility of 
 the Chokmah Jovanith, or "wisdom of the Greeks " one of the few who held 
 the desirability of not wholly dissevering the white tallitJi of Shein from the 
 stained pallium of Japhet. 3 But, on the one hand, neither would Gamaliel 
 
 1 See Schaff, Hid. of Anct. Christianity, I. 68. J 2 Tim. iv. 13. 
 
 3 See Life of Chmt, Exc. IV. vol. ii. 461. The study of Greek literature by the 
 House of Gamaliel ia said to have been connived at by the Kabbis, on the plea that they 
 needed a knowledge of Greek in civil and diplomatic intercourse on behalf of their 
 countrymen (see Etheridge, Heb. Lit. p. 45). Rabban Shimon Ben Gamaliel is said to 
 have remarked that there were 1,000 children in his father's house, of whom 500 studied
 
 22 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 have had that false toleration which seems to think that " the ointment of the 
 apothecary " is valueless without " the fly which causeth it to stink ;" and, on 
 the other hand, if Gamaliel had allowed his pupils to handle such books, or 
 such parts of books, as dwelt on the darker side of Paganism, Paul was not the 
 kind of pupil who would, for a moment, have availed himself of such " ruinous 
 edification." 1 The Jews were so scrupulous, that some of them held concern- 
 ing books of their own hagiographa such, for instance, as the Book of Esther 
 that they were dubious reading. They would not allow their youth even to 
 open the Song of Solomon before the age of twenty-one. Nothing, therefore, 
 can be more certain than that a "Pharisee of Pharisees," even though his 
 boyhood were spent in heathen Tarsus, would not have been allowed to read 
 barely even allowed to know the existence of any but the sweetest and soundest 
 portions of Greek letters, if even these. 2 But who that has read St. Paul can 
 believe that he has ever studied Homer, or uEschylus, or Sophocles ? If he 
 had done so, would there in a writer who often " thinks in quotations " 
 have been no touch or trace of any reminiscence of, or allusion to, epic or tragic 
 poetry in epistles written at Athens and at Corinth, and beside the very tumuli 
 of Ajax and Achilles ? Had Paul been a reader of Aristotle, would he have 
 argued in the style which he adopts in the Epistles to the Galatians and the 
 Romans ? * Had he been a reader of Plato, would the fifteenth chapter of the 
 first Epistle to the Corinthians have carried in it not the most remotely faint 
 allusion to the splendid guesses of the Phaedo ? Nothing can be more clear 
 than that ho had never been subjected to a classic training. His Greek is not 
 the Greek of the Atticists, nor his rhetoric the rhetoric of the schools, nor his 
 logic the logic of the philosophers. It is doubtful whether the incomparable 
 energy and individuality of his style and of his reasoning would not have been 
 
 the law, and 500 the wisdom of the Greeks, and that of these all but two perished [in 
 the rebellion of Bar-cochba?] (Balha Kama, f. 83, 1). The author of the celebrated 
 comparison, that " because the two sons of Noah, Shem and Japhet, united to cover with 
 one garment their father's nakedness, Shem obtained the fringed garment (talllth), and 
 Japhet the philosopher's garment (pattium), which ought to be united again," was R. 
 Jochanan Ben Napuchah (Midr. Rdbbah, Gen. xxxvi. ; Jer. Sotah, ad f.; Selden, De 
 Synedr. ii. 9, 2; Biscoe, p. 60). On the other hand, the narrower Rabbis identified 
 Greek learning with Egyptian thaumaturgy ; and when R. Elieser Ben Darna asked hia 
 uacle, R. Ismael, whether one might not learn Greek knowledge after having studied the 
 entire law, R. Ismael quoted in reply Josh. i. 8, and said, "Go and find a moment which 
 is neither day nor night, and then abandon yourself in it to Greek knowledge " (Mena- 
 ck6th, 99, 2). 
 
 1 1 Cor. viii. 10, i) <rwe<j)<r<9 avrou i<r6tvovs oirof oucoofti)&j<rer<u eis TO TO. ci&uXodvra IrrSinv. 
 Ruinosa aedificatio, Calv. ad loc. 
 
 2 See Sota, 49, 6 ; and the strong condemnation of all Gentile books by R. Akibha, 
 Bab. Sanhcdr. 90, a. (Gfrorer, Jahrh. d. Heils. i. 114 ; Philo, ii. 350 ; Griitz, iii. 502 ; 
 Derenbourg, Palest. 114.) In Yadayim, iv. 6, the Sadducees complain of some Pharisees 
 for holding that the Books of Ecclesiastes and Canticles "defile the hands," while "the 
 books of Homeros " do not. The comment appended to this remark shows, however, the 
 most astounding ignorance. The two Rabbis (in loco) take "Meros" to be the proper 
 name, preceded by the article, and deriving Meros from rasas, to destroy, make the 
 poems of Homer into books which cavil against the Law and are doomed to destruction ! 
 Gratz denies that DVon is Homer. 
 
 3 "Melius haec sibi convenissent," says Pritzsche, in alluding to one of St. Paul's 
 antinomies, "si Apo?jtolus Aristotelis non Gamalielis alumnus fuisaet,"
 
 THE SCHOOL OF THE RABBI. 
 
 merely enfeebled and conventionalised if he bad gone tnrough any prolonged 
 course of tbe only training wbich tbe Sophists of Tarsus could have given 
 him. 1 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 THE SCHOOL OP THE EABBI. 
 
 'H/covaare yelp TT\V ^UTJP waarpo(pi)v irore tv 'louSai'a'/uip, #TI ... vpotKOVTOV 
 iv T(JJ 'lovticiiff/Ay virep iroAAotis ffvi'rj\iKid>Tas ev Tq> yevn pav. GAL. i. 13, 14. 
 
 " Let thy house he a place of resort for the wise, and cover thyself with the 
 dust of their feet, and drink their words with thirstincss." fir fit AbhSth, i. 4. 
 
 "The world was created for the sake of the Thorah." Nedarim, 32, 1. 
 
 "Whoever ia husied in the law for its own sake is worth the whole world." 
 PEREK R. MEIR, 1. 
 
 So far, then, we have attempted to trace in detail, by the aid of St. Paul's 
 own writings, the degree and the character of those influences which were 
 exercised upon bio mind by the early years which he spent at Tarsus, modified 
 or deepened as they must have been by long intercourse with heathens, and 
 with converts from heathendom, in later years. And already we have seen 
 abundant reason to believe that the impressions which he received from 
 Hellenism wore comparatively superficial and fugitive, while those of his 
 Hebraic training and nationality worked deep among the very bases of his 
 life. It is this Hebraic side of his character, so important to any under- 
 standing of his life and writings, that we must now endeavour to trace and 
 estimate. 
 
 That St. Paul was a Roman citizen, that he could go through the world 
 and say in his own defence, when needful or possible, Oivis Romanus sum, is 
 stated so distinctly, and under circumstances so manifestly probable, that the 
 fact stands above all doubt. There are, indeed, some difficulties about it 
 which induce many German theologians quietly to deny its truth, and attri- 
 bute the statement to a desire on the part of the author of the Acts " to 
 recommend St. Paul to the Romans as a native Roman," or " to remove the 
 reproach that the originators of Christendom had been enemies of the Roman 
 State." It is true that, if St. Paul was a free-born Roman citizen, his legal 
 rights as established by the Lex Porcia 2 must, according to his own state- 
 ment, have been eight times violated at the time when he wrote the Second 
 
 1 See Excursus I., " The Style of St. Paul ; " Excursus II., " Rhetoric of St. Paul ; " 
 and Eicursiis III., "The Classic Quotations and Allusions of St. Paul." I may sum up 
 the conclusion of these essays by stating that St. Paul had but a slight acquaintance 
 with Greek literature, but that he had very probably attended some elementary classes 
 in Tarsus, in which he had gained a tincture of Greek rhetoric, and possibly even of 
 Stoic principles. 
 
 2 Porcia lex virgaa ab omnium oivium Komanorum corpora amovet " (do. n, *b, 
 Sj Liv. x, 9),
 
 24 THE LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PATH,. 
 
 Epistle to the Corinthians j 1 while a ninth violation of those rights was only 
 prevented by his direct appeal. Five of these, however, were Jewish 
 scourgings ; and what we have already said, as well as what we shall say 
 hereafter, may well lead us to suppose that, as against the Jews, St. Paul 
 would have purposely abstained from putting forward a claim which, from 
 the mouth of a Jew, would have been regarded as an odious sign that he was 
 willing to make a personal advantage of his country's subjection. The Jewish 
 authorities possessed the power to scourge, and it is only too sadly probable 
 that Saul himself, when he was their agent, had been the cause of its infliction 
 on other Christians. If so, he would have felt a strong additional reason for 
 abstaining from the plea which would have exempted him from the authority 
 of his countrymen ; and we may see in this abstention a fresh and, so far as 
 I am aware, a hitherto unnoticed trait of his natural nobleness. As to the 
 Roman scourgings, it is clear that the author of the Acts, though well aware 
 of the privileges which Roman citizenship entailed, was also aware that, on 
 turbulent occasions and in remote places, the plea might be summarily set 
 aside in the case of those who were too weak or too obscure to support it. If ' 
 under the full glare of publicity in Sicily, and when the rights of the " Civitas" 
 were rare, a Verres could contemptuously ignore them to an extent much 
 more revolting to the Roman sense of dignity than scourging was then very, 
 little difficulty remains in reconciling St. Paul's expression, " Thrice was I 
 beaten with rods," with the claim which he put forth to the praetors of 
 Philippi and to the chiliarch at Jerusalem. How St. Paul's father or grand- 
 father obtained the highly-prized distinction we have no means of ascertaining. 
 It certainly did not belong to any one as a citizen of Tarsus, for, if so, Lysiaa 
 at Jerusalem, knowing that St. Paul came from Tarsus, would have known 
 that he had also the rights of a Roman. But Tarsus was not a Colonia or a 
 Municipium, but only an Urbs Libera; and this privilege, bestowed upon it 
 by Augustus, did not involve any claim to the Civitas. The franchise may 
 either have been purchased by Paul's father, or obtained as a reward for some 
 services of which no trace remains. 9 When Cassius punished Tarsus by a 
 heavy fine for having embraced the side of Antony, it is said that many 
 iTarsians were sold as slaves in order to pay the money ; and one conjecture 
 is that St. Paul's father, in his early days, may have been one of these, and 
 may have been first emancipated and then presented with the Civitaa during 
 a residence at Rome. The conjecture is just possible, but nothing more. 
 
 At any rate, this Roman citizenship is not in any way inconsistent with 
 his constant claim to the purest Jewish descent ; nor did it appreciably affect 
 his character. The father of Saul may have been glad that he possessed an 
 inalienable right, transmissible to his son, which would protect him in many 
 of those perils which were only too possible in such times; but it made no 
 
 1 When he was about fifty-three years old. 
 
 * See for such means of acquiring it, Suet. Aug. 47 ; Jos. B. J. ii. 14 ; Acts xxil. 
 28. The possession of citizenship had to be proved by a "diploma" and Claudius 
 punished a false assumption of it with death. (Suet. Claud. 25 ; Calig. 28 ; Nero, 12 ; 
 Epictet, Dissert, iii. 24.)
 
 THB SCHOOL OF THE EABBI. 25 
 
 difference in the training which he gave to the young Saul, or in the destiny 
 which he marked out for him. That training, as we can clearly see, was the 
 ordinary training of every Jewish boy. " The prejudices of the Pharisaic 
 house, it has been said, " surrounded his cradle ; his Judaism grew like the 
 mustard-tree in the Gospel, and intolerance, fanaticism, national hatred, pride, 
 and other passions, built their nests among its branches." 1 At the age of five 
 he would begin to study the Bible with his parents at home ; and even earlier 
 than this he would doubtless have learnt the Shema 2 and the Hallel (Psalms 
 cxiii. cxviii.) in whole or in part. At six he would go to his " vineyard," as the 
 later Rabbis called their schools. At ten he would begin to study those 
 earlier and simpler developments of the oral law, which were afterwards 
 collected in the Mishna. At thirteen he would, by a sort of " confirmation," 
 become a " Son of the Commandment." 3 At fifteen he would be trained in 
 yet more minute and burdensome halachoth, analogous to those which ulti- 
 mately filled the vast mass of the Gemara. At twenty, or earlier, like every 
 orthodox Jew, he would marry. During many years he would be ranked 
 among the " pupils of the wise," 4 and be mainly occupied with " the traditions 
 of the Fathers." 6 
 
 It was in studies and habits like these that the young Saul of Tarsus grew 
 np to the age of thirteen, which was the age at which a Jewish boy, if he were 
 destined for the position of a Rabbi, entered the school of some great master. 
 The master among whose pupils Saul was enrolled was the famous Rabban 
 Gamaliel, a son of Rabban Simeon, and a grandson of Hillel, " a doctor of 
 the law had in reputation among all the people." 6 There were only seven of 
 the Rabbis to whom the Jews gave the title of Rabban, and three of these 
 were Gamaliels of this family, who each in turn rose to the high distinction 
 of Nast, or President of the School. Gamaliel I., like his grandfather | 
 Hillel, held the somewhat anomalous position of a liberal Pharisee. A Pharisee , 
 in heartfelt zeal for the traditions of his fathers, 7 he yet had none of the 
 narrow exclusiveness which characterised Shammai, the rival of his grand- 1 
 father, and the hard school which Shammai had founded. His liberality of 
 intellect showed itself in the permission of Pagan literature ; his largeness of 
 heart in the tolerance which breathes through his speech before the Sanhedrin. 
 
 1 Hausrath, p. 19. 
 
 3 Strictly Deut. vi, 49 ; but also xi 1327 ; Num. XT. 8741. 
 8 Bar Mitsvah. 
 
 4 Pirke Aijhdlk, v. 21. See too Dr. Ginsburg's excellent article on " Education " in 
 Kitto's Bibl. Cycl. 
 
 6 Pirke AbMtii, 1. 1. The two favourite words of the Pharisees were aiepiBi and 
 T* Trdrpta efrj. -See Acts xxvi. 6; xxii. 3; Jos. B. /. ii. 8, 14; i. 5, 2; Antt. xiii. 10, 
 6; rvri. 2, adfin. 
 
 6 Acts v. 84, xiii. 3. Bee Gratz, Gesch. d. Juden. iii. 274. 
 
 7 I have noticed farther on (see Excursus V.) the difficulty of being sure which of the 
 Gamaliels is referred to when the name occurs in the Talmud. This, however, is less im- 
 portant, since they were all of the same school, and entirely faithful to Mosaism. We 
 may see the utter change which subsequently took place in St. Paul's views if we com- 
 pare Bom. xiv. 5, Col. ii. 16, Gal. iv. 10, with the following anecdote: "Rabban 
 Gamaliel's ass happened to be laden with honey, and it was found dead one Sabbath 
 evening, because he had been unwilling to unload it on that day " (Shdbbath, f . 154, o. 2).
 
 26 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 There is no authority for the tradition that he was a secret Christian, 1 but we 
 see from the numerous notices of him in the Talmud, and from the sayings 
 there ascribed to him, that he was a man of exactly the character which we 
 should infer from the brief notice of him and of his sentiments in the Acts 
 of the Apostles. In both sources alike we see a humane, thoughtful, high- 
 minded, and religious man a man of sufficient culture to elevate him above 
 vulgar passions, and of sufficient wisdom to see, to state, and to act upon the 
 broad principles that hasty judgments are dangerously liable to error ; that 
 there is a strength and majesty in truth which needs no aid from pei-secu- 
 tion ; that a light from heaven falls upon the destinies of man, and that by 
 that light God " shows all things in the slow history of their ripening." 
 
 At the feet of this eminent Sanhedrist sat Saul of Tarsus in all pro- 
 bability for many years; 2 and though for a time the burning zeal of his 
 temperament may have carried him to excesses of intolerance in which he 
 was untrue to the best traditions of his school, yet, since the sunlight of the 
 grace of God ripened in his soul the latent seeds of all that was wise and 
 tender, we may believe that some of those germs of charity had been 
 implanted in his heart by his eminent teacher. So far from seeing any 
 improbability in the statement that St. Paul had been a scholar of Gamaliel, 
 it seems to me that it throws a flood of light on the character and opinions of 
 the Apostle. With the exception of Hillel, there is no one of the Jewish 
 Rabbis, so far as we see them in the light of history, whose virtues made him 
 better suited to be a teacher of a Saul, than Hillel's grandson. We must bear 
 in mind that the dark side of Pharisaism which is brought before us in the 
 Gospels the common and current Pharisaism, half hypocritical, half 
 mechanical, and wholly selfish, which justly incurred the blighting flash of 
 Christ's denunciation was not the only aspect which Pharisaism could wear. 
 When we speak of Pharisaism we mean obedience petrified into formalism, 
 religion degraded into ritual, morals cankered by casuistry; we mean the 
 triumph and perpetuity of all the worst and weakest elements in religious 
 party-spirit. But there were Pharisees and Pharisees. The New Testament 
 furnishes us with a favourable picture of the candour and wisdom of a 
 Nicodemus and a Gamaliel. In the Talmud, among many other stately 
 figures who walk in a peace and righteousness worthy of the race which 
 sprang from Abraham, we see the lovable and noble characters of a Hillol, of 
 a Simeon, of a Chaja, of a Juda "the Holy." It was when he thought of 
 such as these, that, even long after his conversion, Paul could exclaim before 
 the Sanhedrin with no sense of shame or contradiction " Men and brethren, 
 I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees." He would be the more able to make 
 this appeal because, at that moment, ho was expressly referring to the 
 
 1 Recogn. Clcni. i. 65; Phot. Cod. 171, p. 199; Thilo, Cod. Apocr. p. 501 (Meyer ad 
 Acts v. 34). 
 
 2 Acts xxii. 3. The Jewish Rabbis sat on lofty chairs, and their pupils sat at their 
 feet, either on the ground or on benches. There is no sufficient ground for the tradition 
 thwfc up till the time of Gamaliel's death it had been the custom for the pupils to stand. 
 (2 Kings ii. 3 ; iv. 38 ; Bab. Sanhedr. vii. 2 ; Biscoe, p. 77.)
 
 THE SCHOOL OF THK BA.BBL 27 
 
 resurrection of the dead, which has been too sweepingly characterised as M the 
 one doctrine which Paul the Apostle borrowed from Saul the Pharisee." 
 
 It is both interesting, and for the study of St. Paul's Epistles most 
 deeply important, to trace the influence of these years upon his character and 
 intellect. Much that ho learnt during early manhood continued to be, till the 
 last, an essential part of his knowledge and experience. To the day of his 
 death he neither denied nor underrated the advantages of the Jew ; and first 
 among those advantages he placed the possession of "the oracles of God." 1 
 He had begun the study of these Scriptures at the age of six, and to them, 
 and the elucidations of them which had been gathered during many centuries 
 in the schools of Judaism, he had devoted the most studious years of his life. 
 The effects of that study are more or less traceable in every Epistle which he 
 wrote ; they are specially remarkable hi those which, like the Epistle to the 
 Romans, were in whole or in part addressed to Churches in which Jewish 
 converts were numerous or predominant. 
 
 His profound knowledge of the Old Testament Scriptures shows how 
 great had been his familiarity with them from earliest childhood. From the 
 Pentateuch, from the Prophets, and above all from the Psalter, he not only 
 quotes repeatedly, advancing at each step of the argument from quotation to 
 quotation, as though without these his argument, which is often in reality 
 quite independent of them, would lack authority; but he also quotes, as is 
 evident, from memory, anil often into one brief quotation weaves the verbal 
 reminiscences of several passages. 2 Like all Hellenistic Jews he uses the 
 Greek version of the LXX., but he had an advantage over most Hellenists in 
 that knowledge of the original Hebrew which sometimes stands him in good 
 stead. Tet though he can refer to the original when occasion requires, the 
 LXX. was to him as much " the Bible " as our English version is to us ; and, 
 as is the case with many Christian writers, he knew it so well that his 
 sentences are constantly moulded by its rhythm, and his thoughts incessantly 
 coloured by its expressions. 
 
 And the controversial use which he makes of it is very remarkable. It 
 often seems at first sight to be wholly independent of the context. It often 
 seems to read between the lines. 3 It often seems to consider the mere words 
 of a writer as of conclusive authority entirely apart from their original 
 application. 4 It seems to regard the word and letter of Scripture as full of 
 divine mysterious oracles, which might not only be cited in matters of doctrine, 
 but even to illustrate the simplest matters of contemporary fact. 5 It attaches 
 consequences of the deepest importance to what an ordinary reader might 
 
 1 Rom. iii. 2. 
 
 E.g., Rom. i. 24, Iii. 6, iv. 17, is. 83, x. 18, xi. 8 ; 1 Cor. vi. 2, ix. 7, xv. 45 ; &o. 
 
 Rom. ii. 24, iii. 1018, ix. 15 ;1 Cor. x. 14 ; Gal. iv. 2431; &c. This is the 
 essence of the later Kabbala, with its Pardes namely, Pcsliat, " explanation ; " Remes, 
 "hint;" Derush, "homily;" and Sod, "mystery." Yet in St. Paul there is not a 
 trace of tke methods (Geneth) of Gem atria, Notarikon, or Themcurah, which the Jews 
 applied ve>*y early to Old Testament exegesis. I have fully explained these terms in a 
 paper on "Rabbinic Exegesis," Expositor, May, 1877. 
 
 4 1 Cor. xiv. 21 ; Rom. x. 69 ; 1 Cor. xv. 45. * See Rom. x. 1521.
 
 28 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 regard as a mere grammatical expression. 1 But if the general conception of 
 this style of argumentation was due to Paul's long training in Rabbinic 
 principles of exegesis, it should not be forgotten that while these principles 
 often modified the form of his expressions, they cannot in any single instance 
 be said to have furnished the essential matter of his thoughts. It was quite 
 inevitable that one who had undergone the elaborate training of a Rabbi one 
 who, to full manhood, had never dreamt that any training could be superior to 
 it would not instantly unlearn the reiterated lessons of so many years. Nor 
 was it in any way necessary to the interests of religious truth that he should 
 do so. The sort of traditional culture in the explanation of Scripture which 
 he learnt at the feet of Gamaliel was not only of extreme value in all his 
 controversies with the Jews, but also enriched his style, and lent fresh vivid- 
 ness to his arguments, without enfeebling his judgment or mystifying his 
 opinions. The ingenuity of the Jewish Rabbi never for one moment over- 
 powers the vigorous sense and illuminated intellect of the Christian teacher. 
 Although St. Paul's method of handling Scripture, undoubtedly, in its general 
 features, resembles and recalls the method which reigns throughout the 
 Talmud, yet the practical force, the inspired wisdom, the clear intuition, of 
 the great Apostle, preserve him from that extravagant abuse of numerical, 
 kabbalistic, esoteric, and impossibly inferential minutiae which make anything 
 mean anything from all attempt to emulate the remarkable exegetical feats 
 of those letter-worshipping Rabbis who prided themselves on suspending 
 dogmatic mountains by textual hairs. He shared, doubtless, in the views of 
 the Liter Jewish schools the Tanaim and Amoraim on the nature of 
 inspiration. These views, which we find also in Philo, made the words of 
 Scripture co-extensive and identical with the words of God, and in the 
 clumsy and feeble hands of the more fanatical Talmudists often attached to 
 the dead letter an importance which stifled or destroyed the living sense. 
 But as this extreme and mechanical literalism this claim to absolute in- 
 fallibility even in accidental details and passing allusions this superstitious 
 adoration of the letters and vocables of Scripture as though they were the 
 articulate vocables and immediate autograph of God finds no encouragement 
 in any part of Scripture, and very direct discouragement in more than one of 
 'the utterances of Christ, so there is not a single passage in which any 
 approach to it is dogmatically stated in the writings of St. Paul. 1 Nay, more 
 the very point of his specific difference from the Judseo- Christians was his 
 denial of the permanent validity of the entire scheme of legislation which it 
 i was the immediate object of the Pentateuch to record. If it be asserted 
 ithat St. Paul deals with the Old Testament in the manner of a Rabbi, let it 
 ibe said in answer that he uses it to emancipate the souls which Judaism 
 
 Gal. iii. 16. 
 
 2 2 Tim. iii. 16 is no exception ; even if 9<6inxv<rros be there regarded aa a predicate, 
 nothing would be more extravagant than to rest on that single adjective the vast hypo- 
 thesis of literal dictation (see infra, ad loc,). On this great subject of inspiration I have 
 stated what I believe to be the Catholic faith folly and clearly in the Bible Educator, 1, 
 190 sq.
 
 THE SCHOOL OF THS BABBX. 29 
 
 enslaved ; and thai he deduces from it, not the Kabbala and the Talmud " a 
 philosophy for dreamers and a code for mummies" 1 but the main ideas of 
 the Gospel of the grace of God. 
 
 It will be easy for any thoughtful and unprejudiced reader of St. Paul's 
 Epistles to verify and illustrate for himself the Apostle's use of Scripture. 
 He adopts the current mode of citation, but he ennobles and enlightens it. 2 
 That he did not consider the method universally applicable is clear from its 
 omission in those of his Epistles which were intended in the main for Gentile 
 Christians, 3 as also in his speeches to heathen assemblies. But to the Jews he 
 would naturally address a style of argument which was in entire accordance 
 with their own method of dialectics. Many of the truths which he 
 demonstrates by other considerations may have seemed to him to acquire 
 additional authority from their assonance with certain expressions of Scripture. 
 We cannot, indeed, be sure in some instances how far St. Paul meant his 
 quotation for an argument, and how far he used it as a mere illustrative 
 formula. Thus, we feel no hesitation in admitting the cogency of his proof 
 of the fact that both Jews and Gentiles were guilty in God's sight ; but we 
 should not consider the language of David about his enemies in the fourteenth 
 and fifty-third Psalms, still less his strong expressions " all " and " no, not 
 one," as adding any great additional force to the general argument. It is 
 probable that a Jew would have done so; and St. Paul, as a Jew trained in 
 this method of Scriptural application, may have done so too. But what has 
 been called his " inspired Targum " of the Old Testament does not bind us to 
 the mystic method of Old Testament commentary. As the Jews were more 
 likely to adopt any conclusion which was expressed for them in the words of 
 Scripture, St. Paul, having undergone the same training, naturally enwove 
 into his style though only when he wrote to them this particular method of 
 Scriptural illustration. To them an argument of this kind would be an 
 argumentum ex concessis. To us its argumentative force would be much 
 smaller, because it does not appeal to us, as to him and to his readers, with all 
 the force of familiar reasoning. So far from thinking this a subject for 
 regret, we may, on the contrary, be heartily thankful for an insight which 
 could give explicitness to deeply latent truths, and find in an observation of 
 minor importance, like that of Habakkuk, that " the soul of the proud man 
 is not upright, but the just man shall live by his steadfastness "* i.e., that 
 the Chaldeans should enjoy no stable prosperity, but that the Jews, here 
 ideally represented as " the upright man," should, because of their fidelity, 
 live secure the depth of power and meaning which we attach to that palmary 
 truth of the Pauline theology that "the just shall live by his faith,"* 
 
 Reuss, Th&ol. Ckrtt. i. 268 and 408421. 
 
 3 See Jowett, Romans, i. 353362. 
 
 * There are no Scriptural quotations in 1, 2 Thess., Phil., Col. 
 
 4 Hab. ii. 4. (Heb. tajiDMJ, by his trustworthiness.) See Lightfoot on. Gal. iii. 11, 
 and p. 149. 
 
 5 GaL iii. 11 ; Eom. L 17 ; also in Heb. x. 38. St. Paul omits the pov of the LXX,, 
 which is not in the Hebrew,
 
 30 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 A similar but more remarkable instance of this apparent subordination of 
 the historic context in the illustrative application of prophetic words is found 
 in 1 Cor. xiv. 21. St. Paul is there speaking of the gift of tongues, and 
 speaking of it with entire disparagement in comparison with the loftier gift 
 of prophecy, i.e., of impassioned and spiritual teaching. In support of this 
 disparaging estimate, and as a proof that the tongues, being mainly meant as 
 a sign to unbelievers, ought only to be used sparingly and under definite 
 limitations in the congregations of the faithful, he quotes from Isaiah xxviii. II 1 
 the verse which he does not in this instance borrow from the LXX. version 
 " With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people, and 
 yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord" The whole meaning 
 and context are, in the original, very interesting, and generally misunderstood. 
 The passage implies that since the drunken, shameless prieste and prophets 
 chose, in their hiccoughing scorn, to deride the manner and method of the 
 divine instruction which came to them, 2 God should address them in a wholly 
 different way, namely, by the Assyrians, who spake tongues which they could 
 not understand ; and yet even to that instruction the stern and unintelligible 
 utterance of foreign victors they should continue deaf. This passage, in a 
 manner quite alien from any which would be natural to us, St. Paul embodied 
 in a pre-eminently noble and able argument, as though it illustrated, if it did 
 not prove, his view as to the proper object and limitations of those soliloquies 
 of ecstatic spiritual emotion which were known as Glossolalia, or " the Gift of 
 Tongues." 
 
 One more instance, and that, perhaps, the most remarkable of all, will 
 enable us better to understand a peculiarity which was the natural result of 
 years of teaching. In Gal. iii. 16 he says, " Now the promises were spoken to 
 Abraham and to his seed. He saith not, AND TO SEEDS, as applying to 
 many, but, as applying to one, AND TO THY SEED who is Christ." Certainly 
 at first sight we should say that an argument of immense importance was 
 here founded on the use of the Hebrew word zero, hi the singular, 3 and its 
 representative the <rirtp/j.a of the LXX. ; and that the inference which St. Paul 
 deduces depends solely on the fact that the plural, zeraim (ffW/yiara), is not 
 used ; and that, therefore, the promise of Gen. xiii. 15 pointed from the first 
 to a special fulfilment in ONE of Abraham's descendants. This primd facie 
 view must, however, be erroneous, because it is inconceivable that St. Paul a 
 good Hebraist and a master of Hellenistic Greek was unaware that the plural 
 zeratm, as in 1 Sam. viii. 15, Dan i. 12, and the title of the Talmudic treatise, 
 could not by any possibility have been used in the original promise, because 
 it could only mean "various kinds of grain" exactly in the sense in which he 
 
 1 The quotation is Introduced with the formula, "It has been written in the Law," a 
 phrase which is sometimes applied to the entire Old Testament. 
 
 2 They ridiculed Isaiah's repetitions by saying they were all "bid and bid, bid and 
 bid, forbid and forbid, forbid and forbid," &c. (Tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav, kav la-kav, 
 Tear la-kav, &c., Heb.). (See an admirable paper on this passage by Rev. S. Cox, 
 Expositor, L p. 10L)
 
 THE SCHOOL OF THE KABM. 81 
 
 himself uses spermaia in 1 Cor. xv. 38 and that the Greek spervnaia, in the 
 sense of " offspring," would be nothing less than an impossible barbarism. 
 The argument, therefore if it bo an argument at all, and not what tho 
 Rabbis would have called a sod, or " mystery " does not, and cannot, turn, 
 as has been so unhesitatingly assumed, on the fact that sperma is a singular 
 noun, but on the fact that it 5s a collective noun, and was deliberately used 
 instead of "sons" or "children;" 1 and St. Paul declares that this collective 
 term was meant from the first to apply to Christ, as elsewhere he applies it 
 spiritually to the servants of Christ. In the interpretation, then, of this word, 
 St. Paul reads between the lines of the original, and is enabled to see in it 
 deep meanings which are the true, but not the primary ones. He does not 
 say at once that the promises to Abraham found in Christ as in the purpose 
 of God it had always been intended that they should find in Christ 2 their 
 highest and truest fulfilment; but, in a manner belonging peculiarly to the 
 Jewish style of exegesis, he illustrates this high truth by the use of a collective 
 noun in which he believes it to have been mystically foreshadowed. 3 
 
 This passage is admirably adapted to throw light on the Apostle's use of 
 the Old Testament. Rabbinic in form, it was free in spirit. Though he does 
 not disdain either Amoraic or Alexandrian methods of dealing with Scripture, 
 St. Paul never falls into the f ollios or extravagances of either. Treating the 
 letter of Scripture with intense respect, he yet made the literal sense of it bend 
 at will to the service of the spiritual consciousness. On the dead letter of tho 
 Urim, which recorded the names of lost tribes, he flashed a mystic ray, which 
 made them gleam forth into divine and hitherto undreamed-of oracles. The 
 actual words of the sacred writers became but as the wheels and wings of the 
 Cherubim, and whithersoever the Spirit went they went. Nothing is more 
 natural, nothing more interesting, in the hands of an inspired teacher 
 nothing is more valuable, than this mode of application. We have not 
 in St. Paul the frigid spirit of Philonian allegory which to a great 
 extent depreciated the original and historic sense of Scripttire, and was 
 chiefly bent on educing philosophic mysteries from its living page ; nor have 
 we a single instance of Gematria or Notarikon, of Atbash or Albam, of 
 Hillel's middoth or Akibha's method of hanging legal decisions on the horns 
 of letters. Into these unreal mysticisms and exegetical frivolities it was 
 impossible that a man should fall who was intensely earnest, and felt, in tho 
 vast mass of what he wrote, that he had the Spirit of the Lord. In no 
 single instance does he make one of these general quotations the demon- 
 strative basis of the point which he is endeavouring to impress. In every instance 
 
 1 See Lightfopt, ad loc., p. 139. 
 
 - As in Gen. iii. 15. The Jews could not deny the force of the argument, for they 
 interpreted Gen. iv. 25, &c., of the Messiah. But St. Jerome's remark, "Galatis, quoa 
 paulo ante stultos dbcerat, factus est stultus," as though the Apostle had purposely used 
 an " accommodation " argument, is founded on wrong principles. 
 
 8 The purely illustrative character of the reference seems to be clear from the 
 diif ereut, yet no less spiritualised, sense given to the text in Rom. ir. 13. 16, 18 j is. 8 ; 
 Gal. jii. 28, 29.
 
 32 .... THE LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 he states the solid argument on which he rests his conclusion, and only adduces 
 Scripture by way of sanction or support. And this is in exact accordance 
 with all that we know of his spiritual history of the genuineness of which 
 it affords an unsuspected confirmation. He had not arrived at any one of the 
 truths of his special gospel by the road of ratiocination. They came to him 
 with the flash of intuitive conviction at the miracle of his conversion, or in 
 the gradual process of subsequent psychological experience. We hear from 
 his own lips that he had not originally found these truths in Scripture, 
 or been led to them by inductive processes in the course of Scripture study. 
 He received them, as again and again he tells us, by revelation direct from 
 Christ. It was only when God had taught him the truth of them that he 
 became cognisant that they must be latent in the writings of the Old 
 Dispensation. When he was thus enlightened to see that they existed in 
 Scripture, he found that all Scripture was full of them. When he knew 
 that the treasure lay hid in the field, he bought the whole field, to become 
 its owner. When God had revealed to him the doctrine of justification by 
 faith, he saw as we may now see, but as none had seen before him that it 
 existed implicitly in the trustfulness of Abraham and the " life " and " faith '' 
 of Habakkuk. Given the right, nay, the necessity, to spiritualise the meaning 
 of the Scriptures and given the fact that this right was assumed and 
 practised by every teacher of the schools in which Paul had been trained and 
 to which his countrymen looked up, as it has been practised by every great 
 teacher since we then possess the key to all such passages as those to which 
 I have referred ; and we also see the cogency with which they would come 
 home to the minds of those for whom they were intended. In other words, 
 St. Paul, when speaking to Jews, was happily able to address them, as it were, 
 in their own dialect, and it is a dialect from which Gentiles also have deep 
 lessons to learn. 
 
 It is yet another instance of the same method when he points to the two 
 wives of Abraham as types of the Jewish and of the Christian covenant, 
 and in the struggles and jealousies of the two, ending in the ejection of Agar, 
 sees allegorically foreshadowed the triumph of the new covenant over the 
 old. In this allegory, by marvellous interchange, the physical descendants of 
 Sarah become, in a spiritual point of view, the descendants of Agar, and those 
 who were Agar's children become Sarah's true spiritual offspring. The 
 inhabitants of the Jerusalem that now is, though descended from Sarah and 
 Abraham, are foreshadowed for rejection under the type of the offspring of 
 Ishmael ; and the true children of Abraham and Sarah are those alone who 
 are so spiritually, but of whom the vast majority were not of the chosen seed. 
 And the proof of this if proof be in any case the right word for what 
 perhaps St. Paul himself may only have regarded as allegoric confirmation- 
 is found in Isaiah liv. 1, where the prophet, addressing the New Jerusalem 
 which is to rise out of the ashes of her Babylonian ruin, calls to her as to 
 a barren woman, and bids her to rejoice as having many more children 
 than she that hath a husband. The Jews become metamorphosed into th?
 
 THE SCHOOL OF THE EABBI. 33 
 
 descendants of Agar, the Gentiles into the seed of Abraham and heirs of the 
 Promise. 1 
 
 This very ranging in corresponding columns of type and antitype, or of 
 the actually existent and its ideal counterpart this Systoichia in which 
 Agar, Ishmael, the Old Covenant, the earthly Jerusalem, the unconverted 
 Jews, &c., in the one column, are respective counterparts of their spiritual 
 opposites, Sarah, Isaac, the New Covenant, the heavenly Jerusalem, the 
 Christian Church, &c., in the other column is in itself a Rabbinic method 
 of setting forth a series of conceptions, and is, therefore, another of the many 
 traces of the influence of Rabbinic training upon the mind of St. Paul. A 
 part of the system of the Rabbis was to regard the earth as 
 
 " But the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
 Each to the other like more than on earth is thought." 
 
 This notion was especially applied to everything connected with the Holy 
 People, and there was no event in the wanderings of the wilderness which 
 did not stand typically for matters of spiritual experience or heavenly hope. 8 
 This principle is expressly stated in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 8 
 where, in exemplification of it, not only is the manna made the type of the 
 bread of the Lord's Supper, but, by a much more remote analogy, the passing 
 through the waters of the Red Sea, and the being guided by the pillar of 
 cloud by day, is described as " being baptised unto Moses in the cloud and in 
 the sea," and is made a prefigurement of Christian baptism. 4 
 
 But although St. Paul was a Hebrew by virtue of his ancestry, and by 
 virtue of the language which he had learnt as his mother-tongue, and although 
 he would probably have rejected the appellation of " Hellenist," which is 
 indeed never applied to him, yet his very Hebraism had, in one most impor- 
 tant respect, and one which has very little attracted the attention of scholars, 
 an Hellenic bias and tinge. This is apparent in the fact which I have already 
 mentioned, that he was, or at any rate that he became, to a marked extent, 
 in the technical language of the Jewish schools, an Hagadist, not an Halachist. 5 
 It needs but a glance at the Mishna, and still more at the Gemara, to see that 
 
 1 Other specimens of exegesis accordant in result with the known views of the Rabbis 
 may be found in Rom. ix. 33 (compared with Is. via. 14, xxviii. 16 ; Luke ii. 34), since 
 the Eabbis applied both the passages referred to " the rock of offence," and " the 
 corner-stone " to the Messiah ; and in 1 Cor. ix. 9, where by a happy analogy (also 
 found in Philo, De Victimat Offer entibus, 1) the prohibition to muzzle the ox that 
 treadeth out the corn is applied to the duty of maintaining ministers (1 Cor. ix. 4, 11 ; 
 Eph. iv. 8). The expressions in Rom. v. 12 ; 1 Cor. xi. 10 ; 2 Cor. xi. 14 ; Gal. iii. 19, 
 iv. 29, find parallels in the Targums, &c. To these may be added various images and 
 expressions in 1 Cor. xv. 36 ; 2 Cor. xii. 2 ; 1 Thess. iv. 16. (See Immer, Neut. The I. 
 210 ; Krenkel, p. 218.) 
 
 8 "Quicquid evenit patribus slgnum flliis," &c. (Wetstein, and Schottgen ad 1 Cor. 
 x. 11). (See Wisd. xi., xvi. xviii.) 
 
 8 1 Cor. x. 6, TOVTO & Tvirot T)/O? rftvrj8ii<Ta*' On the manna (= 0cios Aoyo;), compare 
 Philo, De Leg. Alleg. iv. 56 ; on the rock (= <nxf>(<t TOV 0o), id. ii. 21. 
 
 4 So Greg. Naz. Orat. 39, p. 688, Jer. Ep. ad FaUol. and most commentatorB, fol- 
 lowed by the collect in our baptismal service, " figuring thereby thy holy baptism." But 
 observe that the typology is quite incidental, the moral lesson paramount (1 Cor. x. (J, 11). 
 
 * See Excursxu IV., fl St. Paul a Hagadirt."
 
 34 THE LIFE AND WORK OF 8T* PAUL. 
 
 the question which mainly occupied the thoughts and interests of the Pales- 
 tinian and Babylonian Rabbis, and which almost constituted the entire 
 education of their scholars, was the Halacha, or " rule ; '' and if we compare 
 the Talmud with the Midrashim, we see at once that some Jewish scholars 
 devoted themselves to the Hagada almost exclusively, and others to the 
 Halacha, and that the names frequent in the one region of Jewish literature 
 are rarely found in the other. The two classes of students despised each 
 other. The Hagadist despised the Halachist as a minute pedant, and was 
 despised in turn as an imaginative ignoramus. There was on the part of 
 some Babbis a jealous dislike of teaching the Hagadoth at all to any one who 
 had not gone through the laborious training of the Halacha. "I hold from 
 my ancestors," said R. Jonathan, in refusing to teach the Hagada to R. Samlai, 
 " that one ought not to teach the Hagada either to a Babylonian or to a 
 southern Palestinian, because they are arrogant and ignorant." The conse- 
 quences of the mutual dis-esteem in which each branch of students held the 
 other was that the Hagadists mainly occupied themselves with the Prophets, 
 and the Halachists with the Law. And hence the latter became more and 
 more Judaic, Pharisaic, Rabbinic. The seven rules of Hillel became the 
 thirteen rules of Ishmael, 1 and the thirty-three of Akibha, and by the inter- 
 vention of these rules almost anything might be added to or subtracted from 
 the veritable Law. 2 The letter of the Law thus lost its comparative simpli- 
 city in boundless complications, until the Talmud tells us how Akibha was 
 seen in a vision by the astonished Moses, drawing from every horn of every 
 letter whole bushels of decisions. 3 Meanwhile the Hagadists were deducing 
 from the utterances of the Prophets a spirit which almost amounted to con- 
 tempt for Levitical minntise ; * were developing the Messianic tradition, and 
 furnishing a powerful though often wholly unintentional assistance to the 
 logic of Christian exegesis. This was because the Hagadists were grasping 
 the spirit, while the Halachists were blindly groping amid the crumbled 
 fragments of the letter. It is not wonderful that the Jews got to be so jealous 
 of the Hagada, as betraying possible tendencies to the heresies of the minim - 
 i.e., the Christians that they imposed silence upon those who used certain 
 suspected hagadistic expressions, which in themselves were perfectly harmless. 
 " He who profanes holy things," says Rabbi Eliezer of Modin, in the PirJce 
 Abhoth, "who slights the festivals, who causes his neighbour to blush in 
 public, who breaks the covenant of Abraham, and discovers explanations of 
 the Law contrary to the Halacha, even if he knew the Law and his works 
 were good, would still lose his share in the life to come." 6 
 
 It is easy to understand from these interesting particulars that if the 
 Hagada and the Halacha were alike taught in the lecture-room of Gamaliel, 
 
 1 See Derenbourg, Palest, p. 397. 
 
 2 Even R. Tshmael, who snares with R. Akibha the title of Father of the World, 
 admits to having found three cases in which the Halacha was contrary to the letter of 
 the Pentateuch. It would not be difficult to discover very many more. 
 
 3 MenacMth, 29, 2. Isa. i. 1115; Iviii. 57; Jer. vii. 2L 
 * Pirke Abh6th, iii. 8 ; Gratz, ill 79,
 
 SAUL THE PHARISEE. 85 
 
 St. Paul, whatever may have been his original respect for and study of the 
 one, carried with him in mature years no trace of such studies, while ho by 
 no means despised the best parts of the other, and, illuminated by the Holy 
 Spirit of God, found in the training with which it had furnished him at least 
 an occasional germ, or illustration, of thoso Christian and Messianic argu- 
 ments which ho addressed with such consummate force alike to the rigid 
 Hebraists and the most bigoted Hellenists in after years. 1 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SAUL THE PHARISEE. 
 
 T&V irarpiKSiv /JLOV iropafi&ffswv. GAL. i. 14 ; ACTS xxii. 3. 
 
 Karh rty facpipf<rr<lT-r]v atptcriv TTJS i)/ji.erepa.s OpTjffKflas efoffa Qaptffdios. ACTS 
 rxvi. 5. 
 
 IP the gathered lore of the years between the ages of thirteen and thirty-three 
 has left, as it must inevitably have left, unmistakable traces on the pages of 
 St. Paul, how much more must this be the case with all the moral struggles, 
 all the spiritual experiences, all those inward battles which are not fought 
 with earthly weapons, through which he must have passed during the long 
 period in which " he lived a Pharisee " P 
 
 We know well the kind of life which lies hid behind that expression. We 
 know the minute and intense scrupulosity of Sabbath observance wasting 
 itself in all those aVhotli and toldoth those primary and derivative rules and 
 prohibitions, and inferences from rules and prohibitions, and combinations of 
 inferences from rides and prohibitions, and cases of casuistry and conscience 
 arising out of the infinite possible variety of circumstances to which those 
 combinations of inference might apply which had degraded the Sabbath 
 from " a delight, holy of the Lord and honourable," partly into an anxious and 
 pitiless burden, and partly into a network of contrivances hypocritically 
 designed, as it were, in the lowest spirit of heathenism, to cheat the Deity 
 with the mere semblance of accurate observance. 2 We know the carefulness 
 about the colour of fringes, and the tying of tassels, and the lawfulness of 
 meats and drinks. We know the tithings, at once troublesome and ludicrous, 
 of mint, anise, and cummin, and the serio-comic questions as to whether in 
 tithing the seed it was obligatory also to tithe the stalk. We know the double 
 fasts of the week, and the triple prayers of the day, and the triple visits to the 
 Temple. We know the elaborate strainings of the water and the wine, that 
 not even the carcase of an animalcula might defeat the energy of Levitical 
 anxiety. We know the constant rinsings and scourings of brazen cups and 
 
 1 See Derenbourg's Hist, de la Palestine cTaprtis les Thalmudt (ch. zrf. and xxiii.), 
 which seems to me to throw a flood of light on the views and early training of St. Paul. 
 8 See the rules about the mixtures (Erubhtn), Life of Christ, i. 486, fi. 472.
 
 36 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 pots and tables, carried to so absurd an extreme that, on the occasion of wash- 
 ing the golden candelabrum of the Temple, the Sadducees remarked that their 
 Pharisaic rivals would wash the Sun itself if they could get an opportunity. 
 We know the entire and laborious ablutions and bathings of the whole person, 
 with carefully tabulated ceremonies and normal gesticulations, not for the 
 laudable purpose of personal cleanliness, but for the nervously-strained 
 endeavour to avoid every possible and impossible chance of contracting cere- 
 monial uncleanness. We know how this notion of perfect Levitical purity 
 thrust itself with irritating recurrence into every aspect and relation of 
 ordinary life, and led to the scornful avoidance of the very contact and shadow 
 of fellow-beings, who might after all be purer and nobler than those who 
 would not touch them with the tassel of a garment's hem. We know the 
 obtrusive prayers, 1 the ostentatious almsgivings, 8 the broadened phylacteries, 3 
 the petty ritualisms, 4 the professorial arrogance, 5 the reckless proselytism, 8 
 the greedy avarice, 7 the haughty assertion of pre-eminence, 8 the ill-concealed 
 hypocrisy, 9 which were often hidden under this venerable assumption of 
 superior holiness. And we know all this quite as much, or more, from the 
 admiring records of the Talmud which devotes one whole treatise to hand- 
 washings, 10 and another to the proper method of killing a fowl, u and another to 
 the stalks of legumes 12 as from the reiterated "woes" of Christ's denuncia- 
 tion. 13 But we may be sure that these extremes and degeneracies of the Pharisaic 
 aim would be as grievous and displeasing to the youthful Saul as they were to 
 all the noblest Pharisees, and as they were to Christ Himself. Of the seven 
 kinds of Pharisees which the Talmud in various places enumerates, we may be 
 quite sure that Saul of Tarsus would neither be a " bleeding " Pharisee, nor a 
 "mortar" Pharisee, nor a "Shechemite" Pharisee, nor a "timid" Pharwee, 
 nor a "tumbling" Pharisee, nor a "painted" Pharisee at all; but that the 
 only class of Pharisee to which he, as a true and high-minded Israelite, would 
 have borne any shadow of resemblance, and that not in a spirit of self -content- 
 ment, but in a spirit of almost morbid and feverish anxiety to do all that 
 was commanded, would be the Tell-me-anything-more-to-do-and-I-will-do-it 
 Pharisee ! 14 
 
 And this type of character, which" bears no remote resemblance to that 
 of many of the devotees of the monastic life however erroneous it may be, 
 however bitter must be the pain by which it must be accompanied, 
 however deep the dissatisfaction which it must ultimately suffer is very 
 far from being necessarily ignoble. It is indeed based on the enormous 
 error that man can deserve heaven by care in external practices; that he 
 can win by quantitative goodness his entrance into the kingdom of God ; that 
 
 i Matt. vi. 5. Matt. vL 2. Matt, xxiii. 5 
 
 Mark vii. 4 & John vii. 49. Matt, xxiii. 15, 
 
 1 Luke xs. 47. Luke xviii. It Matt. xxii. 17. 
 
 w Yadayim. Ckolin. M Ozekin. 
 
 See Schottgen, Hor. Hebr. pp. 7, 160, 204. 
 
 14 Jcr. Berachtith, jx. 7, &o. See Life of Christ, vol p. 248, where these name* an 
 explained.
 
 SAUL THE PHARISBB. 3? 
 
 that kingdom is meat and drink, not righteousness and peace and joy in 
 believing. Occasionally, by some flash of sudden conviction, one or two of 
 the wisest Doctors of the Law seem to have had some glimmering of the 
 truth, that it is not by works of righteousness, but only by God's mercy, 
 that man is saved. But the normal and all but universal belief of the religious 
 party among the Jews was that, though of the 248 commands and 365 prohi- 
 bitions of the Mosaic Law some were " light " and some were " heavy," 1 yet 
 that to one and all alike not only in the spirit but in the letter not only 
 in the actual letter, but in the boundless inferences to which the letter might 
 lead when every grain of sense and moaning had been crushed out of it 
 under mountain loads of " decisions " a rigidly scrupulous obedience was due. 
 This was what God absolutely required. This, and this only, came up to the 
 true conception of the blameless righteousness of the Law. And how much 
 depended on it ! Nothing less than recovered freedom, recovered empire, 
 recovered pre-eminence among the nations ; nothing less than the restoration 
 of their national independence in all its perfectness, of their national worship 
 in all its splendour ; nothing less than the old fire upon the altar, the holy oil, 
 the sacred ark, the cloud of glory between the wings of the cherubim ; nothing 
 less, in short, than the final hopes which for many centuries they and their 
 fathers had most deeply cherished. If but one person could only for one day 
 keep the whole Law and not offend in one point nay, if but one person could 
 but keep that one point of the Law which affected the due observance of the 
 Sabbath then (so the Rabbis taught) the troubles of Israel would be ended, 
 and the Messiah at last would come. 2 
 
 And it was at nothing less than this that, with all the intense ardour of 
 his nature, Saul had aimed. It is doubtful whether at this period the utter 
 nullity of the Oral Law could have dawned upon him. It sometimes dawned 
 even on the Rabbis through the dense fogs of sophistry and self-importance, 
 and even on their lips we sometimes find the utterances of the Prophets 
 that humility and justice and mercy are better than sacrifice. " There was 
 a flute in the Temple," says the Talmud, "preserved from the days of 
 Moses ; it was smooth, thin, and formed of a reed. At the command of the 
 king it was overlaid with gold, which ruined its sweetness of tone until the 
 gold was taken away. There were also a cymbal and a mortar, which had 
 become injured in course of time, and were mended by workmen of Alex- 
 andria summoned by the wise men ; but their usefulness was so completely 
 destroyed by this process, that it was necessary to restore them to their 
 former condition." 3 Are not these things an allegory? Do they not imply 
 that by overlaying the written Law with what they called the gold, but what 
 
 1 See Life of Christ, ii. 239. All these distinctions were a part of the Seyyag, the 
 "hedge of the Law," which it was the one raison d'etre of Kabbinism to construct. The 
 object of all Jewish learning was to make a mishmereth ("ordinance," Lev. xviii. 30) to 
 God'u mishmereth, (Tebhamdth, f. 21, 1). 
 
 3 See Acts iii. 19, where 5rrs 3* is "in order that haply," not "when," as in E. V, 
 (Shabbath, f. 118, 6). 
 
 * EircAin, t. 10, 2.
 
 38 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 was in reality the dross and tinsel of tradition, the Rabbis had destroyed or 
 injured its beauty and usefulness ? But probably Saul had not realised this. 
 To him there was no distinction between the relative importance of the Written 
 and Oral, of the moral and ceremonial Law. To every precept and they 
 were countless obedience was due. If it could be done, he would do it. If 
 on him, on his accuracy of observance, depended the coming of the Mes- 
 siah, then the Messiah should come. Were others learned in all that con- 
 corned legal rectitude ? he would be yet more learned. Were others scrupu- 
 lous? he would be yet more scrupulous. Surely God had left man free? 1 
 Surely He would not have demanded obedience to the Law if that obedience 
 were not possible ! All things pointed to the close of one great aeon in the 
 world's history, and the dawn of another which should be the last. The very 
 heathen yearned for some deliverer, and felt that there could be no other end 
 to the physical misery and moral death which had spread itself over their 
 hollow societies. 2 Deep midnight was brooding alike over the chosen people 
 and the Gentile world. From the East should break forth a healing light, a 
 purifying flame. Let Israel be true, and God's promise would not fail. 
 
 And we know from his own statements that if external conformity were all 
 if obedience to the Law did not mean obedience in all kinds of mattei-s 
 which escaped all possibility of attention if avoidance of its prohibitions did 
 not involve avoidance in matters which evaded the reach of the human senses 
 then Saul was, touching the righteousness of the Law, blameless, having 
 lived in all good conscience towards God. 3 Had he put the question to the 
 Great Master, " What shall I do to be saved ? " or been bidden to " keep the 
 commandments," it is certain that he would have been able to reply with the 
 youthful ruler, " All these have I kept from my youth," and he might have 
 added " very much besides." And yet we trace in his Epistles how bitterly 
 he felt the hollowness of this outward obedience how awful and how burden- 
 some had been to him " the curse of the Law." Even moral obedience could 
 not silence the voice of the conscience, or satisfy the yearnings of the soul; 
 but these infinitesimal Levitisms, what could they do ? Tormenting questions 
 would again and again arise. Of what use was all this ? from what did the 
 necessity of it spring ? to what did the obedience to it lead ? Did God indeed 
 care for the exact size of a strip of parchment, or the particular number of 
 lines in the texts which were upon it, or the way in which the letters were 
 formed, or the shape of the box into which it was put, or the manner in which 
 that box was tied upon the forehead or the arm ? 4 Was it, indeed, a very im- 
 jortant matter whether "between the two evenings" meant, as the Samaritans 
 
 1 The Rabbis said, " Everything is in the hands of heaven, except the fear of heaven." 
 " All things are ordained by God, but a man's actions are his own. (Barclay, Talmud, 
 18.) 
 
 2 Virg. Ed. iv. ; Suet. Aug. 94 ; Vesp. 4. 
 
 2 Cor. xi. 22 ; Horn. xi. 1 ; Acts xxii. 3, xxiii. 1, 6. 
 
 4 I have adduced abundant illustrations from Rabbinic writers of the extravagant- 
 importance attached to minutiae in the construction of the two phylacteries of the hand 
 (.Tephtittn shd Yad) and of the head (Teph. skd Edsh), in the Exposityr, 1877, No.
 
 SAUL THE PHARISEE. 39 
 
 believed, between sunset and darkness, or, as the Pharisees asserted, between 
 the beginning and end of sunset ? Was it a matter worth the discussion of two 
 schools to decide whether an egg laid on a festival might or might not be 
 eaten P 1 Were all these things indeed, and in themselves, important ? And 
 even if they were, would it be errors as to those littlenesses that would really 
 kindle the wrath of a jealous God ? How did they contribute to the beauty of 
 holiness ? in what way did they tend to fill the soul with the mercy which was 
 better than sacrifice, or to educate it in that justice and humility, that patience 
 and purity, that peace and love, which, as some of the prophets had found grace 
 to see, were dearer to God than thousands of rams and ten thousands of rivers 
 of oil P And behind all these questions lay that yet deeper one which agitated 
 the schools of Jewish thought the question whether, after all, man could reach, 
 or with all his efforts must inevitably fail to reach, that standard of righteous- 
 ness which God and the Law required ? And if indeed he failed, what more 
 had the Law to say to him than to deliver its sentence of unreprieved condem- 
 nation and indiscriminate death ? 2 
 
 Moreover, was there not mingled with all this nominal adoration of the Law 
 a deeply-seated hypocrisy, so deep that it was in a great measure unconscious P 
 Even before the days of Christ the Rabbis had learnt the art of straining out 
 gnats and swallowing camels. They had long learnt to nullify what they pro- 
 fessed to defend. The ingenuity of Hillel was quite capable of getting rid of 
 any Mosaic regulation which had been found practically burdensome. Pharisees 
 and Sadducees alike had managed to set aside in their own favour, by the de- 
 vices of the " mixtures," all that was disagreeable to themselves in the Sabbath 
 scrupulosity. The fundamental institution of the Sabbatic year had been 
 stultified by the mere legal fiction of the prosbol. Teachers who were on the 
 high road to a casuistry which could construct " rules " out of every superfluous 
 particle had found it easy to win credit for ingenuity by elaborating prescrip- 
 tions to which Moses would have listened in mute astonishment. If there be 
 one thing more definitely laid down in the Law than another it is the unclean- 
 ness of creeping things, yet the Talmud assures us that " no one is appointed 
 a member of the Sanhedrin who does not possess sufficient ingenuity to prove 
 from the written Law that a creeping thing is ceremonially clean ;" 3 and that 
 there was an unimpeachable disciple at Jabne who could adduce one hundred 
 and fifty arguments in favour of the ceremonial cleanness of creeping things. 4 
 Sophistry like this was at work even in the days when the young student of 
 Tarsus sat at the feet of Gamaliel ; and can we imagine any period of his life 
 when he would not have been wearied by a system at once so meaningless, so 
 stringent, and so insincere P Could he fail to notice that they " hugely violated 
 what they trivially obeyed P" 
 
 We may see from St. Paul's own words that these years must have been 
 very troubled years. Under the dignified exterior of the Pharisee lay a wildly- 
 beating heart ; an anxious brain throbbed with terrible questionings under the 
 
 See Bltsah, I ad in. * Bom. x. 5 ; Gal. til. 10. Sankedr. f , 17, 1. 
 
 * ErubMn, f . 13, 2,
 
 40 THE LIFE AHD WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 broad phylactery. Saul as a Pharisee believed in eternity, he believed in the 
 resurrection, he believed in angel and spirit, in voices and appearances, in 
 dreaming dreams and seeing visions. But in all this struggle to achieve his 
 own righteousness this struggle so minutely tormenting, so revoltingly bur- 
 densome there seemed to be no hope, no help, no enlightenment, no satisfaction, 
 no nobility nothing but a possibly mitigated and. yet inevitable curse. God 
 seemed silent to him, and heaven closed. No vision dawned on his slumbering 
 senses, no voice sounded in his eager ear. The sense of sin oppressed him ; the 
 darkness of mystery hung over him; he was ever falling and falling, and no 
 hand was held out to help him ; he strove with all his soul to be obedient, and 
 he was obedient and yet the Messiah did not come. 
 
 The experience of Saul of Tarsus was the heartrending experience of all 
 who have looked for peace elsewhere than in the love of God. All that Luther 
 suffered at Erf urdt Saul must have suffered in Jerusalem ; and the record of 
 the early religious agonies and awakenment of the one is the best commentary 
 on the experience of the other. That the life of Saul was free from flagrant 
 transgressions we see from his own bold appeals to his continuous rectitude. 
 He was not a convert from godlessness or profligacy, like John Bunyan or 
 John Newton. He claims integrity when he is speaking of his life in the 
 aspect which it presented to his fellow-men, but he is vehement in self -accusa- 
 tion when he thinks of that life in the aspect which it presented to his God. 
 Ho found that no external legality could give him a clean heart, or put a right 
 spirit within him. He found that servile -obedience inspired no inward peace. 
 He must have yearned for some righteousness, could he but know of it, which 
 would be better than the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. The 
 Jewish doctors had imagined and had directed that if a man did not feel inclined 
 to do this or that, he should force himself to do it by a direct vow. " Yows," 
 says Rabbi AMbha, 1 are the enclosures of holiness." But Saul the Pharisee, 
 long before he became Paul the Apostle, must have proved to the very depth 
 the hollowness of this direction. Vows might be the enclosures of formal 
 practice ; they were not, and could not be, the schooling of the disobedient 
 soul ; they could not give calm to that place in the human being where meet the 
 two seas of good and evil impulse 2 to the heart, which is the battle-field on 
 which passionate desire clashes into collision with positive command. 
 
 Even when twenty years of weariness, and wandering, and struggle, and 
 Buffering, were over, we still catch in the Epistles of St. Paul the mournful 
 echoes of those days of stress and storm echoes as of the thunder when its 
 fury is over, and it is only sobbing far away among the distant hills. We 
 hear those echoes most of all in the ^Epistle to the Romans. We hear them 
 when he talks of " the curse of the law." We hear them when, in accents of 
 deep self-pity, he tells us of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit ; 
 between the law of sin in his members, and that law of God which, though 
 holy and just and good and ordained to life, he found to be unto death. In 
 
 Pirke AbMth, iiL 10. 
 * The Tetter tSbh and the Yetier ha-rd of the Talmud.
 
 SAUL THE PHARISEE. 41 
 
 the days, indeed, when he thus writes, he had at last found peace ; he had 
 wrung from the lessons of his life the hard experience that by the works of 
 the law no man can be justified in God's sight, but that, being justified by 
 faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And though, 
 gazing on his own personality, and seeing it disintegrated by 5 miserable 
 dualism, he still found a law within him which warred against that inward 
 delight which he felt in the law of God-^-though groaning in this body of 
 weakness, he feels like one who is imprisoned in a body of death, he can still, 
 in answer to the question, " Who shall deliver me ? " exclaim with a burst of 
 triumph, " I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." i But if the Apostle, 
 after he has found Christ, after he has learnt that " there is no condemnation 
 to them that are in Christ Jesus " 2 still felt the power and continuity of the 
 inferior law striving to degrade his life into that captivity to the law of sin 
 from which Christ had set him free, through what hours of mental anguish 
 must he not have passed when he knew of no other dealing of God with his 
 soul than the impossible, unsympathising, deathf ul commandment, " This do, 
 and thou shalt live ! " Could he " this do " ? And, if he could not, what 
 hope, what help ? "Was there any voice of pity among the thunders of Sinai ? 3 
 Could the mere blood of bulls and goats be any true propitiation for wilful 
 sins ? 
 
 But though we can see the mental anguish through which Saul passed hi 
 his days of Parisaism, yet over the events of that period a complete darkness 
 falls ; and there are only two questions, both of them deeply interesting, which 
 it may, perhaps, be in our power to answer. 
 
 1. The first is, Did Saul in those days ever see the Lord Jesus Christ P 
 
 At first sight we might suppose that the question was answered, and 
 answered affirmatively, in 1 Cor. ix. 1, where he asks, " Am I not an Apostle P 
 Have I not seen Jesus, our Lord ? " and still more in 2 Cor. v. 16, where he 
 eays, " Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth 
 know we Him no more." * 
 
 But a little closer examination of these passages will show that they do not 
 necessarily involve any such meaning. In the first of them, St. Paul cannot 
 possibly be alluding to any knowledge of Jesus before His crucifixion, because 
 such mere external sight, from the position of one who disbelieved in Him, so 
 far from being a confirmation of any claim to be an Apostle, would rather have 
 been a reason for rejecting such a claim. It can only apply to the appearance 
 
 1 See Bom. vl., vii., viil., passim. 
 
 2 Rom. viii. 1. The rest of this verse in our E. V. Is probably a gloss, or a repetition, 
 since it is not found in . B, C, D, F, G. 
 
 3 "That man that overtook you," said Christian, "was Moses. He spareth none, 
 neither knoweth he how to show mercy to them that transgress his law." (Pilgrim's 
 Progress.) 
 
 * tl icai eyvu>Ka.tJLtv. It is perfectly true thatcixoi (quamqiiam, "even though," wenn 
 auch) in classical writers though perhaps less markedly in St. Paul concedes a fact, 
 whereas <col el (etiam si, "even if,") puts an hypothesis ; but the explanation here turns, 
 not on the admitted force of the particles, but on what is meant by "knowing Ckriat 
 after the flesh." 
 3
 
 42 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of Christ to him on the way to Damascus, or to some similar and subsequent 
 revelation. 1 The meaning of the second passage is less obvious. St. Paul has 
 there been explaining the grounds of his Apostolate in the constraining love oi 
 Christ for man. He has shown how that love was manifested by His death 
 for all, and how the results of that death and resurrection are intended so 
 utterly to destroy the self-love of His children, so totally to possess and to 
 change their individuality, that " if any man be in Christ he is a new creation." 
 And the Christ of whom he is here speaking is the risen, glorified, triumphant 
 Christ, in whom all things are become new, because He has reconciled man to 
 God. Hence the Apostle will know no man, judge of no man, in his mere 
 human and earthly relations, but only in his union with their risen Lord. The 
 partisans who used, and far more probably abused, the name of James, to thrust 
 their squabbling Judaism even into the intercourse between a Paul and a 
 Peter, and who sowed the seeds of discord among the converts of the Churches 
 which St. Paul had founded, were constantly underrating the Apostolic 
 dignity of Paul, because he had not been an eye-witness of the human life of 
 Christ. The answer of the Apostle always was that he too knew Christ by an 
 immediate revelation, that " it had pleased God to reveal His Son in him that 
 he might preach Christ among the Gentiles." 8 The day had been when he had 
 known " Christ according to the flesh " not indeed by direct personal inter- 
 course with Him in the days of His earthly ministry, but by the view which 
 he and others had taken of Him. In his unconverted days he had regarded 
 Him as a mesith an impostor who deceived the people, or at the very best as 
 a teacher who deceived himself. And after his conversion he had not perhaps, 
 at first, fully learnt to apprehend the Plenitude of the glory of the risen Christ 
 as rising far above the conception of the Jewish Messiah. All this was past. 
 To apprehend by faith the glorified Son of God was a far more blessed 
 privilege than to have known a living Messiah by earthly intercourse. Even 
 if he had known Christ as a living man, that knowledge would have been less 
 near, less immediate, less intimate, less eternal, in its character, than the close- 
 ness of community wherewith he now lived and died in Him ; and although he 
 had known Him first only by false report, and then only with imperfect realisa- 
 tion as Jesus of Nazareth, the earthly and human conception had now passed 
 away, and been replaced by the true and spiritual belief. The Christ, there- 
 fore, whom now he knew was no " Christ after the flesh," no Christ in the 
 days of His flesh, no Christ in any earthly relations, but Christ sitting for ever 
 at the right hand of God. To have seen the Lord Jesus with the eyes was of 
 itself nothing it was nothing to boast of. Herod had seen Him, and Annas, 
 
 1 Of. Acts rviii. 9, zxii. 18 ; 2 Cor. xii. 1. The absence of such personal references to 
 Jesus in St. Paul's Epistles as we find in 1 Pet. ii. 21 sq., iii. 18 sq.; 1 John i. 1 confirms 
 this view (Ewald, Gesch. vi. 889). 
 
 2 Gal. i. 16. I cannot agree with Dr. Lightfoot (following Jerome, Erasmus, &c.)that 
 iv e/uol means " a revelation made through Paul to others," as in ver. 24, 1 Tim. i. 16, and 
 2 Cor. xiii. 3 ; because, as a friend points out, there is an exact parallelism of clauses 
 between i. 11, 12, and 13 17, and anwenAttyoi rbv vJbv avrov iv tfiol balances ii 
 
 li<rov XptoroO in ver 12,
 
 SAUL THE PHARISEE. 43 
 
 and Pilate, and many a coarse Jewish mendicant and m *"> f a brutal Roman 
 soldier. But to have seen Him with the eye of Faith to have spiritually 
 apprehended the glorified Redeemer that was indeed to be a Christian. 
 
 All the other passages which can at all be brought to bear on the question 
 support this view, and lead us to believe that St. Paul had either not seen at 
 all, or at the best barely seen, the Man Christ Jesus. Indeed, the question, 
 " Who art Thou, Lord ?" l preserved in all three narratives of his conversion, 
 seems distinctly to imply that the appearance of the Lord was unknown to 
 him, and this is a view which is confirmed by the allusion to the risen Christ 
 in 1 Cor. xv. St. Paul there says that to him, the least of the Apostles, and 
 not meet to be called an Apostle, Christ had appeared last of all, as to tho 
 abortive-born of the Apostolic family. 2 And, indeed, it is inconceivable that 
 Saul could in any real sense have seen Jesus in His lifetime. That ineffaceable 
 impression produced by His very aspect ; that unspeakable personal ascen- 
 dency, which awed His worst enemies and troubled tho hard conscience of His 
 Roman judge ; the ineffable charm and power in the words of Him who spake 
 as never man spake, could not have appealed to him in vain. We feel an 
 unalterable conviction, not only that, if Saul had seen Him, Paul would again 
 and again have referred to Him, but also that he would in that case have been 
 saved from the reminiscence which most of all tortured him in after days the 
 undeniable reproach that he had persecuted tho Church of God. If, indeed, 
 we could imagine that Saul had seen Christ, and, having seen Him, had looked 
 on Him only with the bitter hatred and simulated scorn of a Jerusalem 
 Pharisee, then wo may be certain that that Holy Face which looked into the 
 troubled dreams of Pilate's wife that the infinite sorrow in those eyes, of 
 which one glance broke the repentant heart of Peter would have recurred so 
 often and so heartrendingly to Paul's remembrance, that his sin in persecuting 
 the Christians would have assumed an aspect of tenfold aggravation, from the 
 thought that in destroying and imprisoning them he had yet more openly been 
 crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting Him to an open shame. The 
 intense impressibility of Paul's mind appears most remarkably in the effect 
 exercised upon him by the dying rapture of St. Stephen. The words of 
 Stephen, though listened to at the time with inward fury, not only lingered in 
 his memory, but produced an unmistakable influence on his writings. If this 
 were so with the speech of the youthful Hellenist, how infinitely more would 
 it have been so with the words which subdued into admiration even the alien 
 disposition of Pharisaic emissaries P Can we for a moment conceive that 
 Paul's Pharisaism would have lasted unconsumed amid the white lightnings of 
 that great and scathing denunciation which Christ uttered in the Temple in 
 the last week of His ministry, and three days before His death ? Had 
 St. Paul heard one of these hist discourses, had he seen one of those miracles, 
 had he mingled in one of those terrible and tragic scenes to which he must 
 
 1 Acts Lx. 5 (xxii. 8, xxvi. 15). There is not the shadow of probability in the notion of 
 Ewald, that St. Paul was the young man clad in ft sindOn, of Mark xiv, 52, 
 
 2 1 Cor. xv. 9.
 
 44 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 hard afterwards looked back as events the most momentous in the entire 
 course of human history, is there any one who can for a moment imagine that 
 no personal reminiscence of such scenes would be visible, even ever so faintly, 
 through the transparent medium of his writings ? 
 
 We may, then, regard it as certain that when the gloom fell at mid-day 
 over the awful sacrifice of Golgotha, when the people shouted their preference 
 for the murderous brigand, and yelled their execration of the Saviour whoso 
 day all the noblest and holiest of their fathers had longed to see, Saul was not 
 at Jerusalem. Where, then, was he ? It is impossible to answer the question 
 with any certainty. He may have been at Tarsus, which, even after his 
 conversion, he regarded as his home. 1 Or perhaps the explanation of his 
 absence may be seen in Gal. v. 11. He there represents himself as having 
 once been a preacher of circumcision. Now we know that one of the charac- 
 teristics of the then Pharisaism was an active zeal in winning proselytes. " Ye 
 compass sea and land," said Christ to them, in burning words, " to make one 
 proselyte ; and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of 
 Gehenna than yourselves." 2 The conversion which changed Paul's deepest 
 earlier convictions left unchanged the natural impulse of his temperament. 
 Why may not the same impetuous zeal, the same restless desire to be always 
 preaching some truth and doing some good work which marked him out as the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, 3 have worked in him also in these earlier days, and 
 made him, as he seems to imply, a missionary of Pharisaism P If so, he may 
 have been absent on some journey enjoined upon him by the party whose 
 servant, heart and soul, he was, during the brief visits to Jerusalem which 
 marked the three years' ministry of Christ on earth. 
 
 2. The other question which arises is, Was Saul married ? Had he the 
 support of some loving heart during the fiery struggles of his youth P Amid 
 the to-and-fro contentions of spirit which resulted from an imperfect and 
 unsatisfying creed, was there in the troubled sea of his life one little island 
 home -where he could find refuge from incessant thoughts ? 
 
 Little as we know of his domestic relations, little as he cared to mingle 
 more private interests with the great spiritual truths which occupy his soul, it 
 seems to me that we must answer this question in the affirmative. St. Paul, 
 who has been very freely charged with egotism, had not one particle of that 
 egotism which consists in attaching any importance to his personal surround- 
 ings. The circumstances of his individual life he would have looked on as 
 having no interest for any one but himself. When he speaks of himself he 
 does so always from one of two reasons from the necessity of maintaining 
 against detraction his apostolic authority, or from the desire to utilise for 
 others his remarkable experience. The things that happened to him, the 
 blessings and privations of his earthly condition, would have seemed matters 
 of supremo indifference, except in so far as they possessed a moral significance, 
 or had any bearing on the lessons which he desired to teach. 
 
 Acts ix. 30, xi 25 ; Gal. i. 21. * Matt. xxffl. 15. 
 
 GaL i. 16. (See Krenkel, p. 18.)
 
 SAUL THE FHAKISEE. 45 
 
 It is, then, only indirectly that we can expect to find an answer to the 
 question as to his marriage. If, indeed, be was a member of the Sanhedrin, 
 it follows that, by the Jewish requirements for that position, he must hav 
 been a married man. His official position will be examined hereafter ; but, 
 meanwhile, his marriage may be inferred as probable from passages in his 
 Epistles. In 1 Cor. ix. 5 he asks the Corinthians, " Have we not power to 
 lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other Apostles, and as the brethren of 
 the Lord, and Keplias P " This passage is inconclusive, though it asserts his 
 right both to marry, and to take a wife with him in his missionary journeys 
 if he thought it expedient. 1 But from 1 Cor. vii. 8 it seems a distinct inference 
 that he classed himself among widowers ; for, he says, " I say, therefore, to 
 the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide (pttvufftr) even 
 as I." That by " the unmarried " he here means " widowers " for which 
 there is no special Greek word seems clear, because he has been already 
 speaking, in the first seven verses of the chapter, to those who have never 
 been married. 2 To them he concedes, far more freely than to the others, the 
 privilege of marrying if they considered it conducive to godliness, though, 
 in the present state of things, he mentions his own personal predilection for 
 celibacy, in the case of all who had the grace of inward purity. And even 
 apart from the interpretation of this passage, the deep and fine insight of 
 Luther had drawn the conclusion that Paul knew by experience what marriage 
 was, from the wisdom and tenderness which characterise his remarks respect- 
 ing it. One who had never been married could hardly have written on the 
 subject as he has done, nor could he have shown the same profound sympathy 
 with the needs of all, and received from all the same ready confidence. To 
 derive any inference from the loving metaphors which ho draws from the 
 nurture of little children 3 would be more precarious. It is hardly possible 
 that Paul ever had a child who lived. Had this been the case, his natural 
 affection could hardly have denied itself some expression of the tender love 
 which flows out so freely towards his spiritual children. Timothy would not 
 have been so exclusively " his own true child " in the faith if he had had son 
 or daughter of his own. If we are right in the assumption that he was 
 married, it seems probable that it was for a short time only, and that his wife 
 had died. 
 
 But there is one more ground which has not, I think, been noticed, which 
 seems to me to render it extremely probable that Saul, before the time of his 
 
 1 The notion that the " true yokefellow M ( yvtjate (rv<Jvy) of Phil. iv. 3 has any bearing 
 on the question is an error as old as Clemens Alexandrinus. (See Strom, iii. 7 ; Ps. Ignat. 
 
 CM fhllad. 4, Os ITcrpovxtu Hov\ov mil rav oAAwi' a.wo<no\.iav r!av yafioif !>iii)(.T)<ro.vT<ov.) 
 
 2 If BO, Chaucer is mistaken when he says, "I wot wel the Apostle was amayd," i.e., 
 wapOfvot, Rev. xiv. 4 (Prologue to Wife of Bath's Tale). Ver. 7 does not militate against 
 this view, because there he is alluding, not to his condition, but to the grace of continence. 
 It is not true, as has been said, that early tradition was unanimous in saying that he had 
 never married. Tertullian (De Monogam. 3) and Jerome (Up. 22) says so ; but Origen 
 is doubtful, and Methodius (Conviv. 45), as well as Clemens Alex, and Ps. Ignatius (v, 
 tupra), says that he was a widower. 
 
 1 Cor. iii. 2, rii. 14, iv. 15 ; 1 Thew. ii. 7 ; T. 8,
 
 46 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 conversion, had been a married man. It is the extraordinary importance 
 attached by the majority of Jews in all ages to marriage as a moral duty, nay, 
 even a positive command, incumbent on every man. 1 The Mishna fixes the 
 age of marriage at eighteen, 3 and even seventeen was preferred. The Baby- 
 lonist Jews fixed it as early as fourteen. 8 Marriage is, in fact, the first of the 
 613 precepts. They derived the duty partly from the command of Gen. i. 28, 
 partly from allusions to early marriage in the Old Testament (Prov. ii. 17; 
 v. 18), and partly from allegorising explanations of passages like EccL xi. 6 ; 
 Job v. 24.* The Rabbis in all ages have laid it down as a stringent duty that 
 parents should marry their children young ; 6 and the one or two who, like 
 Ben Azai, theoretically placed on a higher level the duty of being more free 
 from incumbrance in order to study the Law, were exceptions to the almost 
 universal rule. But even these theorists were themselves married men. If 
 St. Paul had ever evinced the smallest sympathy with the views of the 
 Therapeutse and Essenes if his discountenancing of marriage, under certain 
 immediate conditions, had been tinged by any Gnostic fancies about its 
 essential inferiority we might have come to a different conclusion. But 
 he held no such views either before or after his conversion;* and certainly, 
 if he lived unmarried as a Jerusalem Pharisee, his case was entirely 
 exceptional. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ST. PETER AND THE FIRST PENTECOST. 
 
 Jiv T&V tmoffT&Kw, ncal <rr6fiM r&v fiaOrjr&r, Kal 
 CHRYS. In Joan. Horn. 88. 
 
 Herpes f] &px^l r ns opQo$otas, i ptyas TTJJ tKK\T\(rias ItpoipJivrris. Ps. CHH.YB. 
 Orat. Encom. 9. 
 
 WHATEVER may have been the cause of Saul's absence from Jerusalem during 
 the brief period of the ministry of Jesus, it is inevitable that, on his return, 
 he must have heard much respecting it. Tet all that he heard would be 
 exclusively from the point of view of the Pharisees, who had so bitterly 
 opposed ffis doctrines, and of the Sadducees, who had so basely brought 
 
 1 "A Jew who has no wife is not a man " (Gen. T. 2, Yebkam&h, f. 63, 1). 
 Pirke Abhdth, v. 21. 
 
 * God was supposed to curse all who at twenty were unmarried (Kidduskin, 29, 1 ; 
 80; Yebham6tk, G2, 63). (See Hamburger, Talmud. Worterb. s.v. Ehe, Verheirathung ; 
 Weill, La Morale du Judalsme, 49, seq.) The precept is inferred from "Ho called 
 their name man (sing.)," and is found in the Rabbinic digest Tur-Shulchcm Arucft, 
 
 * See Ecclus. vii. 25 ; xlii. 9 ; cf. 1 Oor. vii. 36. 
 
 8 Early marriages are to this day the curse of the Jews in Eastern countries. Some- 
 times girla are married at ten, boys at fourteen (Frankl, Jetos in East, ii. 18, 84). Not 
 long ago a Jewish girl at Jerusalem, aged fourteen, when asked in school why she was 
 sad, replied that she had been three times divorced. 
 
 * 1 Oor. rii. 9, 86; 1 Tim. iv. 3; v. 14.
 
 ST. PETER AND THE WEST PENTECOST. 47 
 
 about His death. But he would have abundant opportunities for seeing that 
 the Infant Church had not, as the Jews of Jerusalem had hoped, been extin- 
 guished by the murder of its founder. However much the news might fill 
 him with astonishment and indignation, he could not have been many days in 
 Jerusalem without receiving convincing proofs of the energy of what he then 
 regarded as a despicable sect. 
 
 Whence came this irresistible energy, this inextinguishable vitality ? The 
 answer to that question is the history of the Church and of the world. 
 
 For the death of Jesus had been followed by a succession of events, the 
 effects of which will be felt to the end of time events which, by a spiritual 
 power at once astounding and indisputable, transformed a timid handful of 
 ignorant and terror-stricken Apostles into teachers of unequalled grandeur, 
 who became in God's hands the instruments to regenerate the world. 
 
 The Resurrection of Christ had scattered every cloud from their saddened 
 souls. The despair which, for a moment, had followed the intense hope that 
 this was He who would redeem Israel, had been succeeded by a joyous and 
 unshaken conviction that Christ had risen from the dead. In the light of that 
 Resurrection, all Scripture, all history, all that they had seen and heard 
 during the ministry of Jesus, was illuminated and transfigured. And though 
 during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, the inter- 
 course held with them by their risen Lord was not continuous, but brief and 
 interrupted, 1 yet as St. Peter himself testifies, appealing, in confirmation of 
 his testimony, to the scattered Jews to whom His Epistle is addressed God 
 had begotten them again by the Resurrection unto a lively hope, to an inheri- 
 tance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. 2 But besides 
 this glorious truth, of which they felt themselves to be the chosen witnesses, 3 
 their Risen Lord had given them many promises and instructions, and spoken 
 to them about the things which concerned the Kingdom of God. In His last 
 address He had specially bidden them to stay in Jerusalem, and there await 
 the outpouring of the Spirit of which they had already heard. 4 That promise 
 was to be fulfilled to them, not only individually, but as a body, as a Church ; 
 and it was to be fulfilled in the same city in which they had witnessed His 
 uttermost humiliation. And they were assured that they should not have 
 long to wait. But though they knew that they should be baptised with the 
 Holy Ghost and with fire " not many days hence," yet, for the exorcise of their 
 faith and to keep them watchful, the exact time was not defined. 6 
 
 Then came the last walk towards Bethany, and that solemn parting on the 
 Mount of Olives, when their Lord was taken away from them, and " a cloud 
 
 1 Acts i. 3, iC ijufpiov Teo-a-apajcovra. oirravoufvo* avTot*. This is the only passage in 
 Scripture which tells us the interval which elapsed between the Resurrection and the 
 Ascension. 
 
 2 1 Pet. i. 3, 4. 
 
 Acts ii. 32 ; iii. 15 ; iv. 33 ; v. 32 : x. 40, 41 ; Luke xxiv. 48, &c. On this fact St. 
 Luke dwells repeatedly and emphatically. (See Meyer on Acts i. 22.) 
 
 4 Acts i. 4 ; Luke xxiv. 49. 
 
 * Chrys. ad loc. "Numerus dierum non definitus exercebat fidem apostolorum " 
 (Bengel). The reading !o>* 7% irvro<mj of D and the Sahidic version is a mere gloss.
 
 48 THE LIFE AND WORK OF 8*. PAUL. 
 
 received Him out of their sight." But even in His last discourse He had 
 rendered clear to them their position and their duties. When, with lingeringg 
 of old Messianic fancies, they had asked Him whether He would at that 
 time re-constitute 1 the kingdom for Israel, He had quenched such material 
 longings by telling them that it was not for them to know " the times or the 
 seasons," 2 which the Father placed in His own authority.* But though these 
 secrets of God were not to be revealed to them or to any living man, there was 
 a power which they should receive when the Holy Ghost had fallen upon 
 them a power to be witnesses to Christ, His sufferings, and His Resurrection, 
 first in the narrow limits of the Holy Land, then to all the world. 
 
 From the mountain slopes of Olivet they returned that Sabbath-day's 
 journey 4 to Jerusalem, and at once assembled in the upper chamber, 6 which 
 was so suitable a place for thoir early gatherings. It was one of those large 
 rooms under the flat roof of Jewish houses, which, for its privacy, was set 
 apart for religious purposes ; and in the poverty of these Galilaean Apostles, 
 we can scarcely doubt that it was the same room of which they had already 
 availed themselves for the Last Supper, and for those gatherings on the " first 
 day of the week," 6 at two of which Jesus had appeared to them. Hallowed 
 by these divine associations, it seems to have been the ordinary place of 
 sojourn of the Apostles during the days of expectation. 7 Here, at stated 
 hours of earnest prayer, they were joined by the mother of Jesus 8 and the 
 other holy women who had attended His ministry ; as well as by His brethren, 
 of whom one in particular 9 plays henceforth an important part in the history 
 of the Church. Hitherto these " brethren of the Lord " had scarcely been 
 numbered among those who believed in Christ, 10 or, if they had believed 
 in Him, it had only been in a secondary and material sense, as a human 
 Messiah. But now, as we might naturally conjecture, even apart from 
 tradition, they had been convinced and converted by " the power of His 
 Resurrection." Even in these earliest meetings of the whole Church of 
 Christ at Jerusalem it is interesting to see that, though the Apostles were 
 still Jews in their religion, with no other change as yet beyond the belief in 
 
 1 Acts i. 6, airoicaSurTaveit. f Acts i. 7, \p&vov* ij Kcupovt, "periods or crises." 
 
 * The E.Y. passes over the distinction between cov<ria here ana ivWfuc in the next 
 verse, and a neglect of this distinction has led Bengel and others to understand ovv v^Cu- 
 cm in the sense that it was not yet their prerogative to know these things ("quae 
 appstolorum nondom erat nosse" Beng.), but that it should be so hereafter. That 
 this, however, was not the error of our translators appears from their marginal gloss to 
 {vvofiic in ver. 8, "the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you." We shall see here- 
 after that St. Paul, in common with all the early Christians (1 Thess. iv. 16, 17 j 
 2 Thess. ii. 8; Rom. xiii. 12; 1 Cor. xvi. 22; Phil. iv. 5; 1 Pet. iv. 5; James v. 8; 
 Heb. x. 37), hoped for the near return of Christ to earth. 
 
 * 2,000 cubits, between five and six furlongs, the distance between the Tabernacle 
 and the farthest part of the camp (of. Numb. xxxv. 5). This is the only place in which 
 it is alluded to in the N.T. 
 
 6 Not "on upper room," aa in E.Y. It Is probably the rnVs?, or topmost room of tha 
 house, which is called ivuytov in Mark xiv. 15. 
 
 John xx. 19, 26. ^ Acts i. 13, rf V- *Tf^orr 5 T. ntrp^, K.T.A. 
 
 Here last mentioned In the N.T. Jamea. the Ixird'a brother 
 19 Matt. xiii. 46 ; xiL 65 ; Mark vi. 8; 1 Cor. rv. 7.
 
 
 
 . .1H '? ;*T.,
 
 BT. PETER AND THE FIBST PENTECOST. 49 
 
 Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, 1 they yet suffered the women 
 to meet with them in prayer, not in any separate court, as in the Temple 
 cervices, not with dividing partitions, as in the worship of the synagogue, 2 but 
 5n that equality of spiritual communion, which was to develop hereafter into 
 the glorious doctrine that among Christ's redeemed " there is neither Jew nor 
 Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male and female," but 
 that, in Christ Jesus, all are one. 8 
 
 During the ten days which elapsed between the Ascension and Pentecost, 
 it was among the earliest cares of the Apostles to fill up the vacancy which 
 had been caused in their number by the death of Judas. This was done at a 
 full conclave of the believers in Jerusalem, who, in the absence of many 
 of those five hundred to whom Christ had appeared in Galilee, numbered 
 about one hundred and twenty. The terrible circumstances of the traitor's 
 suicide, of which every varied and shuddering tradition was full of horror, had 
 'left upon their minds a deeper faith in God's immediate retribution upon guilt. 
 |He had fallen from his high charge by transgression, and had gone to his 
 ,own place.* That his place should be supplied appeared reasonable, both 
 'because Jesus Himself had appointed twelve Apostles the ideal number of 
 the tribes of Israel and also because Peter, and the Church generally, saw in 
 Judas the antitype of Ahitophel, and applying to him a passage of the 109th 
 Psalm, they wished, now that his habitation was desolate, that another should 
 +ftke his office. 5 The essential qualification for the new Apostle was that he 
 should have been a witness of the Resurrection, and should have companied 
 with the disciples all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among 
 them. The means taken for his appointment, being unique in the New 
 Testament, seem to result from the unique position of the Church during the 
 few days between the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Ghost. As 
 though they felt that the swift power of intuitive discernment was not yet 
 theirs, they selected two, Joseph Barsabbas, who in Gentile circles assumed 
 the common surname of Justus, and Matthias. 6 They then, in accordance 
 
 1 " The Church, so to speak, was but half born ; the other half was still in the womb 
 of the synagogue. The followers of Jesus were under the guidance of the Apostles, but 
 continued to acknowledge the authority of the chair of Moses in Jerusalem " (Dr. 
 Dollinger, First Age, p. 43). 
 
 2 Jos. Antt. xv. 11, 5 ; Philo, ii. 476. Gal. iii. 28. 
 
 4 Acts i. 25, eU TOV roTrov TOV ISiov (aZ. oucaiov). This profound and reverent euphemism 
 is one of the many traces of the reticence with which the early Church spoke of the 
 fate of those who had departed. The reticence is all the more remarkable if the word 
 " place " be meant to bear allusive reference to the same word in the earlier part of the 
 text, where the true reading is -rovov TTJ? iuueovias (A, B, C, D), not K^pov, as in E.V. 
 The origin of this striking expression may perhaps be the Rabbinic comments on Numb, 
 xrir. 25, where "Balaam went to his own place" is explained to mean " to Gehenna." 
 Cf . Judg. ix, 55, TO'po'j, and Targ. Eccles. vi. 6 ; v. Schottgen, p. 407 ; and cf. Clem. Rom 
 ad Cor. i. 5 ; Polyc. ad Phil. 9 ; Ignat. ad Magnes. 5 (Meyer). See too Dan. xii. 13. 
 
 5 Ps. xli. 9 ; cix. 8. The alteration of the T/X"y. airriov into ourov is a good illustration 
 of the free method of quotation and interpretation of the Old Testament, which is 
 universally adopted in the New. The 109th has been called the Iscariotic Psalm. 
 
 6 Of these nothing is known, unless it be true that they were among the Seventy 
 fEuseb. If. E. i. 12 ; Epiphan. Haer. i. 20); and that Joseph drank poison unharmed 
 (Fapias ap. Eueeb. H. E. iii. 39). On the uncertain derivation of Barsabbae (to in H, A,
 
 50 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 with Old Testament analogies 1 and Jewish custom, 2 prayed to God that Ho 
 would appoint 3 the one whom He chose. The names were written on 
 tablets and dropped into a vessel. The vessel was shaken, and the name of 
 Matthias leapt out. He was accordingly reckoned among the twelve 
 Apostles.* 
 
 We are told nothing further respecting the events of the ten days which 
 elapsed between the Ascension and Pentecost. With each of those days 
 the yearning hope, the keen expectation, must have grown more and more 
 intense, and most of all when the day of Pentecost had dawned. 6 It was tho 
 first day of the week, and tho fiftieth day after Nisan 16. The very circum- 
 stances of the day would add to the vividness of their feelings. The 
 Pentecost was not only one of the three great yearly feasts, and the Feast of 
 Harvest, but it came to be identified and quite rightly in Jewish conscious- 
 ness with the anniversary of the giving of the Law on Sinai. 6 The mere 
 fact that another solemn festival had come round, and that at the last 
 great festival their Lord had been crucified in the sight of the assembled 
 myriads who thronged to the Passover, would be sufficient on this solemn 
 morning to absorb their minds with that overwhelming anticipation which was 
 a forecast of a change in themselves and in the world's history of a new and 
 eternal consecration to the service of a new law and the work of a new 
 life. 
 
 It was early morning. Before "the third hour of the day" summoned 
 them to the Temple for morning prayer/ tho believers, some hundred and 
 twenty in number, were gathered once more, according to their custom, in the 
 upper room. It has been imagined by some that the great event of this first 
 Whit-Sunday must have taken place in the Temple. The word rendered 
 
 B, E), see Lightfoot, HOT. Hebr., ad loc. There is a Judas Barsabbas in Acts xv. 22. 
 Matthias is said to have been martyred (Niceph. ii. 60), and there were apocryphal 
 writings connected with his name (Euseb. H. E. lii. 29 ; Clem. Alex. Strom, ii. 163). 
 
 1 Numb. xxvi. 55, 56 ; Josh. vii. 14 ; 1 Sam. x. 20 ; Prov. xvi. 33. 8 Luke i. 9. 
 
 8 araStifov, " appoint, " not "show": Luke x. 1, /neri 5 TOVTO. oWSfifrv 6 Kvpiot , irtpovs, 
 ijSSofiTjKovra. The word is peculiar in the N.T. to St. Luke. For eft/u'fw, see Acts i. 2, 
 rots an-o^ToAoi* . . . . ofls efeAefaro. I need hardly notice the strange view that the 
 election of St. Matthias was a sheer mistake made before the gift of the Spirit, and that 
 Paul was in reality the destined twelfth Apostle ! (Stier, Reden d. Apost, i. 15. ) 
 
 * The method in which the lot was cast (see Lev. xvi. 8 ; Ezek. xxiv. 6) is not certain, 
 but the expression Kwxav, rather than tfiaXov jeA^pous avrofc i goes against the notion of their 
 casting dice as in Luke xxiii. 34. " The lot/eW on Matthias " is a common idiom in all 
 languages (Horn. II. v. 316 ; Od. E. 209 ; Ps. xxii. 18 ; Jon. i. 7, &c. ; ut cujusquc sors 
 exciderat ; Liv. xxi. 42). From the use of the word KArjpos in this passage, in ver. 17 and 
 in viii, 21, xxvi. 18, is probably derived the Latin clerus and our clergy, clerici, (cXJjpos = 
 TO ovanjfia r&v SIOKOVUV na.1 irpevpyrepiav, (Suid.) (Wordsworth, ad. loc.) 
 
 6 This is the obvious meaning of <rvfi7rAt)pov<rd<u, not ' ' was drawing near " (of. Eph. i. 
 10), or, "had passed." 
 
 6 It is true that this point is not adverted to by either Philo or Josephus. The in- 
 ference arises, however, so obviously from the comparison of Ex. xii. 2 ; xix. 1, that we 
 can hardly suppose that it was wholly missed. (See Schottgen, ad. loc.j, Jer. Ep. ad 
 Fabiolam, xii. ; Aug. c. Faustum, xxxii. 12 ; Maim on. Mor. Nevoch. iii. 41.) TheSimchath 
 Tkorah, or "Feast of the Joy of the Law," is kept on the last day of the Fast of 
 Tabernacles, when the last Haphtarah from the Pentateuch is read. 
 
 7 t.c., 9 o'clock in the morning (of. Luke xxiv. 53 ; Acts ii. 46 ; iii. 1).
 
 ST. PETEB AND THE FIRST PENTECOST, 51 
 
 " house" 1 might equally mean a " chamber," and is actually used by Josephus 
 of tho thirty small chambers which were attached to the sides of Solomon's 
 Temple, with thirty more above them. 2 But it is supremely improbable 
 that the poor and suspected disciples should have been able to command 
 tho use of such a room ; and further, it is certain that if, in the Herodian 
 temple, these rooms were no larger than those in the Temple of Solomon., 
 the size of even the lower ones would have been wholly inadequate for the 
 accommodation of so large a number. Tho meeting was probably one of those 
 holy and simple meala which were afterwards known among Christians as the 
 Agapce, or Love feasts. It need hardly be added that any moral significance 
 which might attach to the occurrence of the event in the Temple would be no 
 less striking if we think of the sign of a new era as having hallowed the 
 common street and the common dwelling-place ; as the visible inauguration of 
 the days in which neither on Zion nor on Gerizim alone were men to worship 
 the Father, but to worship Him everywhere in spirit and in truth. 8 
 
 It is this inward significance of the event which constitutes its sacredness 
 and importance. Its awfulness consists in its being the solemn beginning of 
 the new and final phase of God's dealings with mankind. To Abraham He 
 gave a promise which was the germ of a religion. When He called His people 
 from Egypt He gave them the Moral Law and that Levitical Law which was 
 to serve as a bulwark for the truths of the theocracy. During the two 
 thousand years of that Mosaic Dispensation the Tabernacle and the Temple 
 had been a visible sign of His presence. Then, for the brief periqd of the life 
 of Christ on earth, He had tabernacled among men, dwelling in a tent like ours 
 and of the same material. 4 That mortal body of Christ, in a sense far deeper 
 than could be true of any house built with hands, was a Temple of God. Last 
 of all, He who had given to mankind His Son to dwell among them, gave His 
 Spirit into their very hearts. More than this He could not give ; nearer than 
 this He could not be. Henceforth His Temple was to be the mortal body of 
 every baptised Christian, and His Spirit was to prefer 
 
 u Before all temples the upright heart and pure." 
 
 He who believes this in all the fulness of its meaning, he whose heart and 
 conscience bear witness to its truth, will consider in its true aspect the fulfil- 
 ment of Christ's promise in the effusion of His Spirit; and regarding the 
 outward wonder as the least marvellous part of the Day of Pentecost, will not, 
 as Neander says, be tempted to explain the greater by the less, or " consider 
 it strange that the most wonderful event in the inner life of mankind should 
 be accompanied by extraordinary outward appearances as sensible indications 
 of its existence." 6 
 
 Suddenly, while their hearts burned within them with such ardent zeal, and 
 glowed with suck enkindled hope suddenly on the rapt and expectant 
 
 i Acts a. 2, oW. Jos. Antt. viii 3, 2. * John iv. 2123. 
 
 * Archbishop Leighton, John i. 14, 6 Ayo; <rap eyVro KM i<rKri*u<Ttv iv ^if. 
 5 Neander, p. 3.
 
 52 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 assembly came the sign that they had desired the inspiration of Christ's 
 promised Presence in their hearts the baptism with the Holy Ghost and with 
 fire the transforming impulse of a Spirit and a Power from on high the 
 eternal proof to them, and through them, in unbroken succession, to all who 
 accept their word, that He who had been taken from them into heaven was 
 still with them, and would be with them always to the end of the world. 
 
 It came from heaven with the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, filling 
 the whole house where they were sitting, and with a semblance as of infolded 
 flame, 1 which, parting itself in every direction, 8 played like a tongue of 
 lambent light over the head of every one of them. It was not wind, but " a 
 sound as of wind in its rushing violence ; " it was not fire, but something 
 which seemed to them like quivering tongues of a flame which gleamed but 
 did not burn fit symbol of that Holy Spirit which, like the wind, bloweth 
 where it listeth, though we know not whence it cometh or whither it goeth ; 
 and, like the kindled fire of love, glowing on the holy altar of every faithful 
 heart, utters, not seldom, even from the stammering lips of ignorance, the 
 burning words of inspiration. 
 
 And that this first Pentecost marked an eternal moment in the destiny of 
 mankind, no reader of history will surely deny. Undoubtedly in every age 
 since then the sons of God have, to an extent unknown before, been taught by 
 the Spirit of God. Undoubtedly since then, to an extent unrealised before, we 
 may know that the Spirit of Christ dwelleth in us. Undoubtedly we may 
 enjoy a nearer sense of union with God in Christ than was accorded to the 
 saints of the Old Dispensation, and a thankful certainty that we see the days 
 which kings and prophets desired to see and did not see them, and hear the 
 truths which they desired to hear and did not hear them. And this New 
 Dispensation began henceforth in all its fulness. It was no exclusive 
 consecration to a separated priesthood, no isolated endowment of a narrow 
 Apostolate. It was the consecration of a whole Church its men, its women, 
 its children to be all of them " a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy 
 nation, a peculiar people ; " it waa an endowment, of which the full free offer 
 was meant ultimately to be extended to all mankind. Each one of that 
 hundred and twenty was not the exceptional recipient of a blessing and 
 witness of a revelation, but the forerunner and representative of myriads 
 more. And this miracle was not merely transient, but is continuously re- 
 newed. It is not a rushing sound and gleaming light, seen perhaps only for a 
 moment, but it is a living energy and an unceasing inspiration. It is not a 
 visible symbol to a gathered handful of human souls in the upper room of a 
 Jewish house, but a vivifying wind which shall henceforth breathe in all ages 
 of the world's history ; a tide of light which is rolling, and shall roll, from 
 
 1 Acts ii. 2, 3, wcrirep in/or)? . > *xr wvpbt. (Cf. Lake ill. 22, ua-el mpiOTtpav ', Ezek. i, 
 
 24; xliii. 2; 1 Kings six 11.) 
 
 2 yXiao-ai &ia l upi.6fi.ev<ii, not " cloven tongues," &s in the E.V., though this view of the 
 word is said to have determined the symbolic shape of the episcopal mitre. The 
 expression "tongue of lire" u found also in Isa. v. 24, but there it is a devouring 
 flame.
 
 BT. FETEB AND THE FIEST PENTECOST 53 
 
 ehore to shore until the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as tho 
 waters cover the sea. 
 
 And if this be the aspect under which it is regarded, the outward symbol 
 sinks into subordinate importance. They who hold the truths on which I 
 have been dwelling will not care to enter into the voluminous controversy as 
 to whether that which is described as audible and visible was so in seeming 
 only whether the something which sounded like wind, and the something 
 which gleamed like flame, 1 were external realities, or whether they were but 
 subjective impressions, so vivid as to be identified with the things themselves. 
 When the whole soul is filled with a spiritual light and a spiritual fire when 
 it seems to echo, as in the Jewish legend of the great Lawgiver, with the 
 music of other worlds when it is caught up into the third heaven and hoars 
 words which it is not possible for man to utter when, to the farthest horizon 
 of its consciousness, it seems as it were filled with the " rush of congregated 
 wings " when, to borrow the language of St. Augustine, the natural life is 
 dead, and the soul thrills, under the glow of spiritual illumination, with a life 
 which is supernatural what, to such a soul, is objective and what is subjective? 
 To such questions the only answer it cares to give is, " Whether in the body 
 or out of the body, I cannot tell. God knoweth." a 
 
 But when from these mysterious phenomena we turn to the effects wrought 
 by them in those for whom they were manifested, we are dealing with things 
 more capable of being defined. Here, however, it is necessary to distinguish 
 between the immediate result and the permanent inspiration. The former 
 astounded a multitude ; the hitter revived a world. The former led to an 
 immediate conversion ; the hitter is the power of a holy life. The former was 
 a new and amazing outburst of strange emotion ; the hitter was the sustaining 
 influence which enables the soul to soar from earth heavenwards in steady 
 flight on the double wings of Faith and Love. 
 
 Yet, though there be no manner of comparison between the real 
 importance of the transient phenomenon and the continuous result, it is 
 necessary to a true conception of the age of the Apostles that we should 
 understand what is told us of the former. " And they were all immediately 
 filled," it is said, "with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other 
 tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter." * 
 
 The primd facie aspect of the narrative whicft follows apart from the 
 analogy of other Scriptures has led to the belief that the outpouring of 
 the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was succeeded by an outburst of utterance, 
 in which a body of Galileans spoke a multitude of languages which they 
 had never learned j and this has led to the inference that throughout their 
 
 * Aots ii. 2, 3, Sxnrtp . . . ucrci. 
 
 1 " It did me much harm that I did not then know it was possible to see anything 
 otherwise than with the eyes of the body " (St. Teresa, Vida, vii. 11). 
 
 8 Acts ii. 4. XoAeiv, "to apeak," as distinguished from \iyav, "to say," points rather 
 to the actual articulations than to the thoughts which words convey ; an-tx&de'yyccrdac, 
 eloqui, implies a brief forcible utterance. Neither frpat nor yAwovat throw light on the 
 nature of the phenomena, except as referring to ISA, xxviii. 11,
 
 54 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 lives the Apostles possessed the power of speaking languages which they 
 had not acquired. 1 
 
 But if we examine other passages where the same phenomenon is alluded 
 to or discussed, they will show us that this view of the matter is at least 
 questionable. In Mark xvi. 17 waiving all argument as to the genuineness 
 of the passage the word itcuvds, " new," is omitted in several uncials and 
 versions; 5 but if retained, it goes against the common notion, for it points 
 to strange utterances, not to foreign languages. In the other places of 
 the Acts 3 where tho gift of the Spirit is alluded to, no hint is given 
 of the use of unknown languages. In fact, that view of the subject has 
 chiefly been stereotyped in the popular conception by the interpolation of 
 the word " unknown " in 1 Cor. xiv.* The glossolalia, or " speaking with 
 a tongue," is connected with "prophesying" that is, exalted preaching 
 and magnifying God. The sole passage by which wo can hope to under- 
 stand it is the section of the First Epistle to the Corinthians to which 
 I have just alluded. 6 It is impossible for any one to examine that section 
 carefully without being forced to the conclusion that, at Corinth at any 
 rate, the gift of tongues had not the least connexion with foreign languages. 
 Of such a knowledge, if this single passage of the Acts be not an exception, 
 there is not the shadow of a trace in Scripture. That this passage is not 
 an exception seems to be clear from the fact that St. Peter, in rebutting 
 the coarse insinuation that the phenomenon was the result of drunkenness, 
 does not so much as make the most passing allusion to an evidence so 
 unparalleled ; and that the passage of Joel of which he sees the fulfilment 
 in the outpouring of Pentecost, does not contain the remotest hint of 
 foreign languages. Hence the fancy that this was the immediate result 
 of Pentecost is unknown to the first two centuries, and only sprang up 
 when the true tradition had been obscured. The inference that the gift 
 of unlearnt languages was designed to help the Apostles in their future 
 preaching is one that unites a mass of misconceptions. In the first place, 
 such a gift would be quite alien to that law of God's Providence which 
 never bestows on man that which man can acquire by his own unaided 
 efforts. In the second place, owing to the universal dissemination at thac 
 time of Greek and Latin, there never was a period in which such a gif 
 
 -\ 
 
 1 Against this view (which, with the contrast with Babel. &o., is not found, I thinly 
 earlier than the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries), see Herder, Die Qabe rf. 
 Sprache ; Bunsen, Hippol. ii. 12 ; Ewald, Oesch. Isr. vi. 110 ; Neander, Planting, 13 
 14 ; De Wette, Einleit. 2737 ; Hilgenfeld, Einleit. 275 ; Reuss, Hist. Apost. 5055 ; 
 Olshausen, ad loc. ; De Pressense, Trois prem. Siicles, L 355 ; and almost every un 
 biassed modern commentator. Meyer (ad loc.) goes so far as to say that "the sudden 
 communication of the gift of speaking in foreign languages is neither logically possiblt 
 nor psychologically and morally conceivable." 
 
 3 0, L, A, Copt., Arm. Apart from these questions, the unlimited universality o'. 
 the promise leads us to believe that our Lord here, as elsewhere, is using the language 
 of spiritual metaphor. Many a great missionary and preacher has, in the highest 
 sense, spoken "with new tongues" who has yet found insuperable difficulty in the 
 acquisition of foreign languages. 
 
 3 x. 46 ; xix. 6 (cf. rf. 15). 1 Cor. xir. 4, 13, 14, 27. * 1 Cor. xii. -xiv. 33.
 
 ST. PETER AND THE FIRST PENTECOST. 55 
 
 would have been more absolutely needless. 1 In the third place, though 
 all other miracles of the New Testament found their continuance and 
 their analogies, for a time at any rate, after the death of the Apostles, 
 there is no existing allusion, or even early legend, which has presumed 
 the existence of this power.* In the fourth place, although Paul 'spoke 
 with a tongue' 3 more than all his converts, it is clear from the narrative 
 of what occurred at Lycaonia, that at a most crucial moment he did not 
 understand the Lycaonian dialect. In the fifth place, early Christian 
 tradition distinctly asserts that the Apostles did not possess a supernatural 
 knowledge of foreign tongues, since Papias tells us that Mark accompanied 
 St. Peter as an ' interpreter ' (fy/irjveur^s), and Jerome that Titus was useful 
 to St. Paul from his knowledge of Greek. 4 We are, therefore, forced to 
 look for some other aspect of the utterance of that inspiration which 
 accompanied the heavenly signs of Pentecost. The mistaken explanation 
 of it has sprung from taking too literally St. Luke's dramatic reproduction 
 of the vague murmurs of a throng, who mistook the nature of a gift of 
 which they witnessed the reality. I do not see how any thoughtful 
 student who has really considered the whole subject can avoid the con- 
 clusion of Neander, that "any foreign languages which were spoken on 
 this occasion were only something accidental, and not the essential element 
 of the language of the Spirit." 6 
 
 In ancient times especially before Origen there seems to have been 
 an impression that only one language was spoken, but that the miracle 
 consisted in each hearer imagining it to be his own native tongue. 6 The 
 explanation is remarkable as showing an early impression that the passage 
 had been misunderstood. The modern view, developed especially by 
 Schneckenburger (following St. Cyprian and Erasmus), is that the "tongue" 
 was, from its own force and significance, intelligible equally to all who 
 heard it. That such a thing is possible may be readily admitted, and it 
 derives some probability from many analogies in the history of the Church. 
 
 1 For instance, the whole multitude from fifteen countries which heard the Apostles 
 speak "in their own tongues" the wonderful worka of God, yet all understood the 
 speech which St. Peter addressed to them in Greek. Hence such a power of speaking 
 unlearnt foreign languages would have been a " Luxus-wunder " (Immer, Neut. Theol. 
 195). Far different was it with the true glossolaly, which in its controlled force involved 
 a spiritual power of stirring to its inmost depths the heart of unbelief. (1 Cor. xiv. 22. ) 
 
 - Middleton, Mirac. Powers, 120. The passage of Ironzeus (Haer. v. 6, 1) usually 
 quoted in favour of such a view, tells the other way, since the object of the irayroSarrai 
 
 yXlxrcrai is there explained to be TO. pv(ia TO>V ivSpu-auv ls fyavepbv ayciv. 
 
 3 1 Cor. xiv. 18, yluxTrn (N, A, D, E, F, G). 
 
 4 Papias, ap. Euseb. H. E. iii. 39 ; cf . Iren. iiL 1 ; interpres. Tert. adv. Marc. iv. 5. 
 
 8 Planting, 13, 14. I havo not touched on any modern analogies to these spiritual 
 manifestations, but agree with the view of Dr. DSllinger, who gays that they have 
 occurred " in a lower sphere, and without any miraculous endowment ... an unusual 
 phenomenon, but one completely within the range of natural operations, which the gift 
 of the Apostolic age came into to exalt and ennoble it " (First Age of Church, 315). 
 
 6 Greg. Nysa. DC Spir. Sanct. Bp. Martensen, Christl. Dogm. 381 ; Ovcrbeck, App., 
 p. 26, and many others. The often-repeated objection of Gregory of Nazdanzus (Orat. 
 xliv.) that this is to transfer the miracle to the hearers, has no weight whatever. The 
 effect on the hearers waa solely due to the power of the new spiritual " tongue."
 
 56 THE LIFE AND WOKX OF ST. PAUIu 
 
 The stories of St. Bernard, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Vincent Ferrer, 
 St. Louis Bertrand, St. Franeis Xavior, and others who are said to have 
 been endowed with the spiritual power of swaying the passions, kindling 
 the enthusiasm, or stirring the penitence of vast multitudes whom they 
 addressed in a language unintelligible to the majority of the hearers, are so 
 far from being inventions, that any one who has been present at the speech 
 of a great orator, though beyond the range of his voice, can readily under- 
 stand the nature and the intensity of the effect produced. 1 But neither of 
 these theories taken alone seems adequate to account for the language used 
 by St. Peter and St. Paul. Almost all the theories about the glossolali* 
 are too partial. The true view can only be discovered by a combination of 
 them. The belief that languages were used which were unknown, or only 
 partially known, or which had only been previously known to the speaker ; 
 that the tongue was a mystic, exalted, poetic, unusual style of phraseology 
 and utterance ; 2 that it was a dithyrambic outpouring of strange and 
 rhythmic praise; that it was the impassioned use of ejaculatory words 
 and sentences of Hebrew Scripture; that it was a wild, unintelligible, 
 inarticulate succession of sounds, which either conveyed no impression to 
 the ordinary hearer, or could only be interpreted by one whose special 
 gift it was to understand the rapt and ecstatic strain none of these views 
 is correct separately, all may have some elements of truth in their combina- 
 tion. This is the moaning of St. Paul's expression "kinds of tongues." 
 If we assume, as must be assumed, that the glossolalia at Corinth and 
 elsewhere was identical with the glossolalia at Pentecost, then we must 
 interpret the narrative of St. Luke by the full and earnest discussion of 
 the subject written, be it remembered, at a far earlier period, and in 
 immediate contact with, and even experience of, the manifestation by 
 St. Paul. That the glossolaly at Corinth was not a speaking in foreign 
 languages is too clear to need proof. St. Paul in speaking of it uses the 
 analogies of the clanging of a cymbal, the booming of a gong, 8 the in- 
 distinct blare of a trumpet, 4 the tuneless strains of flute or harp. 6 We 
 learn that, apart from interpretation, it was not for the edification of any 
 but the speaker; 6 that even the speaker did not always understand it; 7 that 
 it was sporadic in its recurrences; 8 that it was excited, inarticulate, 
 
 1 See Chaptert on Language, p. 63 ; Marsh, Lect. on Lang. 486488 ; Oic. de Orat. 
 iii. 216. 
 
 2 rAw(r<ro sometimes means " an unusual expression " (Arist. Khet. iii. 2, 14). Of. our 
 " gloss," " glossology." See especially Bleek, Stud, u Krit. 1829. " Linguam ease cum 
 quis loquatur obscuras et mysticas significationes " (Aug. de Gen. ad litt. xii. 8). 
 
 3 1 Cor. xiii. 1| x aA *" ^X U3V > teSpjtukap! aAaAaoi>. 
 
 4 xiv. 8, iav aS-n^ov 4>*>ci]K crdAirtyf . St. Chrysostom uses language equally disparaging 
 of analogous outbreaks in Constantinople (Horn, in Pi. vi. 12; gee Dr, Plump tve'a 
 interesting article in Smith's Diet. iii. 1560). 
 
 5 xiv. 7,0/twc TO. aifjv\a. ^navi\v SiSovTo, K.T.X., cap 5ia<JToAr)i> rot? <f>0dyyon fxij &<f- 
 
 ' xiv. 2, OVK ai-0pa.iro \a\el. 4, cavrbf olKoSontl. Of; 11. The proper meaning of the 
 words AaAnv, yAuacra, <j,uv'i], all point in this direction, In St. Luke's phraseology the 
 word for a language is not yAilero-a, b 
 
 7 xiv. 19. 8 xiv. 27.
 
 BT. P2TEB AND THE FIEST PENTECOST. 57 
 
 astonishing, 1 intended as a sign to unbelievers rather than as an aid to 
 believers, but even on unbelievers liable, when not under due regulation, 
 to leave an impression of madness ; a lastly, that, though controllable by 
 all who were truly and nobly under its influence, it often led to spurious 
 and disorderly outbreaks. 3 Any one who fairly ponders these indications 
 can hardly doubt that, when the consciousness of the new power came over 
 the assembled disciples, they did not speak as men ordinarily speak. The 
 voice they uttered was awful in its range, in its tone, in its modulations, 
 in its startling, penetrating, almost appalling power; 4 the words they spoke 
 were exalted, intense, passionate, full of mystic significance ; the language 
 they used was not their ordinary and familiar tongue, but was Hebrew, or 
 Greek, or Latin, or Aramaic, or Persian, or Arabic, as some overpowering 
 and unconscious impulse of the moment might direct ; the burden of their 
 thoughts was the ejaculation of rapture, of amazement, of thanksgiving, 
 of prayer, of impassioned psalm, of dithyrambic hymn ; their utterances 
 were addressed not to each other, but were like an inspired soliloquy of the 
 soul with God. And among these strange sounds of many voices, all 
 simultaneously raised in the accordance of ecstatic devotion, 6 there were 
 some which none could rightly interpret, which rang on the air like the 
 voice of barbarous languages, and which, except to those who uttered them, 
 and who in uttering them felt carried out of themselves, conveyed no 
 definite significance beyond the fact that they were reverberations of one 
 and the same ecstasy echoes waked in different consciousnesses by the 
 same immense emotion. Such as we gather from the notices of St. Luke, 
 St. Peter, and St. Paul was the " Gift of Tongues." And thus regarded, 
 its strict accordance with the known laws of psychology 8 furnishes us with 
 a fresh proof of the truthfulness of the history, and shows us that no sign 
 of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit could have been more natural, more 
 evidential, or more intense. 
 
 The city of Jerusalem at that moment was crowded by a miscellaneous 
 multitude of Jews and Proselytes. It was inevitable that the awful sound 7 
 should arrest the astonished attention, first of one, then of more, lastly of a 
 multitude of the inhabitants and passers-by. The age an age which was in 
 
 1 xlv. 2. * xiv. 23, OVK ipovffw ort paii>ta9* ; 
 
 xiv. 9, 11, 17, 20-23, 2628, 33, 40. 
 
 4 So we infer from St. Paul's allusions, which find illustration in modern analogies. 
 Archd. Stopford describes the " unknown +ongue" of the Irish Revivalists in 1859 as " a 
 sound such as I never heard before, unearthly and unaccountable." 
 
 ' This simultaneity of utterance by people under the same impressions is recorded 
 several times in the Acts of the Apostles. It was evidently analogous to, though not 
 perhaps identical with " glossolalia the eloquence of religious transport thrilling with 
 rapture and conviction. 
 
 6 Compare in the Old Testament the cases of Saul, &c. (1 Sam. x. 11 ; xviiL 10 ; xix. 
 23, 24). " C'est le langage brulant et mysterieux de 1'extase " (De PressensS, L 355). 
 
 * In Acts ii. 6 the words ytvo^ivif tt r>> 4>urrjt Tat/rip do not mean (as in the K V.) 
 "now when this was noised abroad," but "when this sound occurred" (cf. J5x* vcr - 2; 
 John iii. 8 ; Kev. ii, 1). It is evidently an allusion to the Bath-kol. (See Herzog, 
 JUal-Encyd., t.v.)
 
 58 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 keen expectation of some divine event; the day the great anniversary of 
 Pentecost and of Sinai ; the hour when people were already beginning to 
 throng the streets on their way to the Temple service would all tend to swell 
 the numbers, and intensify the feelings of the crowd. Up the steps which led 
 outside the house to the " upper room " they would first begin to make their 
 way in twos and threes, and then to press in larger numbers, until their 
 eagerness, their obtrusion, their exclamations of fear, surprise, admiration, 
 insult, could not fail to break the spell. The Church for the first time found 
 itself face to face with the world a world loud in its expressions of perplexity, 
 through which broke the open language of hate and scorn. That which fixed 
 the attention of all the better portion of the crowd was the fact that these 
 " Galilseans " were magnifying, in strange tongues, the mercies and power of 
 God. But most of the spectators were filled with contempt at what seemed 
 to them to be a wild fanaticism. "These men," they jeeringly exclaimed, 
 " have been indulging too freely in the festivities of Pentecost. 1 They are 
 drunk with sweet wine." 8 
 
 It was the prevalence of this derisive comment which forced upon the 
 Apostles the necessity of immediate explanation. 3 "The spirits of the 
 prophets," as St. Paul says, with that masculine practical wisdom which in 
 him is found in such rare combination with burning enthusiasm, " are subject 
 unto the prophets."* The Apostles were at once able not only to calm their 
 own exaltation, but also, even at this intense moment, to hush into absolute 
 silence the overmastering emotion of their brethren. They saw well that it 
 would be fatal to their position as witnesses to a divine revelation if anything 
 in their worship could, however insultingly, be represented as the orgiastic 
 exhibition of undisciplined fervour. It was a duty to prove from the very 
 first that the Christian disciple offered no analogy to the fanatical fakeer. 
 Clearing the room of all intruders, making a space for themselves at the top 
 of the steps, where they could speak in the name of the brethren to the surging 
 throng who filled the sheet, the Apostles came forward, and Peter 
 assumed the office ci. thoir spokesman. Standing in an attitude, and 
 speaking in a tone, w"lich commanded attention, 5 he first begged for serious 
 attention, and ^olil the crowd that their coarse suspicion was refuted at once 
 by the fact that it was but nine o'clock. He then proceeded to explain to them 
 that this was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel that, among other signs 
 and portents of the last days, there should be a special effusion of the Spirit of 
 God, like that of which they had witnessed the manifestations. It was the 
 object of the remainder of his speech to prove that this Spirit had been 
 
 1 See Deut. xvi. 11. 
 
 z yXtuKos cannot be " new wine," as in E.V., for Pentecost fell In June, and the 
 vintage was in August. 
 
 3 Acts ii. 15, is vjuts viroAaji/Jowe. There is a slight excuse for this insult, since 
 spiritual emotion may produce effects similar to those which result from intoxication (Eph. 
 v. 18; 1 Sam. x. 10, 11 ; xviii. 10 Heh., "raved"). Compare the German expression, 
 " Ein Gott-trunkener Mann." 
 
 4 1 Cor. ziv. 32. * Acts ii. 14, <rrafl*k , . .
 
 EARLY PERSECUTIONS. 59 
 
 outpoured by that same Jesus of Nazareth 1 whom they had nailed to the cross, 
 but whose resurrection aud deliverance from the throes of death were fore- 
 shadowed in the Psalms of His glorious ancestor. 
 
 The power with which this speech came home to the minds of the hearers ; 
 the force aud fearlessness with which it was delivered by one who, not two 
 months before, had been frightened, by the mere question of a curious girl, 
 into the denial of his Lord ; the insight into Scripture which it evinced in men 
 who so recently had shown themselves but ' fools and slow of heart ' to believe 
 all that the prophets had spoken concerning Christ ; 2 the three thousand who 
 were at once baptised into a profession of the new faith were themselves the 
 most convincing proofs proofs even more convincing than rushing wind, and 
 strange tongues, and lambent flames that now indeed the Promise of the 
 Paraclete had been fulfilled, and that a new ceem had begun in God's dealings 
 with the world. 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 
 EABLY PERSECUTIONS. 
 
 " It fills the Church of God ; it fillB 
 
 The sinful world around ; 
 Only in stubborn hearts and wills 
 No place for it is found." KEBLE. 
 
 THE life of these early Christians was the poetic childhood of the Church in 
 her earliest innocence. It was marked by simplicity, by gladness, by worship, 
 by brotherhood. At home, and in their place of meeting, their lives were a 
 perpetual prayer, their meals a perpetual love-feast and a perpetual eucharist. 
 In the Temple they attended the public services with unanimous zeaL In the 
 first impulses of fraternal joy many sold their possessions to contribute to a 
 common stock. The numbers of the little community increased daily, and the 
 mass of the people looked on them not only with tolerance, but with admira- 
 tion and esteem. 
 
 The events which followed all tended at first to strengthen their position. 
 The healing of the cripple in Solomon's porch; the bold speech of Peter 
 afterwards ; the unshaken constancy with which Peter and John faced the fury 
 of the Sadducees ; the manner in which all the disciples accepted and even 
 exulted in persecution, if it came in the fulfilment of their duties ; 3 the power 
 
 1 Acts ii. 22, Naupaiof , the Galilzean form of Naopato. 2 Luke xxiv. 25. 
 
 It is a very interesting fact that on the first summons of Peter and John before the 
 Hierarchs, they were dismissed, with threats, indeed, and warnings, but unpunished, 
 because the Council became convinced (KaroAo^djuci/oi ) that they were "unlearned and 
 ignorant men " (Acts iv. 13). The words, however, convey too contemptuous a notion to 
 English readers. 'Aypa^aroi simply means that their knowledge of Jewish culture waa 
 confined to the Holy Scriptures ; iStuTcu, that they had never studied in rabbinic schools. 
 The word Htdioi (^(unj?) occurs frequently in the Talmud, and expresses a position far
 
 60 SHE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 with which they witnessed to the resurrection oi their Lord 5 the beautiful 
 spectacle of their unanimity ; the awful suddenness with which Ananias and 
 Sapphira had been stricken down ; the signs and wonders which were wrought 
 by the power of faith ; the zeal and devotion which marked their gatherings 
 in Solomon's porch, caused a rapid advance in the numbers and position of the 
 Christian brothers. As their influence increased, the hierarchic clique, which 
 at that time governed the body which still called itself the Sanhedrin, grew 
 more and more alanaed. In spite of the populace, whose sympathy made it 
 dangerous at that time to meddle with the followers of Jesus, they at last sum- 
 moned the two leading Apostles before a solemn conclave of the Sanhedrin 
 and senate. 1 Probably, as at the earlier session, the whole priestly party were 
 there the crafty Annas, the worldly Caiaphas, 2 the rich, unscrupulous, money- 
 loving body of Kamhiths, and Phabis, and Kantheras, and Boethusim, 3 the 
 Pharisaic doctors of the law, with Gamaliel at their head ; John, perhaps the 
 celebrated Jphanan Ben Zakkai; 4 Alexander, perhaps the wealthy brother of 
 the learned Philo; 6 the same body who had been present at those secret, 
 guilty, tumultuous, illegal meetings in which they handed over the Lord Jesus 
 to their Roman executioners were again assembled, but now with something 
 of misgiving and terror, to make one more supreme effort to stamp out the 
 Galilaean heresy. 
 
 The Apostles, when first brought before the Sanhedrin, had been arrested 
 in the evening by the Captain of the Temple, and had been released with 
 strong threats, partly because the Sadducees affected to despise ^ them, but still 
 more because they did not know how to gainsay the miracle of the healing of 
 the cripple. The Apostles had then openly declared that they should be 
 compelled by the law of a higher duty to disregard these threats, and they 
 had continued to teach to increasing thousands that doctrine of the resurrec- 
 tion which filled the Sadducees with the greatest jealousy. It was impossible 
 to leave them unmolested in their career, and by the High Priest's order they 
 were thrust into prison. The Sanhedrin met at dawn to try them ; but when 
 they sent for them to the prison they found that the Apostles were not there, 
 but that, delivered by " an angel of the Lord," they were calmly teaching in 
 the Temple. In the deepest perplexity, the Sanhedrists once more despatched 
 
 superior to that of the am haarcts. The lied lot is one who, though not a frequenter of 
 the schools, still pays deference to the authority of the Rabbis ; the am-huarets is one who 
 hates and despises that authority. Hillel waa distinguished for his forbearing condescen- 
 sion towards the ignorance of Hcdiots (Babha Meteia, f. 104, 1). Compare John vii. 15, 
 " How knoweth this man letters, having never learned f " 
 
 1 "Populus sanior quam qui praesunt " (Bengel). The use of the word yepovo-ta in 
 Acts v. 21 is somewhat perplexing, because we know nothing of any Jewish "senate" 
 apart from the Sanhedrin, and because if ycpov<ria be taken in an etymological rather than 
 a political sense, the Sanhedrin included the elders (iv. 8 ; xxv. 15). It is impossible, in 
 the obscurity of the subject, to distinguish between the political and the Talmudic San- 
 hedrin. See Derenbourg (Palestine, 213), who thinks that Agrippa had been the first to 
 introduce Rabbis into the Sanhedrin. 
 
 2 Both of these are mentioned as having been at the earlier meeting, and we are 
 probably intended to understand they were also present at thi*. 
 
 On these, see Life of Christ, ii., pp. 329342. 
 
 4 Loghtfoot, Cent. Chor. in Matt., cap, 15. _ Jos, AnU, xviii. 8, i.
 
 XJLBLT PERSECUTIONS, 61 
 
 the Lcvitical officer to arrest them, but this time without any violence, which 
 might load to dangerous results. They offered no resistance, and were once 
 more placed where their Lord had once stood in the centre of that threaten- 
 ing semicircle of angry judges. In reply te the High Priest's indignant 
 reminder of the warning they had received, St. Peter simply laid down the 
 principle that when our duty to man clashes with our duty to God, it is God 
 that must be obeyed. 1 The High Priest had said, " Ye want to bring upon us 
 the blood of this man." The words are an awful comment on the defiant cry, 
 " His blood be on us, and on our children." Then the Sanhedrin had not been 
 afraid of Jesus ; now they were trembling at the vengeance which might yet 
 be brought on them by two of the despised disciples. The phrase is also 
 remarkable as furnishing the first instance of that avoidance of the name of 
 Christ which makes the Talmud, in the very same terms, refer to Him most 
 frequently as Peloni* "so and so." Peter did not aggravate the Priests' 
 alarm. He made no allusion to the charge of an intended vengeance; he 
 only said that the Apostles, and the Holy Spirit who wrought in them, were 
 witnesses to the resurrection and exaltation of Him whom they had slain. 
 At these words the Sanhedrin ground their teeth with rage, and began to 
 advise another judicial murder, which would, on their own principles, have 
 rendered them execrable to their countrymen, as an assembly given to deeds 
 of blood. 8 This disgrace was averted by the words of one wise man among 
 them. How far the two Apostles were protected by the animosities between 
 the rival sects of Sadducees and Pharisees we do not know, but it was 
 certainly the speech of Gamaliel which saved them from worse results than 
 that scourging by Jewish thongs those forty stripes save one which they 
 received, and in which they exulted. 4 
 
 That speech of Gamaliel was not unworthy of a grandson of Hillel of 
 one of those seven who alone won the supreme title of Rabbanim 5 of one 
 who subsequently became a President of the Sanhedrin. It has been strangely 
 misunderstood. The supposed anachronism of thirty years in the reference to 
 Theudas has led the school of Baur to deny altogether the genuineness of the 
 speech, but it has yet to be proved that the allusion may not have been 
 perfectly correct. The notion that the speech was due to a secret leaning in 
 favour of Christianity, and the tradition of the Clementine Recognitions, that 
 Gamaliel was in heart a Christian, 6 have no shadow of probability in their 
 favour, since every allusion to him in the Talmud shows that he lived and 
 
 1 Cf . Plat. Apol. 29. murofuu 61 ep ftoAAov q VIM: " It were better for me to be 
 called ' fool ' all the days of my life, than to be made wicked before Ha-Makom," i.e., 
 God ; literally " the Place " (Edioth, ch. v. 6). 
 
 3 In Spanish and Portuguese fuln.no (through the Arabic). The designation otho hatsh, 
 "that man," is still more contemptuous, ittr ( Yeshu) is used as the contraction for rna, 
 and is composed of the initial letters of an imprecation. 
 
 "The Sanhedrin is not to destroy life, but to save " (Sanhedr. 42 6). (See Life of 
 Christ, ii. 353, and infra, Excursus VII. 
 
 * Deut. xxv. 2. 
 
 * All the Kabbans except Johanan Ben Zakkai were descendant! of Gamaliel, 
 
 * Tbolo, Cod. Apocr., p. 501,
 
 62 THE LIFE AND WORE 0? ST, FAtftt 
 
 died a Pharisee. Nor, again, is there the least ground for Schrader's in- 
 dignation against his supposed assertion of the principle that the success of a 
 religion is a sufficient test of its truth. We must remember that only the 
 briefest outline of his speech is given, and all that Gamaliel seems to have 
 meant was this ' Let these men alone at present. As far as we can see, they 
 are only the victims of a harmless delusion. There is nothing seditious in 
 their practice, nothing subversive in their doctrines. Even if there were we 
 should have nothing to fear from them, and no need to adopt violent measures 
 of precaution. Fanaticism and imposture are short-lived, even when backed 
 by popular insurrection ; but in the views of these men there may be some- 
 thing more than at present appears. Some germ of truth, some gleam of 
 revelation, may inspire their singular enthusiasm, and to fight against this 
 may be to fight against God.' Gamaliel's plea was not so much a plea for 
 systematic tolerance as for temporary caution. 1 The day of open rupture 
 between Judaism and Christianity was indeed very near at hand, but it had 
 not yet arrived. His advice is neither due to the quiescence of Pharisaic 
 fatalism, nor to a ' fallacious laisser aller view of the matter, which serves to 
 show how low the Jews had sunk in theology and political sagacity if such 
 was the counsel of their wisest.' s There was time, Gamaliel thought, to wait 
 and watch the development of this new fraternity. To interfere with it 
 might only lead to a needless embroilment between the people and the 
 Sanhedrin. A little patience would save trouble, and indicate the course 
 which should be pursued. Gamaliel was sufficiently clear-sighted to have 
 observed that the fire of a foolish fanaticism dies out if it be neglected, and 
 is only kindled into fury by premature opposition. Let those who venture to 
 arraign the principle of the wise Rabbi remember that it is practically 
 identical with the utterance of Christ, "Every plant, which my heavenly 
 Father planted not, shall be plucked up by the roots." 3 
 
 The advice was too sound, and the authority of the speaker too weighty, 
 to be altogether rejected. The Priests and Rabbis, tortured already with 
 guilty anxiety as to the consequences of their judicial murder, renewed their 
 futile command to the Apostles to preach no more in the name of Jesus, and 
 scourging them for disobedience to their former injunctions, let them go. 
 'Neither in public nor in private did the Apostles relax their exertions. The 
 .gatherings still continued in Solomon's porch ; the agapce were still held in 
 the houses of the brethren. So far from being intimidated, the two Apostles 
 only rejoiced that they were counted worthy of the honour of being dis- 
 honoured for the name of Him on whom they believed. 
 
 1 Too much has, perhaps, been made of the Uar j5 j avOpurruv as contrasted with 
 elSi CK eov ecrw. w. 38, 89; of. Gal. i. 8, 9 (Beng. iv j$ si fit, conditionaliter ; 9mv 
 si est, categorice) as though Gamaliel leaned to the latter view " wornach der gesetzte 
 zweitt Fall als der dem Gamaliel wahrscheinlichere erscheint" (Meyer). It merely 
 mean* ' If it should be from men, as results will show,' and, ' if, a caw which I at 
 present suppose, from God.' (See Winer.) 
 
 3 Alford, following Schroder, Der Apostel Paulus. 
 
 9 See Matt. xv. 13. It was in this sense that Luther urged the advice of Gamaliel 
 mpon the Elector of Trevei,
 
 EARLY PERSECUTIONS. 63 
 
 And here I must pause for a moment to make a remark on the grounds 
 which have led many modern critics to reject the authority of the Acts of the 
 Apostles, and to set it down as a romance, written in the cause of reconciliation 
 between Judaising and Pauline Christians. My object in this volume is not 
 controversial. It has been my endeavour here, as in my Life of Christ, to 
 diffuse as widely as I can a clear knowledge of the Dawn of the Christian 
 Faith, and to explain as lucidly as is in my power the bearing of its earliest 
 documents. But I have carefully studied the objections urged against the 
 authenticity and the statements of the New Testament writings ; and I cannot 
 forbear the expression of my astonishment at the baselessness of many of the 
 hypotheses which have been accepted in their disparagement. Honesty of 
 course demands that we should admit the existence of an error where such an 
 error can bo shown to exist ; but the same honesty demands the rejection of all 
 charges against the accuracy of the sacred historian which rest on nothing 
 better than hostile prepossession. It seems to me that writers like Baur and 
 Zeller in spite of their wide learning and great literary acumen often prove, 
 by captious objections and by indifference to counter considerations, the funda- 
 mental weakness of their own system. 1 Hausrath altogether rejects the 
 
 1 See Baur, Paul. i. 35 ; Zeller. Die Apostelgesch., p. 134. Baur asserts that Gamaliel 
 could not have delivered the speech attributed to him because of "the striking chrono- 
 logical error in the appeal to the example of Theudas." And yet he does not offer any 
 proof either that the Theudas here alluded to is identical with the Theudas of Josephus, or 
 that Josephus must necessarily be right and St. Luke necessarily wrong. Zeller, while 
 entering more fully into the discussion, seems only to be struck by the resemblance 
 between the two impostors, without allowing for the obvious differences in the accounts 
 of them ; and he attaches an extravagant importance to the silence of Josephus about 
 the unimportant movement of the earlier fanatic to whom Gamaliel is supposed to allude ; 
 nor does he notice the possibility, admitted even by a Jewish writer ( Jost, Gfesch. d. Jud. 
 ii. 76), that the Theudas of Gamaliel may be the Simon, a slave of Herod, of Jos. Antt. 
 xvii. 10, 6 ; Tac. H. v. 9. On this identification, see Souatag, Stud. u. Krit., 1837, 
 p. 622; and Hackett, ad loc. Again, critics of the Tubingen school point out the 
 supposed absurdity of believing that the Sanhedrin Trould admit " a notable miracle " 
 and yet punish the men who performed it. But this is to reason from the standpoint of 
 modern times. The Jews have never denied the miracles of Jesus, but they have not on 
 that account believed in His mission. Just as a modem Protestant, familiar with the 
 peculiarities of nervous maladies, might accept the narrative of wonderful cures performed 
 at La Salette, without for a moment admitting the reality of the vision which is supposed 
 to have consecrated the place, so the Jews freely admitted the possibility of inconclusive 
 miracles, which they attributed generally to kishovf (i.e., thaumaturgy, miracles wrought 
 by unhallowed influence), or to m*s> nvn, phantasmagoria, or deception of the eyes. 
 (Derenbourg, Palest. 106, n. 3 ; 361, n. 1. ) Thus they allowed miraculous power to 
 idols (Abhoda Zara, f. 54, 2). There is a Talmudic anecdote (perhaps a sort of allegory 
 on Eccles. x. 8) which exactly illustrates this very point. B. Ehezer ben Dama was 
 bitten by a serpent, and Jacob the min (i.e., Christian) offered to heal him in the name of 
 Jesus. "Ben Dama, it is forbidden!" said his uncle, B. Ismael. "Let me do it, 
 urged Jacob; "I will prove to you by the Law that it is allowable." Before the 
 argument was over the sick man died. "Happy Ben Dama !" exclaimed his uncle; 
 " thou hast yielded thy soul in purity, without violating a precept of the wise " (Abhoda 
 Zara, cf. 27, 6 ; 55, 1 ; Jer. Shabbath, 14, 4). When St. Luke makes Gamaliel speak of 
 "Judas of Galilee," whereas Judas was born at Gamala, and commonly known as Judaa 
 the Gaulonite (rovXavmjs avrjp, Jos. Antt. xviii. 1, 1), this trivial peculiarity would 
 unquestionably have been paraded by German critics as a proof or the unhistorical 
 character of the speech, but for the fortunate accident that Josephus, with reference to 
 the sphere of his activity, thrioe calls hi i FoAiA-iio? (Antt. xviii. 1, 6 ; xx. 5, 2 ; 
 & J. ii. 8, 1).
 
 64 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 statement that Paul was "brought up at the feet of Gamaliel," on tha ground 
 that Paul calls himself " a zealot " for the traditions of the fathers, and must 
 therefore have belonged far rather to the school of Shammai. He could not, 
 according to this writer, have been trained by a Rabbi who was remarkable for 
 'tis mildness and laxity. He accordingly assumes that the author of the Acts 
 only invents the relations between St. Paul and Gamaliel in order to confer a 
 sort of distinction upon the former, when the fame of Gamaliel the Second, 
 founder of the school of Jabne, kept alive, in the second century, the fame of 
 his grandfather, Gamaliel the Elder. 1 Now of what value is a criticism which 
 contemptuously, and I may even say calumniously, contradicts a writer whose 
 accuracy, in matters where it can be thoroughly tested, receives striking con- 
 firmation from the most opposite sources P It would have been rightly con- 
 sidered a very trivial blot on St. Luke's accuracy if he had fallen into some 
 slight confusion about the enrolment of Quirinus, the tetrarchy of Abilene, 
 the Ethnarch under Aretas, the Asiarchs of Ephesus, the "Praetors" of 
 Philippi, the " Politarchs " of Thessalonica, the " Protos " of Malta, or the 
 question whether " Propraetor," or " Pro-consul," was, in the numerous 
 changes of those days, the exact official title of the Roman Governor of 
 Cyprus or Corinth. On several of those points he has been triumphantly 
 charged with ignorance and error ; and on all those points his minute exacti- 
 tude has been completely vindicated or rendered extremely probable. In every 
 historical allusion as, for instance, the characters of Gallic, Felix, Festus, 
 Agrippa II., Ananias, the famine in the days of Claudius, the decree to expel 
 Jews from Rome, the death of Agrippa L, the rule of Aretas at Damascus, the 
 Italian band, &c. he has been shown to be perfectly faithful to facts. Are we 
 to charge him with fraudulent assertions about Paul's relation to Gamaliel on 
 the questionable supposition that, after reaching the age of manhood, the pupil 
 deviated from his teacher's doctrines ? 2 Are we, on similar grounds, to charge 
 Diogenes Laertius with falsehood when he tells us that Antisthenes, the Cynic, 
 and Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, were both of them pupils of Socrates ? A re- 
 markable anecdote, which will be quoted farther on, has recorded the terrible 
 quarrel between the parties of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua, of whom the 
 former is called a Shammaite, and the latter a Hillelite ; 3 and yet both of them 
 were pupils of the same Rabbi, the celebrated Hillelite, R. Johanan Ben Zaccai. 
 Such instances might be indefinitely multiplied. And if so, what becomes of 
 Hausrath's criticism P Like many of the Tiibingen theories, it crumbles into 
 dust. 4 
 
 1 Ha-zaken, as be is usually called. 
 
 2 Turning to Buddaeus, Philos. Hebraeorum (1720), I find that he answered this 
 objection long ago. An interesting anecdote in BeracMth, f. 16, 2, shows that the 
 natural kindness of Gamaliel was too strong for the severity of his own teaching. 
 
 3 Jer. Shabbath, i. 7. 
 
 4 See Excursus V., " Gamaliel and the School of Tubingen."
 
 THE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 65 
 
 3131. 
 
 ST. STEPHEN AND THE HELLENISTS, 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 TBE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 
 
 T6trov OVK Jftm paaitas evptlf TT}J o\KOv^.fvr}3 81 ov irapaSe'Se/CTat TOVTO rb <f>v\ov, 
 jirjS' (sic) twiKpa-rtiTou fa' avrov. STKABO, ap. Jos. Antt. xiv. 7, 2. (Of. Philo, 
 Leg. ad Gaium, 36.) 
 
 THE gradual change of relation between tlie Jews and the Christians was an 
 inevitable result of the widening boundaries of the Church. Among the 
 early converts were " Grecians," as well as " Hebrews," and this fact naturally 
 led to most important consequences, on which hinged the historic future of 
 the Cliristian Faith. 
 
 It is not too much to say that any real comprehension of the work of 
 St. Paul, and of the course of events in the days after Christ, must depend 
 entirely on our insight into the difference between those two classes of Jews. 
 And this is a point which has been so cursorily treated that we must here 
 pause while we endeavour to see it in its proper light. 
 
 When the successive judgments, first of the Assyrian, then of the Baby- 
 lonian captivity, had broken all hopes of secular power and all thoughts of 
 secular pride in the hearts of the Jews, a wholly different impulse was given 
 to the current of their life. Settled in the countries to which they had been 
 transplanted, allowed the full rights of citizenship, finding free scope for their 
 individual energies, they rapidly developed that remarkable genius for com- 
 merce by which they have been characterised in all succeeding ages. It was 
 only a wretched handful of the nation compared by the Jewish writers to 
 the chaff of the wheat who availed themselves of the free permission of 
 Cyrus, and subsequent kings of Persia, to return to their native land. 1 The 
 remainder, although they jealously preserved their nationality and their tradi- 
 tions, made their homes in every land to which they had been drifted by the 
 wave of conquest, and gradually multiplying until, as Josephus tells us, 2 they 
 crowded every corner of the habitable globe, formed that great and remark- 
 able body which continues to be known to this day as " the Jews of the 
 Dispersion." 8 
 
 1 Of the whole nation only 42,360 returned ; and as the separate Items of the return- 
 ing families given by Ezra and Nehemiah only amount to 30,000, it was precariously 
 conjectured by the Jews that the surplus consisted of members of the ten tribes. As a 
 body, however, the ten tribes were finally and absolutely absorbed into the nations not 
 improbably of Semitic origin among whom they were scattered (Jos. Antt. xL 5, 2 ; 
 2 Esdr. xiii. 45). Such expressions as TO SuSexd^vAov of James i. 1 ; Acts xxvi. 7, point 
 rather to past reminiscences, to patriotic yearnings, and to the sacredly-treasured genea- 
 logical records of a very few families, than to any demonstrable reality. Of the priestly 
 families only four courses out of the twenty-four returned (Ezra ii. 36 39). 
 
 3 Jos. Antt. xiv. 7-, 2. 
 
 ' The word is first found in this sense in Dent, xxviii. 25 ; Pa. cxlvii. 2, " He shall
 
 66 THK LIFE AJKD WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 This Dispersion of the Chosen People was one of those three vast and 
 world-wide events in which a Christian cannot but see the hand of God so 
 ordering the course of history as to prepare the world for the Revelation of 
 Hia Son. (i.) The immense field covered by the conquests of Alexander gave 
 to the civilised world a Unity of Language, without which it would have been, 
 humanly speaking, impossible for the earliest preachers to have made known 
 the good tidings in every land which they traversed, (ii.) The rise of the 
 .Roman Empire created a Political Unity which reflected in every direction the 
 doctrines of the new faith, (iii.) The dispersion of the Jews prepared vast 
 multitudes of Greeks and Romans for the Unity of a pure Morality and a 
 monotheistic Faith. The Gospel emanated from the capital of Judaea; it 
 was preached in the tongue of Athens; it was diffused through the empire 
 of Borne : the feet of its earliest missionaries traversed, from the Euphrates 
 to the Pillars of Hercules, the solid structure of nndeviating roads by which 
 the Roman legionaries " those massive hammers of the whole earth " 1 had 
 made straight in the desert a highway for our God. Semite and Aryan had 
 been unconscious instruments in the hands of God for the spread of a religion 
 which, in its first beginnings, both alike detested and despised. The letters 
 of Hebrew and Greek and Latin inscribed above the cross were the prophetic 
 and unconscious testimony of three of the world's noblest languages to the 
 undying claims of Him who suffered to obliterate the animosities of the 
 nations which spoke them, and to unite them all together in the one great 
 Family of God. 
 
 This contact of Jew with Greek was fruitful of momentous consequences 
 both to the Aryan and the Semitic race. It is true that the enormous dif- 
 ferences between the morals, the habits, the tendencies, the religions systems, 
 the whole tone of mind and view of life in these two great human families, 
 inspired them with feelings of mutual aversion and almost detestation. Out 
 of the chaos of struggling interests which followed the death of Alexander, 
 there gradually emerged two great kingdoms, the Egyptian and the Syrian, 
 ruled respectively by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. These dynasties had 
 inherited the political conceptions of the great Macedonian conqueror, and 
 desired to produce a fusion of the heterogeneous elements included in their 
 government. Both alike turned their eyes to Palestine, which became the 
 theatre of their incessant contentions, and which passed alternately undor the 
 sway of each. The Ptolemies, continuing the policy of Alexander, did their 
 utmost to promote the immigration of Jews into Egypt. The Seleucids, both 
 by force and by various political inducements, settled them as largely as they 
 could in their western cities. Alike the Lagidse and the Seleucidse knew the 
 value of the Jews as quiet and order-loving citizens. To the shores of the 
 
 gather together the outcasts ('irj} ; LXX., T 4t<nropa ) of Israel." It is also found in 
 2 Mace. i. 27, " Gather together those that are scattered from us, deliver them that serve 
 among the heathen." They were originally called Sent Galootha (Ezra vi. 16). In John 
 vii. 35, TTJK aicwnropaK TUP 'i-'.AArji>w> means the Jews scattered over the Greek world. The 
 only other passages where it occurs in the N.T. are James i. 1 ; 1 Pet. i. 1. 
 1 Shairp, Mod. Culture.
 
 THE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISH. 67 
 
 Mediterranean flocked an ever-increasing multitude of Greek merchants and 
 Greek colonists. " The torrent of Greek immigration soon met the torrrent 
 of Jewish emigration. Like two rivers which poured their differently 
 coloured waves into the same basin without mixing with one another, these 
 two peoples cast themselves on the young Macedonian cities, and there simul- 
 taneously established themselves without intermixture, continually separated 
 by the irreconcilable diversity of their beliefs and customs, though continually 
 flung into connexion by community of business and by the uniform legislation 
 which protected their interests." 1 
 
 The effect of this on the Greek was less marked and less memorable than 
 its effect on the Jew. Judaism was more Hellenised by the contact than 
 Hellenism was Judaised. There can be no more striking proof of this fact 
 thaa the total loss by the " Sons of the Dispersion " of their own mother 
 tongue. That the effects on the Pagan world wore less beneficial than might 
 have been anticipated was, in great measure, the fault of the Jews themselves. 
 That sort of obtrusive humility which so often marks a race which has nothing 
 to live on but its memories, was mingled with an invincible prejudice, a rooted 
 self-esteem, an unconcealed antipathy to those of alien race and religion, which, 
 combined as it was with commercial habits by no means always scrupulous, 
 and a success by no means always considerate, alienated into disgust the very 
 sympathies which it should have striven to win. The language in which the 
 Jews are spoken of by the writers of the Empire a language expressive of 
 detestation mingled with curiosity sufficiently accounts for the outbreaks of 
 mob violence, from which in so many ages they have been liable to suffer. 
 These outbreaks, if not connived at by the governing authorities, were too 
 often condoned. Yet, in spite of this, the influence insensibly exercised by 
 the Jews over the heathen among whom they lived was full of important 
 consequences for Christianity. "Victi," says Seneca, "victoribiis leges dede- 
 runt." The old Paganism was, in intellectual circles, to a great extent effete. 
 Great Pan was dead. Except in remote country districts, the gods of Olympus 
 were idle names. In Home the terrors of Tartarus were themes for a school- 
 boy's laughter. Religion had sunk into a state machinery. 2 The natural 
 consequences followed. Those minds which were too degraded to feel the 
 need of a religion were content to wallow, like natural brute beasts, in the 
 Stygian pool of a hideous immorality. Others became the votaries of low 
 foreign superstitions, 3 or the dupes of every variety of designing charlatans. 
 But not a few were attracted into the shadow of \Jhe synagogue, and the 
 majority of these were women, 4 who, restricted as was their influence, yet 
 
 1 Rcuss, TMol. Ohrtt. I. L 93; and in Herzog, Cyclop, t.v. "Hellenism." On this 
 laopolity see Jos. c. Ap. ii. 4. 
 
 8 See Juv. ii. 149 ; Boissier, La ReHgion Romainc, L 374 450 and contra Friedlander, 
 SUtengesch. Horns, (who goes too far). 
 
 3 Because these presented vaguer and more shadowy conceptions of the Divine, more 
 possible to grasp than gross concrete images (see Hausrath, Neut. Zdtg. ii. 76), and 
 because Greek religion was too gay for a sick and suffering world (Apul. Metam. xi. passim). 
 See Cat. x. 26 ; Ov. F. iv. 309 : A. A. i. 78 ; Juv. vi 489, 623 ; Tac. Awn. xvi. 6, &c. 
 
 * The important part played by these proselytes (who are also called <re0tf|uityot, cv<rf0t!f,
 
 68 THK LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 could not fail to draw the attention of their domestic circles to the belief 
 which they had embraced. In every considerable city of the Roman Empire 
 the service of the synagogue was held in Greek, and these services were 
 perfectly open to any one who liked to be present at them. Greek, too, 
 became emphatically the language of Christianity. Multitudes of early con- 
 verts had been Jewish proselytes before they became Christian disciples. They 
 passed from the synagogue of Hellenists into the Church of Christ. 
 
 The influences exercised by the Dispersion on the Jews themselves were, 
 of course, too varied and multitudinous to be summed up under one head ; yet 
 we may trace two consequences which, century after century, worked in 
 opposite directions, but each of which was deeply marked. On the one hand 
 they became more faithful to their religion ; on the other more cosmopolitan 
 in their views. Although they made their homo in the heathen countries to 
 which they had been removed by conquest, or had wandered in pursuit of 
 commerce, it must not be supposed that they were at all ready to forfeit their 
 nationality or abandon their traditions. On the contrary, the great majority 
 of them clung to both with a more desperate tenacity. In the destruction of 
 their independence they had recognised the retribution threatened in that 
 long-neglected series of prophecies which had rebuked them for their idola- 
 tries. Of all polytheistic tendencies the Jew was cured for ever, and as 
 though to repair past centuries of rebellion and indifference as though to 
 earn the fulfilment of that great promise of an Anointed Deliverer which was 
 the centre of all their hopes they devoted themselves with all the ardour of 
 their self-conscious pride to keep the minutest observances of their Law and 
 ritual. Their faithfulness a complete contrast to their old apostasies was 
 due to the work of the Sopherim. or Scribes. It was towards Jerusalem that 
 they worshipped ; it was to the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem that they looked 
 for legal decisions ; it was from the Amoraim and Tanaim of Jerusalem 
 that they accepted all solutions of casuistical difficulties; it was from 
 Jerusalem that were flashed the fire-signals which announced over many lands 
 the true date of the new moons ; it was into the treasury of Jerusalem that 
 they poured, not only the stated Temple-tribute of half a shekel, but gifts far 
 more costly, which told of their unshaken devotion to the church of their 
 fathers. It was in Jerusalem that they maintained a special synagogue, and 
 to Jerusalem that they made incessant pilgrimages. 1 The hatred, the sus- 
 picion, the contempt created in many countries by the exclusiveness of their 
 prejudices, the peculiarity of their institutions, the jealousy of their successes, 
 only wedded them more fanatically to the observance of their Levitical rules 
 by giving a tinge of martyrdom to the fulfilment of obligations. It became 
 
 cvXo/3ts) may be seen in Acts x. 2; xiii. 43 ; xvi. 14, &c., and passim. Owing to the 
 painful and, to Hellenic imagination, revolting rite of circumcision, women were more 
 frequently converted to Judaism than men. Josephus (B. J. ii. 20, 2) tella us that 
 nearly all the women of Damascus had adopted Judaism ; and even in the first century 
 three celebrated Rabbis were sons of heathen mothers who had embraced the faith of 
 Moses (Derenbourg, Palest., p. 223). 
 
 1 See Philo, Legal. 36 ; in Flacc. 7 ; Jos. 4fl#. *vl. 6, 7 ; rvjii 9, 1 ; Olc. 
 28 ; Shekalim, 7, 4 ; Rosh Hashana, 2, 4.
 
 THE DIASFOBA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 69 
 
 with them a point of conscience to maintain the institutions which their 
 heathen neighbours attacked with every weapon of raillery and scorn. But 
 these very circumstances tended to produce a marked degeneracy of the 
 religious spirit. The idolatry, which in old days had fastened on the visible 
 symbols of alien deities, only assumed another form when concentrated on 
 the dead-letter of documents, and the minute ritualism of service. Gradually, 
 among vast masses of the Jewish people, religion sank almost into 
 fetichism. It lost all power over the heart and conscience, all its tender 
 love, all its inspiring warmth, all its illuminating light. It bound the 
 nation hand and foot to the corpse of meaningless traditions. Even the 
 ethics of the Mosaic legislation were perverted by a casuistry which was at 
 once timid in violating the letter, and audacious in superseding the spirit. 
 In the place of moral nobleness and genial benevolence, Judaism in its 
 decadence bred only an incapacity for spiritual insight, a self-satisfied ortho- 
 doxy, and an offensive pride. It enlisted murder and falsity in defence of 
 ignorant Shibboleths and useless forms. The difference between the ideal 
 Jew of earlier and later times can only be measured by the difference 
 between the moral principles of the Law and the dry precedents of the 
 Mishna by the difference which separates the Pentateuch from the Talmud, 
 the Book of Exodus from the Abhuda Zara. 1 
 
 But while it produced these results in many of the Jewish communities, 
 there wore others, and there were special individuals in all communities, in 
 whom the influence of heathen surroundings worked very differently. There 
 were many great and beautiful lessons to be learnt from the better aspects 
 of the heathen world. If there was a grace that radiated from Jerusalem, 
 there were also gifts which brightened Athens. The sense of beauty the 
 exquisiteness of art the largeness and clearness of insight the perfection 
 of literary form which characterised the Greek of the age of Pericles, had 
 left the world an immortal heritage ; and Rome had her own lessons to teach 
 of dignity, and law, and endurance, and colonisation, and justice. Commerce 
 is eminently cosmopolitan. The Jewish Captivity, with the events which 
 followed it, made the Jews a commercial people. This innate tendency of 
 the race had been curbed, first by the Mosaic legislation, 2 then by the influence 
 of the prophets. But when these restrictions had been providentially re- 
 moved, the Jew flung himself with ardour into a career from which ho had 
 been hitherto restrained. So far from regarding as identical the notions of 
 " merchant" and " Canaanite," 3 the Rabbis soon began to sing the praises of 
 
 1 " The author of the Pentateuch and the Tanatm moved in different worlds of ideas " 
 (Kuenen, iii. 291). 
 
 2 Deut. xvi. 16, 17 ; Lev. xxv. ; Ps. cvii. 23. See Jos. c. Ap. i. 12. The chapter 
 
 begins with the remark, i^ftetf roiwv OUT* \u>pav oiKoCfiev irapaAioi' our' cftiropuut x at PM el> > "S* 
 
 rats irpbt aAAovs Sta. TOVTUV cnrifuiatf. Muuk (Palest., p. 903) makes some excellent remarks 
 on this subject, showing that commerce would not only have encouraged intercourse with 
 the heathen, but would also have disturbed the social equilibrium at which Mown aimed, 
 BO that it was impossible as long as the Law was rigidly observed (Hos. zii. 8 ; Amos viiL 
 4-6, &c.). 
 
 3 Targum of Jonathan (Zech. xlr. 21).
 
 70 THE LIFE AND WOEK OP ST. PAITL. 
 
 trade. " There can be no worse occupation than agriculture ! " said B. Eleazar. 
 " All the fanning in the world will not make you so remunerative as com- 
 merce," said Rabh l as he saw a cornfield bowing its golden ears under the 
 summer breeze. 2 So easy is it for a people to get over an archaic legislation 
 if it stands in the way of their interests or inclinations ! The Mosaic restric- 
 tions upon commerce were, of course, impracticable in dealing with Gentiles, 
 and in material successes the Jews found something, at any rate, to make up 
 to them for the loss of political independence. The busy intercourse of 
 cities wrought a further change in their opinions. They began to see that 
 God never meant the nations of the world to stand to each other in the posi- 
 tion of frantic antagonism or jealous isolation. A Jerusalem Rabbi, ignorant 
 of everything in heaven and earth and under the earth, except his own 
 Halojcha, might talk of all the rest of tha world promiscuously as an 
 " elsewhere " of no importance ; 3 but an educated Alexandrian Jew would 
 be well aware that the children of heathen lands had received from their 
 Father's tenderness a share in the distribution of His gifts. The silent and 
 imperceptible influences of life are often the most permanent, and no 
 amount of exclusiveness could entirely blind the more intelligent sons of 
 the Dispersion to the merits of a richer civilisation. No Jewish boy familiar 
 with the sights and sounds of Tarsus or Antioch could remain unaware that 
 all wisdom was not exhausted in the trivial discussions of the Rabbis ; that 
 there was something valuable to the human race in the Greek science which 
 Jewish nescience denounced as thaumaturgy ; that there might be a better 
 practice for the reasoning powers than an interminable application of the 
 Middoth of Hillel; in short, that the development of humanity involves 
 larger and diviner duties than a virulent championship of the exclusive privi- 
 leges of the Jew- 4 
 
 We might naturally have conjectured that these wider sympathies would 
 specially be awakened among those Jews who were for the first time brought 
 into close contact with the great peoples of the Aryan race. That contact 
 was first effected by the conquests of Alexander. He settled 8,000 Jews in 
 the Thebais, and the Jews formed a third of the population of his new city of 
 Alexandria. Large numbers were brought from Palestine by Ptolemy I., and 
 they gradually spread from Egypt, not only over " the parts of Libya about 
 
 1 Rabh was a contemporary of Babbi (Judah the Holy), and was "Head of the 
 Captivity." 
 
 2 YebhamAth, f. 63, 1. 
 
 3 pub mnn, " outside the land " (Frank!, Jews in the East, ii. 34). Something like the 
 French M-bas. 
 
 4 Many of the Rabbis regarded the Gentiles as little better than BO much fuel for the 
 fires of Gehenna. R. Jose construes Isa. xxxiii. 12, " And the peoples shall be a burning 
 Jifajlime." Rabh Bar Shilo explained it "that they should be burnt because of their 
 neglect of the Law, which was written upon lime. " (See the curious Hagadah in Sotak, 
 t. 35, 2.) But the Hellenist would soon learn to feel that 
 
 " All knowledge is not couch'd in Mosea' Law, 
 The Pentateuch, or what the Prophets wrote ; 
 The Gentiles also know, and write, ami teach 
 To admiration, taught by Nature's light." HILTON, Par.
 
 THE DIASPOBA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 
 
 71 
 
 Gyrene," but along the whole Mediterranean coast of Africa. 1 Seleucus 
 Nicator, after the battle of Ipsus, removed them by thousands from Babylonia, 
 to such cities as Antioch and Seleucia ; and, when _their progress and pros- 
 perity were for a time shaken by the senseless persecutions of Antiochus 
 Epiphanes, they scattered themselves in every direction until there was hardly 
 a seaport or a commercial centre in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, or the 
 Islands of the JEgean, in which Jewish communities were not to be found. 
 The vast majority of these Jewish settlers adopted the Greek language, and 
 forgot that Aramaic dialect which had been since the Captivity the language 
 of their nation. 
 
 It is to these Greek-speaking Jews that the term Hellenist mainly and 
 properly refers. In the New Testament there are two wozJs, Hellen and 
 Hellenistes, of which the first is rendered " Greek," and the second " Grecian." 
 The word " Greek " is used as an antithesis either to " barbarians " or to 
 "Jews." In the first case it means all nations which spoke the Greek 
 language; 2 in the second case it is equivalent to " Gentiles." 3 The meaning 
 of the word Hellenist or " Grecian " is wholly different. As far as the form 
 is concerned, it means, in the first instance, one who " Grsecises " in language 
 or mode of life, and it points to a difference of training and of circumstances, 
 not to a difference of race. 4 It is therefore reserved as the proper antithesis, 
 not to " Jews," since vast numbers of the Hellenists were Jews by birth, 
 but to strict " Hebrews." The word occurs but twice in the New Testament, 6 
 and in both cases is used of Jews who had embraced Christianity but who 
 spoke Greek and used the Septuagint version of the Bible instead of the 
 original Hebrew or the Chaldaic Targum of any Interpreter. 6 
 
 1 See Philo, c. Fl. ii. 623 ; Jos. Antt. xiv. 7, 2 ; Dr. Deutsch in Kitto's Cycl., .v. 
 " Dispersion ; " and Canon "Westcott in Smitn's Bible Diet. 
 
 2 See Acts xviii. 17 ; 1 Cor. i. 22, 23; Rom. i. 14. The emissaries of Abgarus if such 
 they were who applied to Philip when they wished to see Jesus were "Greeks," not 
 " Grecians " (John xii. 20). 
 
 8 Rom. i. 16 ; ii. 9 ; iii. 9 ; 1 Cor. x. 32 ; Gal. ii. 3. &c. Thus in 2 Mace. iv. 13, 
 EAA>]vi<7>ib is equivalent to aAXo^>v\i<r(xds ; and in iv. 10, 15; vi. 9, To'EAArji/Hca^/} means 
 "Paganism ;" and in Isa. ix. 12, " Philistines " is rendered hy the LXX. *EAAi/as. 
 
 Cf. Xen. Anab. vii. 3, 12. 
 
 s Acts vi. 1 ; ix. 29. In xi. 20 the true reading is's/u^os. 
 
 6 Some of the Hebraising Hellenists hated even the Septuagint (Geiger, Urschr. 419, 
 439 ; Zunz, Qottesd. Vort. 95). The various classes of Christians may be tabulated as 
 follows : 
 
 Christians. 
 
 Circumcised. 
 
 Hebraists. 
 
 Hellenists. 
 
 Uncircumcised. 
 
 I 
 
 imci. Liberal 
 
 -.. "Certain e.g. Peter, 
 from Acts xi. 8. 
 James," 
 Gal 11. 18. 
 
 " Proselytes of " Proselytes of Heathen 
 
 Righteousness." the Gate." Converts. 
 
 e.g. Nicolas, e.g. Cornelius, e.g. Trophimua, 
 
 Acts vi 5. Acts x. 2. Acts xxi. 29. 
 
 Judaic. Liberal. 
 
 (Hala- (Haga- 
 
 chists.) diste.) 
 
 Acts ix e.g. Paul. 
 29.
 
 72 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Now this Hellenism expressed many shades of difference, and therefore tha 
 exact meaning of the word Hellenist varies with the circumstances under which 
 it is used. The accident of language might make a man, technically speaking, 
 a Hellenist, when politically and theologically he was a Hebrew ; and this 
 must have been the condition of those Hellenists who disputed against the 
 arguments of St. Paul in his first visit to Jerusalem. 1 On the other hand, the 
 name might imply that alienation from the system of Judaism, which in some 
 Jews extended into positive apostasy, and into so deep a shame of their 
 Jewish origin, as to induce them, not only in the days of Jason and Menelaus, 8 
 but even under the Herods, to embrace the practices of the Greeks, and even 
 to obliterate the external sign of their nationality. 3 Others again, like the 
 astute Herodian princes, were hypocrites, who played fast and loose with 
 their religion, content to be scrupulous Jews at Jerusalem, while they could 
 be shameless heathen at Berytus or Czesarea. But the vast majority of 
 Hellenists lay between these extremes. Contact with the world had widened 
 their intelligence and enabled them so far to raise their heads out of the heavy 
 fog of Jewish scholasticism as to distinguish between that which was of 
 eternal and that which was but of transient significance. Far away from 
 Jerusalem, where alone it was possible to observe the Levitical law, it was a 
 natural result that they came to regard outward symbols as merely valuable 
 for the sake of inward truths. To this class belonged the wisest members of 
 the Jewish Dispersion. It is to them that we owe the Septuagint translation, 
 the writings of Philo and Josephus, and a large cycle of historical, poetic, and 
 apocryphal literature. Egypt was the main centre of this Graeco- Jewish 
 activity, and many of the Jews of Alexandria distinguished themselves in the 
 art, the learning, and the accomplishments of the Greeks. 4 It is hardly to be 
 wondered at that these more intellectual Jews were not content with an 
 iufructuose Babbinism. It is not astonishing that they desired to represent 
 the facts of their history, and the institutions of their religion, in such an 
 aspect as should least waken the contempt of the nations among whom they 
 lived. 5 But although this might be done with perfect honesty, it tended, no 
 doubt, in some to the adoption of unauthorised additions to their history, and 
 unauthorised explanations of their Scriptures in one word, to that style of 
 
 Acts ix. 29. 
 
 2 See 2 Mace. iv. 13, seqq., " Now such was the height of Greek fashions, and increase 
 of heathenish manners, through the exceeding prof oneness of Jason, that ungodly wretch, 
 and no high priest, . . . that the priests, . . . despising the temple, . . . hastened to 
 be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus 
 called them forth," &c. rwann ]V mobo, "the abominable kingdom of Javan," is an ex- 
 pression which stereotypes the hatred for Greek fashions. 
 
 3 ri<nrao>i.6 (1 Cor. vii. 18). The condition of a TjiteQ (1 Mace. L 15 ; Jos. Anlt. xii. 
 5, 1). (On Judaic Hellenism, see Ewald, Gesch. v. ii. 4.) 
 
 4 Thus, an Ezekiel wrote a tragedy on Moses ; another, Philo, wrote an Epic on 
 Jerusalem ; Theodotus, a tragedy on the Rape of Dina ; Demetrius and Eupolemos wrote 
 secular history. The story of Susanna is a novelette. But the feeling of stricter Jews 
 was sternly opposed to these forms of literary activity. In the letter of Aristeas we are 
 told that Theopompus was struck with madness, and Theodektes with blindness, for 
 offences in this direction (Hausrath, Newt. Zeitg. ii. 180). 
 
 * Such was the main object'of Josephus in his Antiquities.
 
 THE DIASPOEA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 73 
 
 exegesis which, since it deduced anything out of anything, nullified the real 
 significance of the sacred records. 1 Nor can we be surprised that this Alex- 
 andrian theosophy these allegoric interpretations this spirit of toleration 
 for the Pagan systems by which they were surrounded were regarded by the 
 stricter Jews as an incipient revolt from Mosaism thinly disguised under a 
 hybrid phraseology. 2 Hence arose the antagonism between advanced Hellenists 
 and the Hebrews, whose whole patriotic existence had concentrated itself upon 
 the Mosaic and Oral Law. The severance between the two elements became 
 wider and wider as the Jews watched the manner in which Christianity 
 spread in the Gentile world. The consciousness that the rapidity of that 
 diffusion was due, not only to the offer of a nobler faith, but also to the 
 loosening of an intolerable yoke, only made their exclusiveness more obstinate. 
 It was not long before the fall of Jerusalem that there took place in the school 
 of R. Hananiah Ben Hiskiah Ben Garon, that memorable meeting at which 
 eighteen ordinances were resolved upon, of which it was the exclusive object 
 to widen the rift of difference between Jews and Pagans. These ordinances, 
 to which the Mishna only alludes, are found in a bara'ita (" supplemental 
 addition ") of R. Simeon Ben Johai in the second century, and they consist of 
 prohibitions which render impossible any interchange of social relations 
 Between Jews and heathen. It was in vain that R. Joshua and the milder 
 Hillelites protested against so dangerous a bigotry. The quarrel passed from 
 words to blows. The followers of Hillel wore attacked with swords and lances, 
 and some of them were killed. " That day," says the Jerusalem Talmud, "was 
 as disastrous to Israel as the one on wliich they made the golden calf;" but it 
 seemed to be a general opinion that the eighteen resolutions could not be 
 (rescinded even by Elias himself, because the discussion had been closed by 
 bloodshed; and they were justified to the national conscience by the savage 
 massacres which had befallen the Jews atBeth-shan, Csesarea, and Damascus. 3 
 The feelings of Jews towards Pagans were analogous to the hatred of 
 Hebrews to Hellenists. In later days the Christians absorbed the entire fury 
 of that detestation which had once burned in the Jewish heart against 
 ^Hellenism. When a question arose as to the permissibility of burning the 
 Gospels and other books of the Christians (Minim), considering how frequently 
 
 1 The views of these liberal Hellenists may be seen represented in the works of the 
 pseudo-Aristeas, the pseudo-Aristobulus, and in the verses of Phocylides (Kuenen, 
 Rdirjwn of Israel, iii. 180). It was the aim of an entire cycle of literature to prove that 
 all Greek wisdom was derived from Jewish sources, and the names of Orpheus and the 
 Sibyl were frequently given to Jewish forgeries and interpolations (Clem. Alex. Strom. 
 v. 4 ; Euseb. Praep. Evang. vii. 14 ; viii. 10 ; xiii. 1.2). Bel and the Dragon, the Epistle 
 of Jeremiah, the letter of pseudo-Heraclitus, &c., belong to this class of writings. See 
 too "Wisd. of Solomon x. xii. ; Jos. c. Ap. ii. 39 ; Hausrath, N. Zeitgesch. ii. 100, sq. 
 Josephus says that Pythagoras borrowed from Moses (c. Ap. i. 22). 
 
 2 Such Hebraising Hellenists are the author of " the Epistle of Jeremiah," and (on the 
 whole) of Wisdom (see vii. 22, seq., xiii. xix.). "The Liberal Hellenists spiritualised and 
 volatilised the wall of partition between Jews and Pagans," so that, although Philo said 
 that the wall should still be kept up, it is not surprising to find that his nephew, the 
 Procurator Tiberius Alexander, had abandoned Judaism (Jos. Antt. xx. 5, 2 ; Kuenen, 
 Rd, of Israel, iii.). 
 
 Shabbath, i 7; Grata, iii. 494; Derenbourg, Palest., p. 274. 
 4
 
 74 THE LIFE AND WOSZ 05 ST. PAUL. 
 
 they contained the name of God, " May I lose my son," exclaimed Rabbi 
 Tarphon, " if I do not fling these books into the fire when thoy come into my 
 hands, name of God and all. A man chased by a murderer, or threatened by 
 a serpent's bite, ought rather to take refuge in an idol's temple than in the 
 houses of the Minim, for these latter know thf* truth and deny it, whereas 
 idolaters deny God because they know Him no}^ J 
 
 Such, then, being the feelings of the Palestinian Jews with regard to every 
 approach towards idolatry, the antagonism between them and the more liberal 
 Hellenists rose from the very nature of things, and was so deeply rooted that 
 we are not surprised to find a trace of it even in the history of the Church ; 
 for the earliest Christians the Apostles and disciples of Jesus were almost 
 exclusively Hebrews and Israelites, 2 the former being a general, and the latter 
 a religious designation. Their feeling towards those who were Hellenists in 
 principles as well as in language would be similar to that of other Jews, how- 
 ever much it might be softened by Christian love. But the jealousies of two 
 sections so widely diverse in their sympathies would be easily kindled; and it is 
 entirely in accordance with the independent records of that period that, "when 
 the number of the disciples was being multiplied," there should have arisen, 
 as a natural consequence, " a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews." 
 
 The special ground of complaint was a real or fancied neglect of the widows 
 of Hellenists in the daily ministration of food and assistance. There might 
 be some jealousy because all the offices of the little Church were administered 
 by Hebrews, who would naturally have been more cognisant of the claims of 
 their immediate compatriots. Widows, however, were a class who specially 
 required support. We know how full a discussion St. Paul applies to their 
 general position even at Corinth, and we have already mentioned that some of 
 the wisest regulations attributed to Gamaliel wore devoted to ameliorating the 
 Bufferings to which they were exposed. In the seclusion to which centuries of 
 custom had devoted the Oriental woman, the lot of a widow, with none to plead 
 her cause, might indeed be bitter. Any inequalities in the treatment of the 
 class would awaken a natural resentment, and the more so because previous to 
 their conversion these widows would have had a claim on the Corban, or 
 Temple treasury. 3 
 
 But the Apostles mot these complaints in that spirit of candour and 
 generosity which is the best proof how little they were responsible for any 
 partiality which may have been shown to the widows of tho Hebrews. Sum- 
 moning a meeting of the disciples, thoy pointed out to them that the day had 
 now come in which it was inconvenient for the Apostles to have anything 
 further to do with the apportionment of charity 4 a routine task which 
 
 1 SJiaVbath, 116 a ; Derenbourg, p. 380. 
 
 2 The Hellenic names of Philip and Andrew prove nothing, because at this epoch such 
 names were common among the Jews. But they may have had Hellenic connexions. 
 (Johnxii. 20.) 
 
 8 2 Mace. ill. 10, " Then the high priest told him (Heliodorus) that there was such 
 money laid up for the relief of widows and fatherless children." 
 
 4 Acts. vi. 2, JiweowTy Tpcu-^oij. That Tp-irrsfr baa not hero ite meaning of "bank"
 
 r.IASFO&A: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 75 
 
 diverted them from more serious and important duties. They therefore bade 
 the meeting elect seven men of blameless character, high spiritual gifts, and 
 practical wisdom, to form what we should call a committee of management, 
 and relieve the Apostles from the burden, in order that they might dovote 
 their energies to prayer and pastoral work. The advice was followed, and 
 seven were presented to the Apostles as suitable persons. They were admitted 
 to the duties of their position with prayer and the laying on of hands, which 
 have been thenceforth naturally adopted in every ordination to the office of a 
 deacon. 1 
 
 The seven elected were Stephen, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timoa, 
 Parmenas, and Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch. The fact that every one of 
 them bears a Greek name has often been appealed to as a proof of the con- 
 ciliatoriness of the Apostles, aa though they had elected every one of thoir 
 committee from the very body which had found some reason to complain. 
 This, however, would have been hardly just. It would have been to fly into 
 au opposite extreme. The frequency with which the Jews of this time adopted 
 Greek names prevents us from drawing any conclusion as to their nationality. 
 But although we cannot be certain about the conjecture of Gieseler that three 
 of them were Hebrews, three of them Hellenists, and one a proselyte, it is only 
 natural to suppose that the choice of them from different sections of the 
 Church would be adopted as a matter of fairness and common sense. And the 
 fact that a Gentile like Nicolas should thus have been selected to fill an office 
 so honourable and so responsible is one of the many indications which mark 
 the gradual dawn of a new conception respecting the Kingdom of God. 
 
 Though two alone 2 of the seven are in any way known to us, yet this 
 
 (Jos. Antt. xii. 2, 3 : of. Tpair^'ratc, Matt. ixv. 27 ; rpair-^oj', Luke xix. 23), is clear from 
 the context. * " 
 
 1 The seven officers were not, however, "deacons" in the modern sense of the word, 
 nor were they mere almoners. The only special title given to any one of them is 
 Evangelist (Acts xxi. 8). Alike their gifts and their functions are loftier than those 
 required for deacons in 1 Tim. iii. Deacons in the modern sense find their nearer 
 prototypes in the vturepoi and ctovtV/cot (Acts v. 5, 10 ; cf. Luke xxii. 26), and in the 
 ChazzanSm of the synagogue (Luke iv. 20). The seven, as St. Chrysostom observes, 
 rather had the duties of presbyters, and must be regarded as a body chosen only for a 
 special purpose re'wt eU TOVTO expoTo')jei]<raj'. Another analogy for this appointment was 
 furnished by the existing institution of three almoners (Parnaslm), who undertook the 
 collection and distribution of the "alms of the cup" (see Dr. Ginsburg in Kitto, s.v. 
 " Synagogue ") and " alms of the box " in the Jewish synagogues ; and these were always 
 chosen by the entire congregation of the synagogue, as the Apostles here suggest should 
 be done in the case of the new functionaries. 
 
 2 Nicolas is no exception. If, as early tradition asserted, Luke was himself "a 
 proselyte of Antioch " (Euseb. //. E, iii. 4 ; Jer. Z> Vir. Jllustr. 7), this may have 
 suggested the passing reference to him. The evidence which connects him with " the sect 
 of the Nicolaitanes " (Rev. ii. 6, 15), and the story that they adopted both their name 
 and their abominable doctrines from a perversion of his remark that we ought vapaxpwQ * 
 rjj ffapxi, are insufficient. s-apaxp^^"* though used of unrestrained indulgence (SuidA 
 has also the sense of Siaxp^<r9ot, to mortify (Just. M. Anol, 49). Irenaeus (c. ffaer. i. 47), 
 followed by many of the Fathers (Hippolytus, Jl, H. vii. 36 ; Tertullian, De Pratscr. 
 Hacret. c. 46), accepts the tradition of his connexion with the sect. Clemens of 
 Alexandria, while defending him from the charge of personal immorality, and admitting 
 that the meaning of his words (which, to say the least, were unfortunately cltosen) had 
 
 entirely misunderstood (1^9 fyKparrtov TW wtpt<rfm>ta.<rnn qSorav rfc " vaiM-xaiiaQn rj
 
 76 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAtTL. 
 
 election was s crisis in the history of the Church. At the work of Philip vre 
 shall glance hereafter, but wo must now follow the career of Stephen, which, 
 brief as it was, marked the beginning of a memorable epoch. For St. Stephen 
 must be regarded as the immediate predecessor of him who took the most pro- 
 minent part in bringing about his martyrdom ; he must be regarded as having 
 been, in a far truer sense than Gamaliel himself, the Teacher of St Paul. St. 
 Paul has, indeed, been called a "colossal St. Stephen;" but had the life of 
 St. Stephen been prolonged had he not been summoned, it may be, to yet 
 loftier spheres of activity we know not to what further heights of moral 
 grandeur he might have attained. "We possess but a single speech to show his 
 intellect and inspiration, and we are suffered to catch but one glimpse of his 
 life. His speech influenced the whole career of the greatest of the Apostles, 
 and his death is the earliest martyrdom. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 WORK AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 
 
 Flai'Acu & 5t$dffKa\os. BASIL SELETJC. Orat. de S. Sleph. 
 
 Kal ISoi ns iv rb \fy6fievov craipus tl rty o~o<f>ta.t> rov ~3,Ttq>a.vov, tl rfyv Tlerpov 
 I rV Tlav\ov pv/.i)jv Ivvo-tifffif, ircDs ovSfv avrovs ttyfpev ovSev v<piffTa.TO, ob 
 Sjjfjieaf Bv/j.bs t ov rvpd.vv<av ttra.va.ffTd.atis, ov Sa.t/j.6veav fVjj9ou\}j, ov 6a.va.roi Ka.dr,/j.fpu.'ol. 
 i\\' &(nrfp 7TOTa.ft.ol iro\\q> T(f fiotfo <f>(p6fjL(i'oi ovTW TfafTd Trapao'vpot'TfS inn) t a~av. 
 S. CHRYS. in Joan Horn. li. Opp. viii. 30. 
 
 " This farther only have I to say, my lords, that like as St. Paul was present and 
 consenting to the death of the proto-martyr St. Stephen, and yet they be now twain 
 holy saints in heaven, . . . so I verily trust we may hereafter meet in heaven 
 merrily together, to our everlasting salvation." Last Words of Sir T. More to his 
 Judges. 
 
 THE appointment of the Seven, partly because of their zeal and power, and 
 partly because of the greater freedom secured for the Apostles, led to marked 
 successes in the progress of the Church. Net only was the number of 
 disciples in Jerusalem greatly multiplied, but even a large number of the 
 priests 1 became obedient to the faith. Up to this time the acceptance of the 
 
 rap*!" chSao-icei, Strom, iii. iv. 26, ed. Pott., p. 523), yet tells a dubious, and probably 
 mistaken, story about his conduct when charged with jealousy of his wife. This story 
 is repeated by Eusebius (//. E. iii. 29), and other Fathers. For further information on 
 the subject, and on the identification by Cocceius of Nicolas with Balaam in Kev. ii., see 
 Gieseler, Ecc. Ilist. i. 86, E.T. ; Mansel, Gnostic Her., p. 72; Derenbourg, p. 3C3. 
 
 1 Cf. John xii. 42. Commentators have resorted to extraordinary shifts to get rid of 
 this simple statement, which, as I have shown in the text, involves no improbability. 
 Some would adopt the wholly worthless v. 1. lovScuW found in a few cursive M8S. and 
 the Philoxenian Syriac. Others accept Beza's conjectural emendation, iroAus re oxAos K<U 
 itp<W (sc. rif). Others, again, follow Heinsius and Eisner in the suggestion that 
 oxAos -ruiv icptiov means "priests of the common order," "plebeian priests," what the Jews 
 might have called yiNH oy or " people-of-the-land priests," as distinguished from the 
 Thalmtdt kachachdmim, or " learned priests ; " but there is no trace that any such dis- 
 tinction existed, although it is in itself all but certain that none of these converts came
 
 WOBK AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 77 
 
 Gospel, so far from involving any rupture with Judaism, was consistent with 
 a most scrupulous devotion to its observances. It must be borne in mind that 
 the priests in Jerusalem, and a few other cities, were a multitudinous body, 1 
 and that it was only the narrow aristocratic clique of a few alien families who 
 were Sadduceea in theology and Herodians in politics. Many of the lower 
 ranks of the priesthood were doubtless Pharisees, and as the Pharisees were 
 devoted to the doctrine of the Resurrection, there was nothing inconsistent 
 with their traditions in admitting the Messiahship of a Risen Saviour. Such 
 a belief would at this time, and indeed long afterwards, have made little 
 difference in their general position, although if they were true believers it 
 would make a vast difference in their inward life. The simplicity, the fervour, 
 the unity, the spiritual gifts of the little company of Galilaeans, would be 
 likely to attract the serious and thoughtful. They would be won by these 
 graces far more than by irresistible logic, or by the appeals of powerful elo- 
 quence. The mission of the Apostles at this time was, as has been well 
 observed, no mere apostolate of rhetoric, nor would they for a moment pretend 
 to bo other than they were illiterate men, untrained in the schools of tech- 
 nical theology and rabbinic wisdom. Had they been otherwise, the argument 
 for the truth of Christianity, which is derived from the extraordinary rapidity 
 of its dissemination, would have lost half its force. The weapons of the 
 Apostolic warfare were not carnal. Converts were won, not by learning or 
 argument, but by the power of a new testimony and the spirit of a new life. 
 
 Up to this period the name of Stephen has not occurred in Christian 
 history, and as the tradition that he had been one of the seventy disciples is 
 valueless, 2 we know nothing of the circumstances of his conversion to Chris- 
 tianity. His recognition, however, of the glorified figure, which he saw in his 
 ecstatic vision, as the figure of Him who on earth had called Himself " the Son 
 of Man," makes it probable that he was one of those who had enjoyed the 
 advantage of hearing the living Jesus, and of drawing from its very fountain- 
 head the river of the water of life. 3 We would fain know more of one who, 
 in so brief a space of time, played a part so nobly wise. But it was with 
 Stephen as it has been with myriads of others whose names have been written 
 in the Book of Life ; they have been unknown among men, or known only 
 during one brief epoch, or for one great deed. For a moment, but for a 
 moment only, the First Martyr steps into the full light of history. Our 
 insight into his greatness is derived almost solely from the record of a single 
 speech and a single day the last speech he ever uttered the last day of his 
 mortal life. 
 
 from the families of the lordly and supercilious Boethusim, Kamhiia, &c. But neither 
 here nor in i. 15, o\\.o<s wo^itiav, has 6x*o a contemptuous sense. 
 
 1 4,289 had returned with Ezra (ii. 3639). 
 
 2 Epiphan. Haer. zl., p. 50. 
 
 8 That he was a Hellenist is not merely a precarious inference from the Greek form of 
 his name, which may merely have been a rendering of the Aramaic Keltt, but is implied 
 by the narrative itself, and is rendered certain by the character of his speech ; but 
 whether he was trained at Alexandria, or was a Roman freedman (Humptre on Acta 
 vL 5}, and what had brought him to Jerusalem, we cannot tell.
 
 78 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 It was the/at^ of Stephen, together with his loving eiiergy and blameless 
 sanctity, which led to the choice of him as one of the Seven. No sooner was 
 he elected than he became the most prominent of thsin all. The grace which 
 shone in his colleagues shone yet more brightly in him, 1 and he stood on a 
 level with the Apostles in the power of working wonders among the people. 
 Many a man, who would otherwise have died unknown, has revealed to others 
 his inherent greatness on being entrusted with authority. The immense part 
 played by Stephen in the history of the Church was due to the development 
 of powers which might have remained latent but for the duties laid on him 
 by his new position. The distribution of alms seems to have been a part only 
 of the task assigned him. Like Philip, he was an Evangelist as well as a 
 Deacon, and tho speech which he delivered before the Saiihedrin, showing as 
 it does the logical force and concentrated firo of a great orator and a 
 practised controversialist, may explain tho stir which was caused by his 
 preaching. 
 
 The scenes of that preaching were the Hellenistic synagogues of Jerusalem, 
 To an almoner in a city where so many were poor, and to a Hellenist of 
 unusual eloquence, opportunities would constantly recur in which he was not 
 only permitted, but urged, to explain the tenets of the new society. Hitherto 
 that society was in full communion with tho Jewish Church. Stephen alone 
 was charged with utterances of a disloyal tendency against the tenets of 
 Pharisaism, and this is a proof how different was his preaching from that 
 of the Twelve, and how much earlier ho had arrived at the true appreciation 
 of the words of Jesus respecting tho extent and nature of His Kingdom, 
 That which, in the mind of a Peter, was still but a grain of mustard seed, 
 sown in the soil of Judaism, had already grown, in the soul of a Stephen, 
 into a mighty tree. The Twelve were still lingering in the portals of the 
 synagogue. For them the new wine of the kingdom of heaven had not yet 
 burst the old wine-skins. As yet they were only regarded as the heads of a 
 Jewish sect, 2 and although they believed that their faith would soon be the 
 faith of all the world, there is no trace that, up to this time, they ever dreamed 
 of the abrogation of Mosaism, or the free admission of uncircumcised Gentiles 
 into a full equality of spiritual privileges. A proselyte of righteousness one 
 who, like Nicolas of Antioch, had accepted the sign of circumcision might, 
 indeed, be hold worthy of honour ; but one who was only a " proselyte of the 
 gate," 3 one who hold back from the seal of the covenant made to Abraham, 
 would not be regarded as a full Christian any more than he would be regarded 
 as a full Jew. 
 
 Hence, up to this time, the Christians were looked on with no disfavour 
 by that Pharisaic party which regarded the Sadducees as intriguing apostates. 
 They were even inclined to make use of the Pvesurrection which the Christians 
 proclaimed, as a convenient means of harassing their rivals. Nor was it they 
 
 1 \-opiTo? (**, A, B, D, &.), not irt<rr**, Is the true reading in Acts vi. 8. 
 
 > Acts xxiv. 5 ; xxviii. 22, o'pto-tt. 
 
 The ncwie did not arise till later, but is hsro adopted for convenience* sake.
 
 WORK AHD MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 79 
 
 who had been guilty of the murder of Jesus. They had not, indeed, stirred 
 one finger for His deliverance, and it is probable that many of them all those 
 hypocrites of whom both Jesus and John had spoken as a viper brood had 
 looked with satisfaction on the crime by which their political opponents had 
 gilonced their common enemy. Yet they did not fear that His blood would be 
 brought on them, or that the Apostles would ever hurl on them or their 
 practices His terrible denunciations. Though the Christians had their private 
 meetings on the first day of the week, their special tenets, their sacramental 
 institutions, and their common meal, there was nothing reprehensible in these 
 observances, and there was something attractive even to Pharisees in their 
 faitliful simplicity and enthusiastic communism. 1 In all respects they were 
 " devout according to the Law." They would havo shrunk with horror from 
 any violation of the rules which separated clean from unclean meats ; they not 
 only observed the prescribed feasts of the Pentateuch and its single fast, but 
 even adopted the fasts which had been sanctioned by the tradition of the oral 
 Law ; they had their children duly circumcised ; they approved and practised 
 the vows of the Nazarites; they never omitted to be on their knees in the 
 Temple, or with their faces turned towards it, at the three stated hours 
 of prayer. 8 It needs but a glance at the symbolism of the Apocalypse to see 
 how dear to them were the names, the reminiscences, the Levitical ceremonial, 
 the Temple worship of their Hebrew fellow-citizens. Not many years later, 
 the " many myriads of Jews ^vho believed were all zealous of the Law," and 
 would have thought it a disgrace to do otherwise than " to walk orderly." a 
 The position, therefore, which they held was simply that of one synagogue 
 more, in a city which, according to the Rabbis, could already boast that it 
 possessed as many as 480. They might have been called, and it is probable 
 that they were called, by way of geographical distinction, "the Synagogue of 
 tho Nazarenes." 
 
 But this acceptance with tho people could only be temporary and deceptive. 
 If, indeed, the early believers had never advanced beyond this stand-point, 
 Christianity might have been regarded to the last as nothing more than a 
 phase of Pharisaism, heretical for its acceptance of a crucified Messiah, 
 but worthy of honour for the scrupulosity of its religious life. But had 
 Christianity never been ruoro than this, then the olive branch would have died 
 with the oleaster on which it was engrafted. It was as necessary for the 
 Church as for the world that this hollow semblance of unison between 
 religions which, hi their distinctive differences, were essentially antagonistic, 
 should be rudely dissipated. It was necessary that all Christians, whether 
 
 1 The Jewa would have regarded them at that time as Chabertm, a body of people 
 associated, quite harmlessly, for a particular object. 
 
 2 Called mnrc, skachritk, at 9; nma, minckah, at 3.30; and l^sn. mear'b, at dark 
 (Acts ii. 1 ; iii. 1 ; x. 30). 
 
 3 Acts xxl. 20, 24. See for the facts In the previous paragraphs, Acts x. 9, 14, 80 ; 
 alii. 2, 3 ; xviii. 18, 21 ; xx. 6, 10 ; xxii. 3 ; Bom. riv. 5; Gal. iv. 10 ; v. 2 ; Phil. ii>- 2; 
 Rev. ii. 9 ; iii. 9 ; vii. 15 ; xi. 19, &o. ; Eeuss. Th&ol. Chrit. i. 291, who quotes Sulpio. 
 Sever, ii 81, " Christum Deura sub legia observatione credebaat."
 
 80 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Jews or Gentiles, should see how impossible it was to put a new patch on an 
 old garment. 
 
 This truth had been preached by Jesus to His Apostles, but, like many othet 
 of His words, it lay long dormant in their minds. After some of His deepest 
 utterances, in full consciousness that He could not at once be understood, He 
 had said, " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." And as they themselves 
 frankly confess, the Apostles had not always been among those "who had ears 
 to hear." Plain and reiterated as had been the prophecies which He had 
 addressed to them respecting His own crucifixion and resurrection, the first of 
 these events had plunged them into despair and horror, the second had burst 
 upon them with a shock of surprise. He who commanded the light to shine 
 out of darkness had, indeed, shined in their hearts " to give the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ;" 1 but still they 
 were well aware that they had this treasure "in earthen vessels." To 
 attribute to them an equality of endowments, or an entire unanimity of 
 opinion, is to contradict their plainest statements. To deny that their know- 
 ledge gradually widened is to ignore God's method of revelation, and to 
 set aside the evidence of facts. To the last they " knew in part, and they 
 prophesied in part." 2 Why was James the Lord's brother so highly respected 
 by the people as tradition tells us that he was P Why was Paul regarded by 
 them with such deadly hatred ? Because St. Paul recognised more fully than St. 
 James the future universal destiny of a Christianity separated from Judaic in- 
 stitutions. The Crucifixion had, in fact, been the protest of the Jew against 
 an isopolity of faith. " From that moment the fate of the nation was decided. 
 Her religion was to kill her. But when the Temple burst into flames, that re- 
 ligion had already spread its wings and gone out to conquer an entire world." s 
 
 Now, as might have been expected, and as was evidently designed by their 
 Divine Master, the last point on which the Galilsean Apostles attained to 
 clearness of view and consistency of action was the fact that the Mosaic Law 
 was to be superseded, even for the Jew, by a wider revelation. It is probable 
 that this truth, in all its fulness, was never finally apprehended by all the 
 Apostles. It is doubtful whether, humanly speaking, it would ever have been 
 grasped by any of them if their powers of insight had not been quickened, in 
 God's appointed method, by the fresh lessons which came to them through the 
 intellect and faith of men who had been brought up in larger views. The 
 obliteration of natural distinctions is no part of the divine method. The 
 inspiration of God never destroys the individuality of those holy souls which 
 it has made into sons of God and prophets. There are, as St. Paul so 
 earnestly tried to impress npon the infant Churches, diversities of gifts, 
 diversities of ministrations, diversities of operations, though it is the same 
 Spirit, the same Lord, the same God, who worketh all things in all.* The 
 Hellenistic training of a Stephen and a Saul prepared them for the acceptance 
 
 1 2 Cor. iv. 6, 7. 1 Cor. xtti. 9. * Kuonen, Rel. tflsr. Ill, 281, 
 
 1 Cor. xlL f-,
 
 WORK AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 81 
 
 of lessons which nothing short of an express miracle could have made 
 immediately intelligible to a Peter and a James. 
 
 Now the relation of tho Law to the Gospel had been exactly one of those 
 subjects on which Jesus, in accordance with a divine purpose, had spoken with 
 a certain reserve. His mission had been to found a kingdom, not to promulgate 
 a theology ; He had died not to formulate a system, but to redeem & race. His 
 work liad been not to construct the dogmas of formal creeds, but to purify the 
 soul of man, by placing him in immediate relation to the Father in Heaven. 
 It required many years for Jewish converts to understand the meaning of tho 
 saying that " He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfil." Its meaning could 
 indeed only become clear in the light of other sayings of which they overlooked 
 tho force. The Apostles had seen Him obedient to the Law ; they had seen 
 Him worship in the Temple and the Synagogues, and had accompanied Him in 
 His journeys to the Feasts. He had never told them in so many words that tho 
 glory of the Law, like the light which lingered on the face of Moses, was to be 
 done away. They had failed to comprehend the ultimate tendency and signifi- 
 cance of His words and actions respecting the Sabbath, 1 respecting outward 
 observances, 2 respecting divorce, 3 respecting the future universality of spiritual 
 worship. 4 They remembered, doubtless, what He had said about the perma- 
 nence of every yod and horn of a letter in the Law, 6 but they had not remarked 
 that the assertion of the pre-eminence of moral over ceremonial duties is one 
 unknown to the Law itself. Nor had they seen that His fulfilment of the Law 
 had consisted in its spiritualisation ; that He had not only extended to infini- 
 tude the range of its obligations, but had derived their authority from deeper 
 principles, and surrounded their fulfilment with diviner sanctions. Nor, again, 
 had they observed how much was involved in the emphatic quotation by Christ 
 of that passage of Hosoa, " I will have mercy and not sacrifice." 6 They were 
 not yet ripe for the conviction that to attach primary importance to Mosaic 
 regulations after they had been admitted into the kingdom of Heaven, was to 
 fix their eyes upon a waning star while the dawn was gradually broadening into 
 boundless day. 
 
 About the early ministry of Stephen we are told comparatively little in the 
 Acts, but its immense importance has become more clear in the light of subse- 
 quent history. It is probable that he himself can never have formed the 
 remotest conception of the vast results results among millions of Christians 
 through centuries of progress which in God's Providence should arise from 
 the first clear statement of those truths which he was the first to perceive. 
 Had he done so he would have been still more thankful for the ability with 
 which he was inspired to support them, and for the holy courage which pre- 
 vented him from quailing for an instant under the storm of violence and hatred 
 which his words awoke. 
 
 What it was which took him to the synagogues of Jewish Hellenists we do 
 
 > Mark ii. 27; John v. 17, J Matt. ts. 13 ; xii. 7. s Matt. xix. 3, 6, 8 ; v. S2, 
 
 John iv. 22. " Matt. v. 18. Matt. ix. 13 ; xii. 7.
 
 82 THE LIFE AND WOES OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 not know. It may have been the same missionary zeal which afterwards 
 carried to so many regions the young man of Tarsus who at this time was 
 among his ablest opponents. All that wo are told is that " there arose some 
 of the synagogue which is called the synagogue of the Libertines and Cyrenians, 
 and Alexandrians, and those of CUicia and Asia disputing with Stephen." 
 The form of the sentence is so obscure that it is impossible to tell whether we 
 are meant to understand that the opponents of Stephen were the members of 
 one synagogue which united these widely-scattered elements ; of five separate 
 synagogues ; of three synagogues namely, that of the Freedmen, that of the 
 African, and that of the Asiatic Hellenists ; or of two distinct synagogues, of 
 which one was frequented by the Hellenists of Rome, Greece, and Alexandria ; 
 the other by those of Cilicia and Proconsular Asia. The number of synagogues 
 in Jerusalem was (as I have already mentioned) so large that there is no diffi- 
 culty in believing that each of these bodies had their own separate place of 
 religious meeting, 1 just as at this day in Jerusalem there are separate syna- 
 gogues for the Spanish Sephardim, the Dutch Anshe hod, and the German and 
 Polish Ashkenazim. 2 The freedmen may have been the descendants of those 
 Jews whom Pompey had sent captive to Italy, and Jews were to be counted by 
 myriads in Greece, in Alexandria, and in tho cities of Asia. But to us the 
 most interesting of all these Greek-speaking Jews was Saul of Tarsus, who, 
 beyond all reasonable doubt, was a member of tho synagogue of tho Cilicians.a 
 and who hi that case must not only have taken his part in the disputes which 
 followed the exhortations of the fervid deacon,* but as a scholar of Gamaliel 
 and a zealous Pharisee, must have occupied a prominent position as an uncom- 
 promising champion of the traditions of the fathers. 
 
 Though the Saul of this period must have differed widely from that Paul, 
 the slave of Jesus Christ, whom we know so well, yet the main features of his 
 personality must have been tho same. He could not have failed to recognise 
 the moral beauty, the dauntless courage, the burning passion latent in the 
 tenderness of Stephen's character. The white ashes of a religion which had 
 smouldered into formalism lay thickly scattered over his own heart, but the fire 
 of a genuine sincerity burned below. Trained as he had been for years in 
 Rabbinic minutiae, he had not yet so far grown old in a deadening system as to 
 mistake the painted cere-cloths of the mummy for the grace and flush of healthy 
 life. While he listened to St. Stephen, he must surely have felt the contrast 
 between a dead theology and a living faith ; between a kindling inspiration and 
 a barren exegesis ; between a minute analysis of unimportant ceremonials and 
 a preaching that stirred tho inmost depths of tho troubled heart. Even the 
 
 1 The assertion of the Talmud (cf. Sanhedr. f . 58, 1) that there wore 480 synagogues 
 in Jerusalem is indeed valueless, because the remarks of the Kabbis about Jerusalem, 
 Bethyr, and indeed Palestine generally, are mere hyperbole ; but, as Kenan remarks (Les 
 ApCtres, p. 109), it does not seem at all impossible to those who are familiar with the 
 innumerable mosques of Mahommedan cities. We are informed in the Talmud that each 
 synagogue had not only a school for the teaching of Scripture, but also for the teaching 
 of traditions (nittJDb TiDbn m, Megillah, f . 73, 4). 
 
 2 Seo Frankl, Jews in the East, ii. 21, E. T. 
 
 ' He may have been a Libtrtimus also. * Acts vi. 9,
 
 WOEK AND MAETXKEOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 83 
 
 r&go whicli is often intensified by tho unconscious riso of an irresistible 
 conviction could not wholly prevent him from perceiving that theso 
 preachers of a gospel which he disdained as an execrable superstition, had 
 found "in Christ" the secret of a light and joy, and love and peace, com- 
 pared with which his own condition was that of one who was chained indis- 
 solubly to a corpse. 
 
 We catch but a single glimpse of these furious controversies. Their imme- 
 diate effect was the signal triumph of St. Stephen in argument. The Hellen- 
 ists were unable to withstand tho wisdom and the spirit with which he spako. 
 Disdainful Rabbinists were at onc amazed and disgusted to find that he with 
 whom they now had to deal was no rude provincial, no illiterate am ha-arets, 
 no humble hediot, lite tho fishermen and tax-gatherers of Galilee ; but one 
 who had been trained in the culture of heathen cities as well as in the learning 
 of Jewish communities a disputant who could meet them with their own 
 weapons, and speak Greek as fluently as themselves. Steeped in centuries of 
 prejudice, engrained with traditions of which the truth had never been ques- 
 tioned, they must have imagined that they would win an easy victory, and 
 convince a man of intelligence how degrading it was for him to accept a faith 
 on which, from the full height of their own ignorance, they complacently looked 
 down. How groat must have been their discomfiture to find that what they 
 had now to face was not a mere personal testimony which they could con- 
 temptuously set aside, but arguments based on premisses which they them- 
 selves admitted, enforced by methods which they recognised, and illustrated by 
 a learning which they could not surpass ! How bitter must have been their 
 rage when they heard doctrines subversive of their most cherished principles 
 maintained with a wisdom which differed not only in degree, but even in kind, 
 from tho loftiest attainments of their foremost Rabbis even of those whose 
 merits had been rewarded by tho flattering titles of " Rooters of Mountains " 
 and " Glories of the Law !" 
 
 At first tho only discussion likely to arise would be as to the Messiahship 
 of Jesus, the meaning of His death, the fact of His Resurrection. Those 
 would be points on which the ordinary Jew would have regarded argument as 
 superfluous condescension. To him the stumbling-block of the Cross would 
 have been insurmountable. In all ages the Messianic hope had been pro- 
 minent in the minds of tho most enlightened Jews, but during the Exile and 
 the Restoration it had become tho central faith of their religion. It was this 
 belief which, more than any other, kindled their patriotism, consoled their 
 sorrows, and inspired their obedience. If a Shammai used to spend the whole 
 week in meditating how ho could most rigidly observe the Sabbath if the 
 Pharisees regarded it as the main function of their existence to raise a hedge 
 around the Law tho inspiring motivo was a belief that if only for one day 
 Israel were entirely faithful, the Messiah would come. And what a coming ! 
 How should the Prince of the House of David smite the nations with the 
 sword of his mouth ! How should He break them in pieces like a potter's 
 vessel ! How should He exalt the children of Israel into kings of the earth,
 
 84 THE LIFE AND WORK OB 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 and feed them with the flesh of Behemoth, and Leviathan, and the bird Bar 
 Juchne, and pour at their feet the treasures of the sea! And to say that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah to suppose that all the splendid 
 prophecies of patriarchs, and seers, and kings, from the Divine Voice which 
 spoke to Adam in Paradise, to the last utterance of the Angel Halachi all 
 pointed to, all centred in, One who had been the carpenter of Nazareth, and 
 whom they had seen crucified between two brigands to say that their very 
 Messiah had just been "hung" 1 by Gentile tyrants at the instance of their 
 own priests ; this, to most of the hearers in the synagogue, would have, 
 seemed wicked if it had not seemed too absurd. "Was there not one sufficient 
 and decisive answer to it all in the one verse of the Law " Cursed by God is 
 he that hangeth on a tree P" a 
 
 Yet this was the thesis which such a man as Stephen no ignorant 
 Galilsean, but a learned Hellenist undertook to prove, and did prove with 
 such power as to produce silence if not assent, and hatred if not conviction. 
 For with all their adoration of the letter, the Rabbis and Pharisees had but 
 half read their Scriptures, or had read them only to use as an engine of 
 religious intolerance, and to pick out the views which most blended with their 
 personal preconceptions. They had laid it down as a principle of interpreta- 
 tion that the entire books of the Canon prophesied of nothing else but 
 the days of the Messiah. How, under these circumstances, they could 
 possibly miss the conception of a suffering as well as of a triumphaid 
 Messiah, 3 might well amaze us, if there had not been proof in all ages that 
 men may entirely overlook the statements and pervert the meaning of their 
 own sacred books, because, when they read those books, the veil of obstinate 
 prejudice is lying upon their hearts. But when the view of ancient prophecy, 
 which proved that it behoved Christ thus to suffer and to enter into His 
 glory, 4 was forcibly presented to them by the insight and eloquence of one 
 who was their equal in learning and their superior in illumination, we can 
 understand the difficulties to which they were reduced. How, for instance, 
 could they elude the force of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, to which their 
 Rabbis freely accorded a Messianic interpretation ? The Messianic applica- 
 tion of what is there said about the Servant of Jehovah, and the deep humi- 
 liation borne for the sake of others, is not only found in the Targuin of 
 Jonathan and in many Rabbinic allusions, down even to the Book Zohar, but 
 seems to have remained entirely undisputed until the mediaeval Rabbis found 
 
 . 
 
 3 Dent. xxi. 23, .car)pa/ieV<K iiro TOV eou. The later view of this, "He that ia 
 hanged is an insult to God " arose from the fact that Jewish patriots in the Jewish War 
 were crucified by scores. St. Paul, in quoting the verse, omits the vrrb 0eoO (Gal. ii. 13 ; 
 and Lightfoot, p. 133). 
 
 3 Of the notion of a suffering Messiah, Ben Joseph, as distinguished from the 
 triumphant son of David (Rashi on Isa. xxiv. 18 ; Succah, 52, 1, 2, where reference is 
 made to Zech. xii. 10, and Ps. ii., &c. ; see Otho, Lex. Rob. s. v. Messiah), there is no 
 trace in Jewish literature till long afterwards. St. Paul's witness from Moses and the 
 Prop bets el Tra^To* 6 Xpiorbs, Acts x?vi. ?3 only woke a sneer from Agrippa IJ. 
 
 * Luke xiiv. 20,
 
 WORK AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 85 
 
 themselves inconvenienced by it in their controversies with Christians. 1 Yet 
 this was but an isolated prophecy, and the Christiana could refer to passage 
 after passage which, on the very principles of their adversaries, not only 
 justified them in accepting as the Christ One whom the rulers of the Jews 
 had crucified, but even distinctly foreshadowed the mission of His Fore- 
 runner ; His ministry on the shores of Gennesareth ; His humble entry into 
 Jerusalem ; His rejection by His own people ; the disbelief of His announce- 
 ments ; the treachery of one of His own followers ; the mean price paid for 
 His blood ; His death as a malefactor ; even the bitter and stupefying drinks 
 that had been offered to Him ; and the lots cast upon His clothes no less 
 than His victory over the grave by Resurrection, on the third day, from the 
 dead, and His final exaltation at the right hand of God. 2 How tremendous 
 the cogency of such arguments would be to the hearers of Stephen cannot bo 
 shown more strikingly than by the use made of them by St. Paul after tho 
 conversion which they doubtless helped to bring about. It must have been 
 from St. Stephen that he heard them first, and they became so convincing to 
 him that he constantly employs the same or analogous arguments in his own 
 reasonings with his unconverted countrymen. 3 
 
 It is clear that, in the course of argument, Stephen was led to adduce some 
 of those deep sayings as to the purpose of the life of Christ which the keen 
 insight of hate^had rendered more intelligible to the enemies of our Lord than 
 they had been in the first instance to His friends. Many of those priests and 
 Pharisees who had been baptised into the Church of Christ with the notion 
 that their new belief was compatible with an unchanged loyalty to Judaism, 
 had shown less understanding of the sayings of their Master, and loss appre- 
 ciation of the grandeur of His mission, than the Sadducees whose hatred had 
 handed Him over to the secular arm. It did lie within the natural interpreta- 
 tion of Christ's language that the Law of Moses, which the Jews at once 
 idolised aud evaded, was destined to be annulled ; not, indeed, those moral 
 sanctions of it which were eternal in obligation, but the complicated system 
 wherein those moral commandments were so deeply imbedded. The Jewish 
 race were right to reverence Moses as an instrument in the hands of God to 
 lay tho deepest foundations of a national life. As a Lawgiver whose Decaloguo 
 is so comprehensive in its brevity as to transcend all other codes as the solo 
 Lawgiver who laid his prohibition against the beginnings of evil, by daring to 
 forbid an evil thought as one who established for his people a monotheistic 
 faith, a significant worship, and an undefinable hope he deserved the grati- 
 tude and reverence of mankind. _ That this under-official of an obscure sect of 
 
 1 Proofs of this statement may be found in Dr. A. Wiinsche's Die Leiden des Messias, 
 and several quotations from hia book may be found in the Speaker's Commentary, ad loc. 
 
 2 See Is. xl. 3 ; Mark i. 3 ; Mai. iii. 1 ; Matt. xi. 10 ; Is. viii. 14 ; ix. 1 ; Matt. iv. 14 ; 
 Is. Ixi. 1 ; Luke iv. 18 ; Ps. Ixxviii. 2 ; Matt. xiii. 35 ; Ps. cxviii. 22 ; Luke ii. 34 ; Acts 
 iv. 11; xiii. 41; Ps. xli. 9; Zech. xi. 12; John xiii. 18; Matt. xxvi. 15; xxvii. 9, 10; 
 Zech. xii. 10 ; John xis. 37 ; Isa. liii. 9 ; Ps. xvi. 10 ; Matt. xii. 40 ; Acts ii. 27 ; Ps. ex. 
 1; Acts ii. 33; Heb. i. 13, &c. (See Dariaon, On Prophecy, pattim ; Hausrath, p. 112, 
 ueqq.) 
 
 3 Kph. ii. 20; Rom. b, 84; &c,
 
 86 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PATH,. 
 
 yesterday should dare to move his tongue against that awful name, and 
 prophesy the abolition of institutions of which some had been delivered to their 
 fathers of old from the burning cragc of Sinai, and others had been handed 
 down from the lips of the mighty teacher through the long series of priests 
 and prophets, was to them something worse than folly and presumption it 
 was a blasphemy and a crime ! 
 
 And how did he dare to speak one word against, or hint one doubt as to the 
 permanent glory of, the Temple ? The glowing descriptions of the Talmud 
 respecting its colossal size and royal splendour are but echoes of the intense 
 love which breathes throughout the Psalms. In the heart of Saul any word 
 which might sound like a slight to " the place where God's honour dwelt " 
 would excite a peculiar indignation. When the conflagration seized its roofs 
 of cedar-wood and melted its golden tables, every Jew in the city was fired 
 with a rage which made him fight with superhuman strength 
 
 41 Through their torn veins reviving fury ran, 
 And life's last anger warmed the dying man." 
 
 Among those frenzied combatants was a body of Tarsian youths who gladly 
 devoted their lives to the rescue of Jerusalem. "What they felt at that 
 supreme moment may show us what such a zealot as Saul of Tarsus would feel, 
 when ho heard one who called himself a Jew use language which sounded like 
 disparagement of " the glory of the whole earth." 
 
 Foiled in argument, the Hellenists of the synagogues adopted the usual 
 resource of defeated controversialists who have the upper hand. They appealed 
 to violence for the suppression of reason. They first stirred up the people 
 whose inflammable ignorance made them the ready tools of any agitator and 
 through them aroused the attention of the Jewish authorities. Their plot was 
 soon ripe. There was no need of the midnight secrecy which had marked the 
 arrest of Jesus. There was no need to secure the services of the Captain of the 
 Temple to arrest Stephen at twilight, as he had arrested Peter and John. 
 There was no need even to suppress all semblance of violence, lest the people 
 should stone them for their unauthorised interference. The circumstances of 
 the day enabled them to assume unwonted boldness, because they were at the 
 moment enjoying a sort of interregnum from Roman authority. The approval 
 of the multitude had been alienated by the first rumour of defective patriotism. 
 When every rank of Jewish society had been stirred to fury by false witnesses 
 whom these Hellenists had suborned, they seized a favourable moment, sud- 
 denly came upon Stephen, 1 either while he was teaching in a synagogue, or 
 while he was transacting the duties of an almoner, and led him away 
 apparently without a moment's pause into the presence of the assembled 
 Sanhedrin. Everything was ready ; everything seemed to point to a foregone 
 conclusion. The false witnesses were at hand, and confronted their victim 
 with the charge of incessant harangues against "this Holy Place" the 
 expression seems to show that the Sanhedrin were for this timo sitting in their 
 
 1 Ada vi, 12, fcr;#Tsvrc ; cf. rrii 6.
 
 WX>BX AND XASITSDOM Off ST. STEPHEK. 87 
 
 famous " Hall of Squares," and against the Law. 1 In support of this general 
 accusation, they testified that they had heard him say that Jesus "this 
 Nazarene," 2 as they indignantly add to distinguish Him from others who bore 
 that common name " shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs 
 which Moses handed down to us." It is evident that these false witnesses 
 made some attempt to base their accusation upon truth. There was good 
 policy in this, as false witnesses iu all ages have been cunning enough to see. 
 Half truths are often the most absolute of lies, because 
 
 " A lie which ia half a truth ia ever the blackest of lies 
 For a lie which ia all a lie may be met and fought with outright, 
 But a lie which is part a truth ia a harder matter to fight." 
 
 It is certain that if Stephen had not used the very expressions with which they 
 charged him, he had used others not unlike them. It is his immortal glory to 
 have remembered the words of Jesus, and to have interpreted them aright. 
 Against the moral Law the great Ten "Words of Sinai, or any of those 
 precepts of exquisite humanity and tenderness which lie scattered amid the 
 ceremonial observances he is not even falsely accused of having uttered a 
 word. But against the permanent validity of the ceremonial Law he may 
 have spoken with freedom ; for, as we have seen, its destined abrogation was 
 involved in the very slight importance which Jesus had attached to it. And 
 for the Oral Law it is probable that Stephen, whose training would have 
 rendered impossible any minute fulfilment of its regulations, neither felt nor 
 professed respect. The expression used by the witnesses against him seems to 
 show that it was mainly, though not perhaps exclusively, of this Oral Law that 
 he had been thinking. 8 It was not, perhaps, any doubt as to its authenticity 
 which made him teach that Jesus should change its customs, for in those days 
 the critical spirit was not sufficiently developed to give rise to any challenge of a 
 current assertion; but ho had foreseen the future nullity of these "traditions of 
 the fathers," partly from their own inherent worthlessness, and partly because 
 he may have heard, or had repeated to him, the stern denunciation which the 
 worst of these traditions had drawn from the lips of Christ Himself.* 
 
 But though Stephen must have seen that the witnesses were really falsa 
 witnesses, because they misrepresented the tone and the true significance 
 of the language which he had used although, too, he was conscious how 
 dangerous was his position as one accused of blasphemy against Moses, 
 against the Temple, against the traditions, and against God it naver 
 occurred to him to escape his danger by a technicality or a compromise. 
 To throw discredit even upon the Oral Law would not be without danger 
 in the presence of an assembly whoso members owed to its traditions no 
 little of the authority which they enjoyed. 6 But Stephen did not at all 
 intend to confine his argument to this narrow range. Rather the conviction 
 
 1 Acts vi. 13, ov iraverai pr/fiara XaAuv. * Acts vl. 14, 'IijcrpD*, o Natfupato? ovro. 
 
 Acts vi 14, TO i$y S. TrapeSxKtv jm"> MwvoTjj. (Cf. Jos. Antt. riii. 10, 6, and 16, 2.) 
 Matt. xv. 2-6 ; Mark vii. 3, 5, 8, 9, 13. 
 
 Maimon.JVe/. to the Yad Hackasakah ; McOaol, Old Paths, p. 335.
 
 THE LIFE AND WOEK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 came upon him that now was the time to speak out that this was the 
 destined moment in which, even if need be to the death, he was to bear 
 witness to the inner meaning of the Kingdom of his Lord. That conviction 
 an inspiration from on high gave unwonted grandeur and hcavenliuess 
 to his look, his words, his attitude. His whole bearing was ennobled, his 
 whole being was transfigured by a consciousness which illuminated his 
 very countenance. It is probable that the unanimous tradition of the 
 Church is correct in representing him as youthful and beautiful ; but now 
 there was something about him far more beautiful than youth or beauty 
 could bestow. In the spiritual light which radiated from him he seemed 
 to be overshadowed by the Shechinah, which had so long vanished from 
 between the wings of the Temple cherubim. While the witnesses had 
 been delivering their testimony, no one had observed the sudden brightness 
 which seemed to be stealing over him; but when the charge was finished, 
 and every eye was turned from the accusers to a fixed gaze on the accused, 1 
 all who were seated in the Sanhedrin and one of the number, in all 
 probability, was Saul of Tarsus " saw his face as it had been the face 
 of an angel." 
 
 Jn the sudden hush that followed, the voice of the High Priest Jonathan 
 was heard putting to the accused the customary and formal question 
 
 " Are these things so ? " a 
 
 In reply to that question began the speech which is one of the earliest, 
 as it is one of the most interesting, documents of the Christian Church. 
 Although it was delivered before the Sanhedrin, there can be little doubt 
 that it was delivered in Greek, which, in the bilingual condition of Palestine 
 and, indeed, of the civilised world in general at that time, would be 
 perfectly understood by the members of the Sanhedrin, and which was 
 perhaps the only language which Stephen could speak with fluency. 8 The 
 quotations from the Old Testament follow the Septuagint, even where it 
 differs from the Hebrew, and the individuality which characterises almost 
 every sentence of the speech forbids us to look on it as a mere conjectural 
 paraphrase. There is no difficulty in accounting for its preservation. Apart 
 from the fact that two secretaries were always present at the judicial 
 proceedings of the Sanhedrin, 4 there are words and utterances which, at 
 certain times, are branded indelibly upon the memory of their hearers ; and 
 since we can trace the deep impression made by this speech on the mind of 
 
 1 Acts vi. 15, aTeviVaire* s OVT&V airavrw. 
 
 2 St. Chrysostom sees in the apparent mildness of the question an indication that the 
 High Priest and the Sanhedrin were awed by the supernatural brightness of the martyr's 
 
 look opos (of ficrii cirieiKetaf ^ pu'T7)(7ts KOI ovSev rfwt ^)OpTi(cby Ixovo-a J (ffomil. XV. 171 Act.), 
 
 But the question appears to have been a regular formula of interrogation. It was, in 
 fact, the "Guilty or Not Guilty?" of the Jewish Supreme Court. 
 
 3 Against this view are urged (1) the unlikelihood that St. Stephen would have 
 pleaded in Greek before the Sanhedrin ; (2) the use of the Hebraism ovpavoi in Acts vii. 
 58. But as to 1, if even Philo knew no Hebrew, Stephen may have known none ; and, 
 2, the word ovpai-ot points to a special Jewish belief, independent of language. 
 
 4 See Jahn, Archaeol. Bibl. 248. He quotes no authority, and I at first felt soma 
 doubt about the assertion, but I find it so stated in the Mi shim, Sankcdr. iv. 2.
 
 WOBK AND MABTYBDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 89 
 
 St. Paul, we find little difficulty in adopting the conjecture that its preserva- 
 tion was due to him. The Hagadoth in which it abounds, the variations 
 from historical accuracy, the free citation of passages from the Old Testa- 
 ment,'' the roughness of style, above all the concentrated force which makes 
 it lend itself so readily to differing interpretations, are characteristics which 
 leave on our minds no shadow of doubt that whoever may have been the 
 reporter, we have here at least an outline of Stephen's speech. And this 
 speech marked a crisis in the annals of Christianity. It led to consequences that 
 changed the Church from a Judaic sect at Jerusalem, into the Church of the 
 Gentiles and of the world. It marks the commencing severance of two insti- 
 tutions which had not yet discovered that they were mutually irreconcilable. 
 
 Since the charge brought against St. Stephen was partly false and 
 partly true, it was his object to rebut what was false, and justify himself 
 against all blame for what was true. Hence apology and demonstration 
 are subtly blended throughout his appeal, but the apology is only secondary, 
 and the demonstration is mainly meant to rouse the dormant consciences 
 of his hearers. Charged with blasphemous words, he contents himself 
 with the incidental refutation of this charge by the entire tenor of the 
 language which he employs. After his courteous request for attention, his 
 very first words are to speak of God under one of His most awful titles of 
 majesty, as the God of the Shechinah. On the history of Moses he dwells 
 with all the enthusiasm of patriotic admiration. To the Temple he alludes 
 with entire reverence. Of Sinai and the living oracles he uses language 
 as full of solemnity as the most devoted Rabbi could desire. But while 
 he thus shows how impossible it must have been for him to have uttered 
 the language of a blasphemer, he is all the while aiming at the establish- 
 ment of facts far deeper than the proof of his own innocence. The 
 consummate art of his speech consists in the circumstance that while he 
 seems to be engaged in a calm, historical review, to which any Jewish 
 patriot might listen with delight and pride, he is step by step leading up 
 to conclusions which told with irresistible force against the opinions of his 
 judges. While he only seems to be reviewing the various migrations of 
 Abraham, and the chequered fortunes of the Patriarchs, he is really showing 
 that the covenants of God with His chosen people, having been made in Ur 
 and Haran and Egypt, were all parts of one progressive purpose, which 
 was so little dependent on ceremonials or places as to have been anterior 
 not only to the existence of the Tabernacle and Temple, not only to the 
 possession of the Holy Land, but even to the rite of circumcision itself. 1 
 
 1 What fruit the argument bore in the mind of St. Paul we may see in the emphasis 
 with which he dwells on " that faith of our father Abraham which he had being yet un- 
 circumcised " (Rom. iv. 12). How necessary it was to point this out will be seen from the 
 opinions of succeeding Rabbis. "Abraham," says Rabbi as "Juda the Holy," the 
 compiler of the Mishna, is called, KOT' ttoxnv "was not called perfect until he was cir- 
 cumcised, and by the merit of circumcision a covenant was made with him respecting the 
 giving of the land " ( Joreh Deah, 260, ap. McCaul, Old Paths, p. 451 ; Nedarim, f . 31, 2). 
 It is superfluous to add that the latter statement is a flat contradiction of Gen. xv. 18.
 
 90 THS LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PATCX. 
 
 While sketching tho career of Joseph, he is pointing allusively to tha 
 similar rejection of a deliverer greater than Joseph. While passing in 
 review the triple periods of forty years which made up the life of Moses, 
 he is again sketching the ministry of Christ, and silently pointing to the 
 fact that the Hebrew race had at every stage been false alike to Moses and 
 to God. This is why he narrates tho way in which, on the first appearance 
 of Moses to help his suffering countrymen, they rudely spurned his 
 interference ; and how in spite of their rejection he was chosen to lead 
 them out of the house of bondage. In defiance of this special commission 
 and it is well worth notice how, in order to conciliate their doepcr 
 attention, this palmary point in his favour is not triumphantly paraded, 
 but quietly introduced as an incident in his historic summary Moses had 
 himself taught them to regard his own legislation as provisional, by 
 bidding them listen to a Prophet like unto himself who should come 
 hereafter. But the history of Moses, whom they trusted, was fatal to 
 their pretence of allegiance. Even when he was on Sinai they had been 
 disloyal to him, and spoken of him as " this Moses," and as one who had 
 gone they knew not where. 1 And, false to Moses, they had been yet more 
 false to God. The Lovitical sacrifices had been abandoned from the very 
 time of their institution, for sacrifices to tho host of heaven; and the 
 tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of Remphan, 2 had been dearer to them 
 than the Tabernacle of Witness and the Shechinah of God. At last a 
 Jesus for, in order that he might be heard to due purpose, Stephen 
 suppresses the name of that Jesus of whom his thoughts were full led 
 them and their Tabernacle into the land of which he dispossessed the 
 Gentiles. That Tabernacle, after an obscure and dishonoured history, had 
 passed away, and it may perhaps be intimated that this was due to their 
 indifference and neglect. David their own David had indeed desired to 
 replace it by another, but the actual building of the House was carried out 
 by the less faithful Solomon. 8 But even at the very time the House was 
 built it had been implied in the Prayer of David, and in the dedication 
 prayer of Solomon, 4 that " the Most High dwelleth not hi temples made with 
 hands." And to guard against the dangerous superstition into which the 
 reverence paid to material places is apt to degenerate to obviate the trust 
 in lying words which thought it sufficient to exclaim, " The Temple of the 
 Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these" tho 
 great Prophet had cried, in God's name, 6 " Heaven is my throne, and earth 
 is my footstool ; what house will ye build for me, saith the Lord, or what 
 is the place of my abiding ? Did not my hand make all these things P " 
 
 1 Perhaps there is a passing allusion to the expression, "Jesus, this Nazarene," which 
 they had just heard from the lips of the false witnesses. 
 
 5 The LXX. reading for tho Hebrew Chiun. 
 
 8 It must remain doubtful whether any [contrast Is intended between the 
 (r. Suid, s.v.) designed by David, and the ofcw built by Solomon. 
 
 * I Kings viii. 27 ; 1 Chron. xxix. 11 ; quoted by St. Paol, Acts xvii. 24. 
 
 * Isa. uvi 1< S.
 
 WOBK AND MABTYBDOM OV ST. STSPEKH. 01 
 
 The inference from this that the day must come, of which Jesus had 
 prophesied to the woman of Samaria, in which neither in Gevizim nor 
 yet in Jerusalem should men worship the Father, constituted a perfect 
 defence against the charge that anything which ho had said could be 
 regarded as a blasphemy against the Temple. 
 
 Thus far he had fulfilled all the objects of hia speech, and had shown that 
 injurious words had been as far as possible from his thoughts. It had become 
 clear also from his summary of the national story that the principles which he 
 had advocated were in accordance with the teaching of those past ages ; that 
 the rejection of Christ by the rulers of His nation was no argument against 
 His chums ; that the Temple could not have been meant to be the object of an 
 endless honour; lastly, that if he had said that Jesus should change the 
 customs which Moses had delivered, Moses himself had indicated that in 
 God's due time his entire dispensation was destined to pass away. And he 
 had stated the grounds from which these conclusions followed, rather than 
 urged upon them the inferences themselves. He had done this in deference 
 to their passions and prejudices, and in the hope of bringing the truth gently 
 into their hearts. He might have continued the story through centuries of 
 weak or apostate kings, stained with the blood of rejected prophets, down to 
 the great retribution of the exile ; and ho might have shown how, after the 
 exile, the obsolete idolatry of the gods of wood and stone had only been 
 superseded by the subtler and more self-complacent idolatry of f ormalism and 
 letter- worship ; how the Book had been honoured to the oblivion of the truths 
 which it enshrined ; how in the tithing of mint and anise and cummin there 
 had been a forgetf ulnesa of the weightier matters of the Law ; how the smoke 
 of dead sacrifices had been thought of more avail than deeds of living mercy ; 
 how circumcision and Sabbatism had been elevated above faith and purity; 
 how the long series of crimes against God's messengers had been consummated 
 in the murder of the Lord of glory. A truth which is only suggested, often 
 comes homo to the heart with more force than one which is put hi words, and 
 it may have been his original design to guide rather than to refute. But if so, 
 the faces of his audience showed that his object had failed. They were listening 
 with stolid self-complacency to a narrative of which the significant incidents only 
 enabled them to glory over their f athers. It was, I think, something in the aspect 
 of his audience some sudden conviction that to such invincible obstinacy his 
 words were addressed in vain which made him suddenly stop short in his review 
 of history, and hurl in their faces the gathered thunder of his wrath and scorn. 
 
 " Stifc-necked 1 " he exclaimed, "and uncircumcised in your heart and ia 
 your ears, ye are ever in conflict with the Holy Spirit ; as your fathers, so ye ! 
 Which of the prophets did not yonr fathers persecute P and they killed those 
 who announced before respecting the coming of the Just, of whom ye now 
 proved yourselves betrayers and murderers ; ye who received the Law at the 
 ordinance of angels, 1 and kept it not I " 8 
 
 Acts viL 52 ; leg. JyW*> A, B, 0, D, E. 
 
 * Acts vii. 53, XI<T rt* tnJuw eU fcaraye? ayy&wv ; Gal. Hi. 19, & rfjitK JioTayekSt'
 
 92 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 A denunciation so scathing and so fearless, from the lips of a prisoner 
 whose life depended on their will, might well have startled them ; and this 
 strong burst of righteous indignation against those whom he had addressed as 
 " brethren and fathers," can only be accounted for by the long-pent feelings of 
 one whose patience has been exhausted. But he could hardly have addressed 
 them in words more calculated to kindle their fury. The very terms in which 
 he characterised their bearing, being borrowed from their own Law and 
 Prophets, added force to the previous epitome of their history ; l and to call 
 them nncircumcised in heart and ears was to reject with scorn the idle fancies 
 that circumcision alone was enough to save them from God's wrath, and that 
 uncircumcision was worse than crime. 2 To convict them of being the true 
 sons of their fathers, and to brand consciences, already ulcerated by a sense of 
 guilt, with a murder worse than the worst murder of the prophets, was not 
 only to sweep away the prestige of an authority which the people so blindly 
 accepted, but it was to arraign his very judges and turn upon them the tables 
 of accusation. And this he did, not only in the matter of their crucifixion of 
 the Messiah, but also in the matter of disobedience to that Law ordained by 
 angels of which they were at that very moment professing to vindicate the 
 sanctity and the permanence. 
 
 It would be difficult in the entire range of literature to find a speech more 
 skilful, more pregnant, more convincing ; and it becomes truly astonishing when 
 we remember that it seems to have been delivered on the spur of the moment. 5 
 
 But the members of the Sanhedriu were roused to fury by the undaunted 
 audacity of Stephen's final invective. The most excitable of Western nations 
 can hardly imagine the raging passion which maddens a crowd of Eastern 
 fanatics. 4 Barely able to continue the semblance of a judicial procedure, they 
 
 Dent, xxxiii. 2 ; LXX., 8tfiv ovrov oyyeXoi firr' OVTOU ; p a . Ixvii. 18 ; Heb. ii. 2. In Ps, 
 
 Ixviii. 12 they read, '3bo, "angels," for 'Dbn, " kings." (Shabbath, f. 88, 2.) 
 
 1 Deut. ix. 6, 13 ; x. 16 ; xxx. 6 ; Neb. ix. 16 ; Ezek. xliv. 7 ; Jer. ix. 26. 
 
 2 Rabbi [Juda the Holy] said " that circumcision is equivalent to all tbe Command- 
 ments which are in the Law " (Nedarim, f. 32, 1). 
 
 3 Tbe impression which it made on the heart of St. Paul is nowhere noticed by Sfc,, 
 Luke, or by the Apostle himself ; but the traces of that impression are a series of coinci- 
 dences which confirm the genuineness of the speech. In his earliest recorded speech at 
 Antioch he adopts the same historic method so admirably suited to insinuate truth 
 without shocking prejudice ; he quotes the same texts in the same striking phraseology 
 and application (compare Acts vii. 48, 51, with Acts xvii. 24, Rom. ii. 29) ; alludes to the 
 same tradition (Acts vii. 53, Gal. iii. 19) ; uses the same style of address (Acts vii. 2, 
 xxii. 1) ; and gives the same marked significance to the faith of Abraham (Rom. iv. 9, 
 Gal. iii. 7), and to God's dealings with him before the covenant of circumcision (Acts vii. 
 5 8, Rom. iv. 10 19). Nor can we doubt that 2 Tim. iv. 16 was an echo of the last 
 prayer of Stephen, breathed partly on his own behalf. There are at least seven Hagadtith 
 in the speech of Stephen Acts vii. 2 (call of Abraham) ; 4 (death of Terah) ; 14 (seventy- 
 five souls) ; 16 (burial of Patriarchs at Shechem) ; 22 (Egyptian training of Moses) ; 23 
 (forty years) ; 42 (desert idolatry) ; 53 (angels at Sinai). As for the slight instances of 
 <r<f>oVa nvrmovucbv in 6, 7, 14, 16, they are mere" obiter dicta, auctoris aliud agentis." 
 The attempt to square them rigidly with the Old Testament has led to much dishonest 
 exegesis. The speech of St. Stephen has been called " a compendium of the Old Testa- 
 ment drawn up in fragments of the Septuagint " (Greenfield. Apol. for the LXX,, 103). 
 " He had regard to the meaning, not to the words " (Jerome). 
 
 * Acts vii. 54, i'.nrpt'oiro Tt xop&ouf avritv, *oi ejSpvxw TQVS Moyr hf a.vr6v.
 
 WORK AND MAETYEDOM OF ST. STEPHEN. 93 
 
 expressed the agony of hatred which was sawing their hearts asunder, by out- 
 ward signs which are almost unknown to modern civilisation by that grinding 
 and gnashing of the teeth only possible to human beings in whom " the ape 
 and the tiger " are not yet quite dead. To reason with men whose passions 
 had thus degraded them to the level of wild beasts would have been worse 
 than useless. The flame of holy anger in the breast of Stephen had died away 
 as suddenly as the lightning. It was a righteous anger; it was aimed not at 
 them but at their infatuation ; it was intended not to insult but to awaken. 1 
 But ha saw at a glance that it had failed, and that all was now over. In one 
 instant his thoughts had passed away to that heaven from which his inspiration 
 had come. From those hateful faces, rendered demoniac by evil passion, his 
 earnest gaze was turned upward and heavenward. There, in ecstasy of vision, 
 he saw the Shechinah the Glory of God the Jesus" standing "as though to aid 
 and receive him " at the right hand of God." Transported beyond all thought 
 of peril by that divine epiphany, he exclaimed as though he wished his enemies 
 to share his vision : " Lo ! I behold the heavens parted asunder, 2 and the Son 
 of Man standing at the right hand of God." At such a moment he would not 
 pause to consider, he would not even be able to consider, the words he spoke ; 
 but whether it was that he recalled the Messianic title by which Jesus had so 
 often described himself on earth, or that he remembered that this title had 
 been used by the Lord when He had prophesied to this very Sanhedrin that 
 hereafter they should see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power 
 certain it is that this is the only passage of the New Testament where Jesus is 
 called the Son of Man by lips other than His own. 3 
 
 But those high words were too much for the feelings of his audience. 
 Stopping their ears as though to shut out a polluting blasphemy, thoy rose in 
 a mass from both sides of the semi-circular range in which they sat, and with 
 one wild yell 4 rushed upon Stephen. There was no question any longer of a 
 legal decision. In their rage they took the law into their own hands, and then 
 and there dragged him off to be stoned outside the city gate. 5 
 
 "We can judge how fierce must have been the rage which turned a solemn 
 Sanhedrin into a mob of murderers. It was true that they were at this 
 moment under Sadducean influence, and that this influence, as at the Trial of 
 Christ, was mainly wielded by the family of Hanan, who were the most 
 merciless members of that least merciful sect. If, as there is reason to believe, 
 the martyrdom took place A.D. 37, it was most probably during the brief 
 presidency of the High Priest Jonathan, son of Hanan. Unhappy family of 
 the man whom Josephns pronounces to have been so exceptionally blest ! The 
 hoary father, and his son-in-law Caiaphas, imbrued their hands in the blood of 
 Jesus ; Jonathan during his few months' term of office was the Nasi of the 
 Sanhedrin which murdered Stephen ; Theophilus, another son, was the High 
 
 * " Non fratri irascitur qui peccato fratris irascitur " (Aug.). 
 
 1 Acts vii. 56, leg., in)votyfiVovs, , A, B, C. 8 See, however, Rev. i. 13 ; xlv. 14, 
 
 * Acts vii. 57, Kpagavrt* fysavfi ftryaAjj. 
 
 * See Excursus VI., "Capital Punishments."
 
 94 -ffHE LIFS AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Priest who, during tho utmost virulence of tlie first persecution gave Saul his 
 inquisitorial commission to Damascus ; Matthias, another son, roust, from tho 
 date of his elevation, have been one of those leading Jews whom Herod Agrippa 
 tried to conciliate by the murder of James the son of Zebedee ; and another 
 Hunan, the youngest son of the " viper brood " brought about with illegal 
 violence the murder of James the brother of the Lord. 1 Thus all these judicial 
 murders so rare at this epoch were aimed at the followers of Jesus, and all of 
 them directed or sanctioned by the cunning, avaricious, unscrupulous members 
 of a single family of Sadducean priests. 2 
 
 Stephen, then, was hurried away to execution with a total disregard of the 
 ordinary observances. His thoughts were evidently occupied with the sad scene 
 of Calvary ; it would come home to him with all the greater vividness because 
 he passed in all probability through that very gate through which Jesus, four 
 short years before, had borne His cross. It was almost in the words of his 
 Master 8 that when the horrid butchery began for the precautions to render 
 death speedy seem to have been neglected in the blind rage of his murderers 
 ho exclaimed, " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." 4 And when bruised and 
 bleeding lie was just able to drag himself to his knees it was again in the spirit 
 of that Lord that ho prayed for his murderers, and even the cry of his anguish 
 rang forth in the forgiving utterance showing how little malice there Lad 
 been in the stern words ho had used before " Lord, lay not to their charge 
 this sin."' With that cry he passed from the wrath of men to the peace of 
 God. Tho historian ends the bloody tragedy with one weighty and beautiful 
 word, " He fell asleep." 6 
 
 To fulfil their dreadful task, the witnesses had taken off their garments; 7 
 and they laid them " at the feet of a young man whose name was Saul." 
 
 It is the first allusion in history to a name, destined from that day forward 
 to be memorable for ever in tho annals of tho world. And how sad an 
 allusion ! He stands, not indeed actively engaged in the work of death ; but 
 keeping the clothes, consenting to the violence, of those who, in this brutal 
 
 ' Jos. An.lt. xviii. 4, 3 ; 5, 3 ; xix. 6, 2 ; xx. 9, 1. 
 
 2 Every epithet I Lave used is more than justified by what we know of this family 
 from the Isew Testament, from Josephus, and, above all. from the Talmud. See 
 Excursus VII., "The Power of the Sanhedrin to Inflict Death." 
 
 3 Luke xxiii. 34, 46. 
 
 4 tTriKoAdv/xevoc mcans_^ calling on Jesus." There is no need for the ingenious con- 
 jecture of Bentley that eN is lost by hoinoeoteleuton of the ON. 
 
 6 This not as ia the Received text is the proper order of the words (N. A, B, C, D). 
 " Saevire videbatur Stephanus : lingua ferox, cor lene " (Aug. Sc-nn. 315). "Si Stephanus 
 non orassct ecclesia Pauluru non habuisset." With tho expression itself comp. Rev. xiv. 13. 
 Perhaps in the word OTTJCTIJS we may see an allusion to the Jewish notion that a man's sins 
 actually followed and stood by him in the world to come (1 Tim. v. 24 ; Sot^ih, f. 3, 2). 
 
 So in. a beautiful epigram of the Anthology, we find the lines, Upb^ virvov xotpaTiu* 
 0ij<7Keiv fii) Xeye TOUS iyaOoi;?. It is the A'cshikah of the Jews (Deut. xxxiv. 8). That the 
 solemn rhythmical epitrite d/coi^o.) is not wholly unintentional seems to be clear from the 
 similar weighty 'oxa>\vTu with which, as Bishop Wordsworth points out, the Acts of the 
 Apostles ends. St. Luke is evidently fond of paronomasia, as well as St. Paul (cf. 
 KanjfHo0T)<rai' aTtfuurfftgwu, Acts v. 41). This is the third recorded death in the Christian 
 community : the first had been a suicide, the second a judgment, the third a raartyrdocj, 
 
 i This custom is not alluded to in the Mishna or Gemara,
 
 SAUL THE PERSECUTOR, 95 
 
 manner, dimmed in blood the light upon a face which had been radiant as that 
 of aii angel with faith and love. 
 
 Stephen was dead, and it might well have seemed that all tho truth which 
 was to be the glory and the strength o Christianity had died with him. But 
 the deliverance of the Gentiles, and their free redemption by the blood of 
 Christ, were truths too glorious to be quenched. The truth may be suppressed 
 for a time, even for a long time, but it always starts up again from its apparent 
 grave. Fra Dolcino was torn to pieces, and Savonarola and Huss were burnt, 
 but the Reformation was not prevented. Stephen sank in his blood, but his 
 place was taken by the young man who stood there to incite his murderers. 
 Four years after Jesus had died upon the cross of infamy, Stephen was stoned 
 for beiug His disciple and His worshipper ; thirty years after the death of 
 Stephen, his deadliest ODDonent died also for the same holy faith. 
 
 THE CONVERSION. *; 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 SAUL THE PEBSECUTOa. 
 
 Horl Kfrrpov 5^ roi \axrie(i.tv 
 
 TeAe'tfet b\iff6ripos olpos. FIND. fyth. ii. 173. 
 
 " AT a young man's f eot." The expression is vague, but there is good reason 
 to believe that Saul was now not less than thirty years old. 1 The reverence 
 for age, strong among all Orientals, was specially strong among the Jews, and 
 they iiover entrusted authority to those who had not attained to full years of 
 discretion. "We may regard it as certain that even a scholar of Gamaliel, so 
 full of genius and of zeal as Saul, would not have been appointed a commis- 
 sioner of the Sanhcdrin to carry out a responsible inquisition earlier than the 
 ago of thirty ; and if we attach a literal meaning to tho expression, " When 
 they were being condemned to death, I gave a voto against them," 2 this 
 implies that Saul was a member of the Sanhedrin. If so, he was at this time, 
 by the very condition of that dignity, a married man. 3 
 
 1 Josephus uses vtaviat of Agrippa I. when he must have been at least forty (Antt. 
 xviii. >, i ; v. supra, p. 7). 
 
 ' Acts XXV'i. 10, aratpou/4cViop re OLVTWV xar^i-eyxa \jirj<j>ov. 
 
 8 Selden, DC Syncdr. ii. 7, 7. In the Mishna the only qualifications mentioned for 
 membership of the Sanhedrin axe that a man must not be a dicer, usurer, pigeon-flyer, or 
 dealer in the produce of the Sabbatical year (Sanhedr. iii. 3) ; but in the Gemara, and in 
 later Jewish writers, we find that, besides the qualification mentioned in Exod. xviii. 21, 
 and Deut. i. 13 16, a candidate must be free from every physical blemish, stainless in 
 character, learned in science, acquainted with more than one language, and with a family
 
 96 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 But if the regulation that a Sanhedrist must be a married man was 
 intended to secure the spirit of gentleness, 1 the rule had failed of its purpose 
 La the case of Saul. In the terrible persecution of the Christians which 
 ensued a persecution far more severe than the former attacks of the Sad- 
 ducees on the Apostles he was the heart and soul of the endeavour to stamp 
 out the Christian faith. Not content with the flagging fanaticism of the 
 Sanhedrin, he was at once the prime mover and the chief executor of religious 
 vengeance. The charge which had cost St. Stephen his life must have been 
 partially valid against others of the Hellenistic Christians, and although their 
 views might be more liberal than those of the Galilaean disciples, yet the bonds 
 of affection between the two branches of the Church were still so close that 
 the fate of one section could not be dissevered from tliat of the other. The 
 Jews were not naturally fond of persecution. The Sanhedrin of this period 
 had incurred the charge of disgraceful laxity. The Sicarii were not sup- 
 pressed ; the red heifer was slain no longer ; 2 the ordeal of the bitter water 
 had been done away, because the crime of adultery had greatly increased. 3 
 Rabbi Joshua Ben Korcha, when R. Elieser had arrested some thieves, 
 reproached him with the words, " How long will you hand over the people of 
 God to destruction ? Leave the thorns to bo plucked up by the Lord of the 
 vineyard." 4 But to the seducer (mesith), the blasphemer (megadeph), and 
 the idolater, there was neither leniency nor compassion. 5 By the unanimous 
 testimony of the Jews themselves, Christians could not be charged with the 
 crime of idolatry; 8 but it was easy to bring them under the penalty of stoning, 
 which was attached to the former crimes. The minor punishments of flagel- 
 lation and excommunication seem to have been in the power, not only of the 
 Sanhedrin, but even of each local synagogue. Whatever may have been the 
 legal powers of these bodies, whatever licences the temporary relaxation of 
 Roman supervision may have permitted, 7 they were used and abused to the 
 utmost by the youthful zealot. The wisdom of tho toleration which Gamaliel 
 himself had recommended appears in tho fact that the great persecution, 
 which broke up the Church at Jerusalem, was hi every way valuable to the 
 new religion. It dissipated the Judaism which would have endangered the 
 
 of his own, because such were supposed to be less inclined to cruelty, and more likely to 
 sympathise with domestic affections. (Horepoth, i. 4 ; Sankedr. f. 17, 1, 36, b.; Menachdth, 
 f. 65, 1 ; Maimon. Sanhedr. ii. ; Otho, Lex. Rabb. a. v.) Whatever may be thought of 
 the other qualifications, it is probable that this one, at any rate, was insisted on, and it 
 adds force to our impression that St. Paul had once been a married man (1 Cor. vii. 8 ; 
 v. supra, p. 45, sq. See Ewald, Sendschr. d. Ap. Paul- p. 161 ; Gesch. d. Apost. Zeitalt. 
 p. 371). 
 
 1 See Surenhus. Mishna, iv. Praef. ! Sotah, f. 47, 1. 
 
 3 Maimon in Sotah, c. 3. They quoted Hoa. iv. 14 in favour of this abolition of Num. 
 v. 18. Cf. Matt. xii. 39 ; xvi. 4. 
 
 Babha Metzia, f. 82, 2 ; Otho, Lex. Rabb., B. v. Synedrium. 
 
 * Dent. xiii. 8, 9 ; Sanhedr. f. 29, 1 ; 32, 3. 
 
 6 There is not one word about the Christians in the tract Alh6da Za/ra, or on "alien 
 worship." 
 
 < Alarcellus, who was at this time an ad interim governor, held the rank, not of Pro- 
 curator, WIIMV, but only of int(it\i)rfc (J 08 - -AmU. rriii. 4, 2).
 
 SAUL THE PERSECUTOR, 97 
 
 spread of Christianity, and showed that the disciples had a loftier mission 
 than to dwindle down into a Galilean synagogue. The sacred fire, which 
 might have burnt low on the hearth of the upper chamber at Jerusalem, was 
 kindled into fresh heat and splendour when its brands were scattered over all 
 Judaea and Samaria, and uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted by baptism 
 into the fold of Christ. 
 
 The solemn burial of Stephen by holy men whether Hellenist Chris- 
 tians or Jewish proselytes the beating of the breast, the wringing of the 
 hands with which they lamented him, 1 produced no change in the purpose 
 of Saul. The sight of that dreadful execution, the dying agonies and 
 crushed remains of one who had stood before the Sanhedrin like an angel in 
 the beauty of holiness, could hardly have failed to produce an impression on 
 a heart so naturally tender. But if it was a torture to witness the agony of 
 others, and to be the chief agent in its infliction, then that very torture became 
 a more meritorious service for the Law. If his own blameless scrupulosity 
 in all that affected legal righteousness was begiuniag to be secretly tainted 
 with heretical uncertainties, he would feel it all the more incumbent on him 
 to wash away those doubts in blood. Like Cardinal Pole, when Paul IV. 
 began to impugn his orthodoxy, he must have felt himself half driven to 
 persecution, in order to prove his soundness in the faith. 
 
 The part which he played at this time in the horrid work of persecution 
 has, I fear, been always underrated. It is only when we collect the separate 
 passages they are no less than eight in number in which allusion is made 
 to this sad period it is only when wo weigh the terrible significance of 
 the expressions used that we feel the load of remorse which must have 
 lain upon him, and the taunts to which he was liable from malignant ene- 
 mies. He " made havoc of " literally, " he was ravaging " the Church. 2 
 No stronger metaphor could well have been used. It occurs nowhere else 
 in the New Testament, but in the Septuagint, and in classical Greek, is 
 applied to the wild boars which uproot a vineyard. 3 Not content with the 
 visitation of the synagogues, he got authority for an inquisitorial visit from 
 house to house, and even from the sacred retirement of the Christian home 
 he dragged not only men, but women, to judgment and to prison. 4 So 
 thorough was his search, and so deadly were its effects, that, in referring 
 to it, the Christians of Damascus can only speak of Saul as " he that 
 devastated in Jerusalem them that call on this name," s using the strong 
 word which is strictly applicable to an invading army which scathes a con- 
 quered country with fire and sword. So much St. Luke tells us, in giving 
 a reason for the total scattering of the Church, and the subsequent bless- 
 
 1 Acts viii. 2, KOIMTO* pcyat. The word is found in the LXX., Gen. 1. 10, &c., but here 
 alone in the New Testament. 
 
 ' Acts viii. 3, VAvfiaiVero TT)V <KKXi)<rutv. 
 
 8 Ps. Ixxix. 14 ; Callim. Hymn, in iJian. 156, <n epya <n! <J>irra M/fxaii/oirou. 
 
 4 These hostile measures are summed up in the 5<ra xouca woiV rots iytW of Ananias, 
 who says that the rumour had reached him from many sources (Acts is. 13). 
 
 5 Acts Lr. 21, o rrop&;iras.
 
 98 THE LIFE AND WOKE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 legs which sprang from their preaching the Word in widor districts. The 
 Apostles, he adds, remained. What was the special reason for this we do 
 not know ; but as the Lord's direct permission to the seventy to fly before 
 persecution 1 would have sanctioned their consulting their own safety, it 
 may have been because Jesus had bidden them stay in Jerusalem till 
 the end of twelve years. 2 If, as St. Chrysostom imagines, they stayed to 
 support the courage of others, how was it that the shepherds escaped while 
 the flock was being destroyed ? Or are we to infer that the main fury 
 of the persecution foil upon those Hellenists who shared the views of 
 the first martyr, and that the Apostles were saved from molestation by 
 the blameless Mosaism of which one of the leading brethren no less a 
 person than James, the Lord's brother was so conspicuous an example P 
 Be that as it may, at any rate they did not fall victims to tho rage which 
 was so fatal to many of their companions. 
 
 In two of his speeches and four of his letters does St. Paul revert to this 
 crime of an erring obstinacy. Twice to the Galatians does he use the same 
 strong metaphor which was applied to his conduct by the Damascene believers. 3 
 He tells the Corinthians 4 that he was "the least of the Apostles, not 
 meet to be called an Apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God." 
 Ho reminds the Philippians 5 that his old Hebraic zeal as a Pharisee had 
 shown itself by his " persecuting the Church." And oven when the shadows 
 of a troubled old age were beginning to close around him, keen in the sense 
 that he was utterly forgiven through Him who " came into the world to save 
 sinners, of whom I am chief," ho cannot forget the bitter thought that, 
 though in ignorance, he had once been " a blasphemer, and persecutor, and 
 injurious." 8 And when he is speaking to those who knew the worst hi his 
 speech to the raging mob of Jerusalem, as ho stood on the steps of the Tower 
 of Antonia he adds one fact more which casts a lurid light on the annals of 
 the persecution. He shows there that the blood of Stephen was not the only 
 blood that had been shed not the only blood of which the stains had 
 incarnadined his conscience. He tolls the mob not only of the binding and 
 imprisonment of women as well as men, but also that he " persecuted this 
 way unto the death." 1 Lastly, in his speech at Csesarea, he adds what ia 
 perhaps the darkest touch of all, for he says that, armed with the High 
 Priest's authority, he not only fulfilled unwittingly the prophecy of Christ 8 
 by scourging the Christians " often " and " in every synagogue," but that, 
 when it came to the question of death, he gave his vote against them, and that 
 ho did his best to compel them to blaspheme. 9 I say " did his best," because 
 
 Matt. x. 23. 
 
 2 A brief visit to Samaria "to coiifirm the churchea" (Acts viil. 14) would not 
 militate against this command. 
 
 8 Gal. i. 13, whore he alao says that he persecuted them beyond measure (*<& 
 virec/'oXKv) : and i. 23. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 9. Phil. ill. 6. 1 Tim. 1. 13. 7 Acts xxii. 4, 
 
 8 Matt. x. 17 ; Mark xiii. 9. 
 
 Acts xxvi. 11, wa.yna.Zov fiXa<r4>iMu'. There Is a possibility that In the a\pi Sa.va.rav 
 of the previous passage, and the Kcr^viyea it^cx of this, St. Paul may allude to bin
 
 BATJL THE PERSECUTOR. 89 
 
 the tease he uses implies effort, but not necessarily success. Pliny, hi a 
 passage of his famous letter to Trajan from Bithyuia, 1 says that, in question- 
 ing those who, hi anonymous letters, were accused of being " Christians," 
 he thought it sufficient to test them by making them offer wine and incense 
 to the statues of the gods and the bust of the emperor, and to blaspheme 
 the name of Christ-; and, if they were willing to do this, he dismissed them 
 without further inquiry, because he had been informed that to no one of these 
 things could a genuine Christian ever be impelled. 
 
 "We do not know that in all the sufferings of the Apostle any attempt was 
 ever made to compel him to blaspheme. With all the other persecutions 
 which he made the Christian suffer he became in his future life too sadly 
 familiar. To the last dregs of lonely and unpitied martyrdom he drank the 
 bitter cup of merciless persecution. Five times in days when he was no 
 longer the haughty Rabbi, the self-righteous Pharisee, the fierce legate of the 
 Sauhedrin armed with unlimited authority for the suppression of heresy, but 
 was himself the scorned, hunted, hated, half-starved missionary cf that which 
 was branded as an apostate sect five times, from the authority of some ruler 
 of the synagogue, did he receive forty stripes save one. He, too, was stoned, 
 and betrayed, and many times imprisoned, and had the vote of death recorded 
 against him ; and in all this ho recognised the just and merciful flame that 
 purged away the dross of a once misguided soul the light affliction which ha 
 had deserved, but which was not comparable to the far more eternal weight of 
 glory. In all this he may have even rejoiced that he was bearing for Christ's 
 sake that which he had made others bear, and passing through the same 
 furnace which he had once heated sevenfold for them. But I doubt whether 
 any one of these sufferings, or all of them put together, ever wrung his soul 
 with the same degree of anguish as that which lay in the thought that he had 
 used all the force of his character and all the tyranny of his intolerance to 
 break the bruised reed and to quench the smoking flax that he had endea- 
 voured, by the infamous power of terror and anguish, to compel some gentle 
 heart to blaspheme its Lord. 
 
 The great persecution with which St. Paul was thus identified and which, 
 from these frequent allusions, as well as from the intensity of the language 
 employed, seems to me to have been more terrible than is usually admitted 
 did not spend its fury for some months. In Jerusalem it was entirely success- 
 fal. There wore no more preachings or wonders in Solomon's Porch ; no more 
 throngs that gathered in the streets to wait the passing shadow of Peter and 
 John ; no more assembled multitudes in the house of ilary, the mother of St. 
 Mark. If the Christians met, they met in mournful secrecy and diminished 
 numbers, and the Love-feasts, if held at all, must have been held as in the 
 
 own endeavour (cf. Gal. vi. 12) to Lave them capitally punished, without implying that 
 the vote was carried. I have translated the ivaipoviievtav so as to admit of this meaning, 
 which, perhaps, acquires a shade of additional probability from Hcb. xii. 4, "Ye have not 
 yet resisted unto blood," if that Epistle was specially addressed to Palestinian Jews. 
 
 1 Plin. Ep, x. 97 . ..." praeterea maledicere Christo ; quorum nikil coyi pozse <# 
 euniur qui sunt revera Chriatiani."
 
 100 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 early days before the Ascension, with doors closed, for fear of the Jews. 
 Some of the Christians had suffered cruelly for their religion ; the faithless 
 members of the Church had doubtless apostatised ; the majority had fled at 
 once before the storm. 1 
 
 It is, perhaps, to indicate the continuance of this active hostility that St. 
 Luke here inserts the narrative of Philip's preaching as a fitting prelude to 
 the work of the Apostle of the Gentiles. At this narrative we shall glance 
 hereafter ; but now we must follow the career of Saul the Inquisitor, and see 
 the marvellous event which, by one lightning flash, made him "a fusile 
 Apostle" which in one day transformed Saul the persecutor into Paul the 
 slave of Jesus Christ. 
 
 His work in Jerusalem was over. The brethren who remained had either 
 eluded his search-warrant, or been rescued from his power. But the young 
 zealot was not the man to do anything by halves. If he had smitten one head 
 of the hydra, 2 it had grown up in new places. If ho had torn up the heresy 
 by the roots from the Holy City, the winged seeds had alighted on other 
 fertile ground, and the rank weed was still luxuriant elsewhere ; so that, in his 
 outrageous madness it is his own expression 3 ho began to pursue them 
 even to foreign cities. Damascus, ho had heard, was now the worst nest of 
 this hateful delusion, and fortunately in that city he could find scope for 
 action ; for the vast multitude of Jews which it contained acknowledged 
 allegiance to the Sanhedrin. To the High Priest, therefore, he went unsated 
 by all his previous cruelties, and in a frame of mind so hot with rage that 
 again it can only be described by the unparalleled phrase that he was " breathing 
 threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," 4 The High Priest 
 in all probability Thowphilus, who was promoted by Vitellius at the Pentecost 
 of A.D. 37 5 was a Sadducee, and a son of the hated house of Hanan. Yet it 
 was with Saul, and not with Theophilus, that the demand originated, to pursue 
 the heresy to Damascus. 6 Not sorry to find so thorough an instrument in one 
 who belonged to a different school from his own not sorry that the guilty 
 responsibility for " this man's blood " should be shared by Sadducees with the 
 followers of Hillel Theophilus gave the lettprs which authorised Saul to set 
 up his court at Damascus, and to bring from thence in chains all whom he 
 could find, both men and women, to await such mercy as Stephen's murder 
 might lead them to hope for at the hands of the supreme tribunal. 7 In ordinary 
 
 1 This is implied In the iv iKtivy rfj ^'p?, and in the aorist Sietrirapijo-av of Acts viii. 1. 
 
 2 Domitian and Maximin struck medals of Hercules and the Hydra with the inscrip- 
 tion " Deleta religione Christiana quae orbem turbabat." 
 
 3 Acts XXVI. 11, irepKTcrw? cjUTuupopei'Ot avrotfr 
 * Acts IX. 1, tfiirvetav arri.\ii)? xai fywov. 
 
 6 Jos. Antt. xviii. 5, 3. 
 
 6 Acts ix. 2, "If he should find any of the way." The word Xpt<m<m<rjac was 
 invented later (infra, p. 107). The Jewish writers similarly speak of the "dcrck 
 ha-Notserim, " or " way of the Nazareiics." 
 
 7 The repeated allusions to the punishment of women shows not only the keenness of 
 the search, out also the large part played by Christian women in the spread of that 
 religion which first elevated their condition from the degradation of the harem and the 
 narrowness of the gynaeceum. These women-martyrs of the groat persecution were tha
 
 THE CONVERSION OF SAUL. 101 
 
 times when that Jewish autonomy, which always meant Jewish intolerance, 
 was repressed witliiu stern limits by the Roman government it would have been 
 impossible to carry out so cruel a commission. This might have been urged 
 as an insuperable difficulty if an incidental expression in 2 Cor. xi. 32 had not 
 furnished a clue in explanation of the circumstances. From this it appears 
 that at this time the city was more or less in the hands of Aretas or Hareth, 
 the powerful Emir of Petra. 1 Now there are notices in the Talmud which 
 prove that Hareth stood in friendly relations to the Jewish High Priest, 2 and 
 we can see how many circumstances thus concurred to create for Saul an 
 exceptional opportunity to bring the Christians of Damascus under the 
 authority of the Sanhedrin. Never again might he find so favourable an 
 opportunity of eradicating the heresy of these hated Nazarenes. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CONVEBSION OF SAUL. 
 . > . KaTf\r)<f>9T]t' u^b rov Xpiirrov 'liytrou. PHIL. iii. 12. 
 
 " Opfert freudig aus was ihr besesscn 
 
 Was ihr einst gewesen, was ihr seyd ; 
 Und in einem seligen Vergessen 
 
 Schwinde die Vergangenlieit." SCHILLER. 
 
 AEMED with his credentials Saul started from Jerusalem for his journey of 
 nearly 150 miles. That journey would probably be performed exactly as it is 
 now performed with horses and mules, which are indispensable to the traveller 
 along those rough, bad roads, and up and down those steep and fatiguing 
 hills. Saul, it must be remembered, was travelling in a manner very different 
 from that of our Lord and his humble followers. They who, in preaching the 
 Gospel to the poor, assumed no higher earthly dignity than that of the 
 carpenter of Nazareth and the fishermen of Galilee, would go on foot with 
 staff and scrip from village to village, like the other " people of the land " 
 whom long-robed Scribes despised. Saul was in a very different position, 
 and the little retinue which was assigned him would treat him with all the 
 deference due to a Pharisee and a Rabbi a legate a latere of Theophilus, the 
 powerful High Priest. 
 
 But, however performed, the journey could not occupy less than a week, 
 and even the fiery zeal of the persecutor would scarcely enable him to get rid 
 
 true predecessors of those Saints Catherine, and Barbara, and Lucia, and Agnes, and 
 Dorothea, and Caecilia, and Felicitas, who leave the light of their names on the annals 
 of Christian heroism. 
 
 1 See Excursus VIII. : "Damascus under Hareth." 
 
 8 A story is told that on one occasion the High Priest Simeon Ben Kamhith was in, 
 capacitated from performing the duties of the Day of Atonement, because, while 
 familiarly talking with Hareth on the previous evening, a drop of the Emir's saliva had 
 fallen on the High Priest's dress (cf. Ifiddah,, f. 33, 2.)
 
 102 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 of the habitual leisureliuess of Eastern travelling. And thus, as they rnauo 
 their way along the difficult and narrow roads, Saul would be doomed to a 
 week of necessary reflection. Hitherto, ever since those hot disputes in tho 
 synagogues of Cilician Hellenists, he had been living in a whirl of business 
 which could havo left him but little time for quiet thought. That active 
 inquisition, those domiciliary visits, those incessant trials, that perpetual 
 presiding over the scourgings, imprisonments, perhaps even actual stonings of 
 men and women, into which he had been plunged, must have absorbed his 
 whole energies, and left him no inclination to face the difficult questions, or to 
 lay the secret misgivings which had begun to rise in his mind, 1 Pride tlie 
 pride of system, the pride of nature, the rank pride of the self-styled 
 theologian, the exclusive national Pharisaic pride in which he had been 
 trained forbade him to examine seriously whether he might not after all be 
 in the wrong. Without humility there can bo no sincerity ; without sincerity, 
 no attainment of the truth. Saul felt that he could not and would not let 
 himself be convinced ; he could not and would not admit that much of the 
 learning of his thirty years of life was a mass of worthless cobwebs, and that 
 all the righteousness with which he had striven to hasten the coming of the 
 Messiah was as filthy rags. He could not and would not admit the possibility 
 that people like Peter and Stephen could be right, while people like himself 
 and the Sanhedrin could be mistaken; or that the Messiah could bo a 
 Nazarene who had been crucified as a malefactor; or that after looking for 
 Hun so many generations, and making their whole religious life turn on His 
 expected Advent, Israel should have been found sleeping, and have murdered 
 Him when at hist He came. If haunting doubts could for a moment thrust 
 themselves into his thoughts, the vehement self-assertion of contempt would 
 sweep them out, and they would bo expiated by fresh zeal against tho seductive 
 glamour of tho heresy which thus dared to insinuate itself like a serpent into 
 the very hearts of its avengers. What could it be but diabolic influence which 
 made the words and the arguments of these blasphemers of the Law and the 
 Temple fasten involuntarily upon Ids mind and memory P Never would he 
 too be seduced into tho position of a mesiih/ Never would ho degrade him- 
 self to the ignorant level of people who knew not tho Law and were accursed ! 
 
 1 See Rom. vii. 8, 9, 10. This picture of St. Paul's mental condition ia no mere ima- 
 ginative touch ; from all such, both in this work and in my Life of Christ, I have 
 studiously abstained. It springs as a direct and inevitable conclusion from his own 
 epistles and the reproof of Jesus, "It is hard for thee to kick against the goads." 
 These words, following the " Why persecu test thou me?" imply, with inimitable brevity, 
 "Seest thou not that / am the pursuer and thou the pursued?" "What were those 
 goads? There were no conceivable goads for him to resist, except those which were 
 wielded by his own conscience. The stings of conscience, the anguish of a constant mis- 
 giving, inflicted wounds which should have told him long before that he was advancing in 
 a wrong path. They were analogous to the warnings, both inward and outward, which 
 
 "revelation." See Monod, Cinq Dtecowt, p. 168; Stier, Reden d. Apoit. ii, 299; D 
 Preusense", Trots Prem. Silckt, i. 434.)
 
 THE CONVERSION OF SAUL. 103 
 
 But the gliosts of these obstinate questionings would not always be so 
 laid. As long as he had work to do he could crush by passion and energy 
 such obtruding fancies. But when his work was done when there were in 
 Jerusalem no more Hellenists to persecute when even the Galilaeans had fled 
 or boon silenced, or been slain then such doubls would again thicken round 
 him, and ho would hear the approach of them like the sound of a stealthy 
 footfall on the turf. Was it not this that kindled his excessive madness this 
 that made him still breathe out threats and blood ? Was not this a part of 
 the motive which had driven him to the wily Sadducoo with the demand for 
 a fresh commission ? Would not this work for the Law protect him from the 
 perplexing complications of a will that plunged and struggled to resist the 
 agonising goad-thrusts of a ruinous misgiving ? 
 
 But now that he was journeying day after day towards Damascus, how 
 could he save himself from his own thoughts P Ho could not converse with 
 the attendants who were to execute his decisions. They wero mere sub- 
 ordinates mere apparitors of the Sanhedrin members, perhaps, of the 
 Temple guard ignorant Lovites, whose function it would be to dr.ig with 
 them on his retum the miserable gang of trembling heretics. Wo may be 
 sure that the vacuity of thought in which most men live was for Saul a thing 
 impossible. Ho could not help meditating as the sages bade the religious Jew 
 to meditate, on the precepts and promises of his own Law. For the first timo 
 perhaps since he had encountered Stephen he had the uninterrupted leisure to 
 face the whole question calmly and seriously, in the solitude of thoughts 
 which could no longer be sophisticated by the applause of Pharisaic partisans. 
 He was forced to go up into the dark tribunal of his own conscience, and set 
 himself before himself. More terrible by far was the solemnity, more im- 
 partial the judgment of that stern session, than those either of the Jewish 
 Sanhedrin, or of that other Areopagus in wliich he would one day stand. If 
 there be in the character any seriousness at all ; if the cancer of conceit or 
 vice have not eaten out all of the heart that is not frivolous and base, then 
 how many a man's intellectual conclusions, how many a man's moral life has 
 been completely changed and for how many would they not at this moment 
 be completely changed by the necessity for serious reflection during a few 
 days of unbroken leisure ? 
 
 And so we may be quite sure that day after day, as he rode on under the 
 morning sunlight or the bright stars of an Eastern night, the thoughts of 
 Saul would be overwhelmingly engaged. They would wander back over the 
 past; they would glance sadly at the future. Those were happy years in Tarsus ; 
 happy walks in childhood beside " the silver Cydnus ; " happy hours in the 
 school of Gamaliel, where there first dawned upon his soul the glories of Moses 
 and Solomon, of the Law and the Temple, of the Priesthood and the chosen 
 race. Those were golden days when he listened to the promised triumphs of 
 the Messiah, and was told how near was that day when the Holy Land should 
 be exalted as the Lady of kingdoms, and when the vaunted strength of Rome, 
 which now lay so heavy on his subjugated people, should be shattered like
 
 104 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUI* 
 
 a potsherd ! But had not something of the splendour faded from these more 
 youthful dreams P What had the righteousness of the Law done for him ? 
 Ho had lived, as far as men were concerned, an honourable life. He had been 
 exceedingly zealous, exceedingly blameless in the traditions of the fathers ; 
 but what inward joy had he derived from them? what enlightenment? 
 what deliverance from that law of his members, which, do what he would, 
 still worked fatally against the law in his mind? His sins of pride and 
 passion, and frailty would not a jealous God avenge them P Was there any 
 exemption at all from the Law's curse of " death ? " Was there any deliver- 
 ance at all from this ceaseless trouble of a nature dissatisfied with itself, and 
 therefore wavering like a wave of the troubled sea P 
 
 Would the deliverance be secured by the coming of the Messiah ? That 
 advent for the nation would be triumph and victory; would it be for the 
 individual also, peace of conscience, justification, release from heavy bondage, 
 forgiveness of past sins, strength in present weakness ? 
 
 And then it must have flashed across him that these Nazarenes, at any 
 rate, whom he had been hunting and slaying, said that it would. For them 
 the Messiah had come, and certainly they had found peace. It was true that 
 their Messiah was despised and rejected ; but was not that the very thing 
 which had been said of the Servant of Jehovah in that prophecy to which 
 they always appealed, and which also said that which his troubled conscience 
 needed most : 
 
 " Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows : yet we did 
 esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for 
 our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities : the chastisement of our 
 peace was upon him ; and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep 
 have gone astray ; we have turned every one to his own way ; and the Lord 
 hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." 1 
 
 This passage certainly gave a very different aspect to the conception 
 of the Messiah from any which he had been taught to contemplate. Tot 
 the Rabbis had said that all prophecies were Messianic. Jesus had been 
 crucified. A crucified Messiah was a horrible thought ; but was it worse than 
 a Messiah who should be a leper ? Tet here the ideal servant of Jehovah was 
 called a leper. 2 And if His physical condition turned out to be meaner than 
 Israel had always expected, yet surely the moral conception, the spiritual con- 
 ception, as ho had heard it from these hated Galilseans, was infinitely lovelier! 
 They spoke and oh, undeniably those were blessed words! of a Messiah 
 through whom they obtained forgiveness of sins. If this were true, what 
 infinite comfort it brought ! how it ended the hopelessness of the weary 
 struggle ! The Law, indeed, promised life to perfect obedience. 3 But who 
 ever had attained, who could attain, to that perfect obedience? 4 Did he see 
 it in the Gentile world, who, though they had not the Law of Moses had 
 
 1 Isa. liii. 46. 
 
 Isa. lii. 14, liii/4, "stricken," Heb. ; of. Lev. xiii. 13, Sanhedr. f. 98, 
 3 Lev. xviii. 5 ; Gal iii. 12. 4 Bom. x. 5.
 
 CHE CONVERSION OF SAUL, 1Q5 
 
 their own law of nature P Did he see it in the Jewish world ? alas, what a 
 depth of disappointment was involved in the very question! Was Hanan, 
 was Caiaphas, was Theophilus, was Ishmael Ben Phabi a specimen of the 
 righteousness of the Law ? And if, as was too true, Israel had not attained 
 if he himself had not attained to the law of righteousness, what hope was 
 there? 1 Oh, the blessedness of him whoso unrighteousness was forgiven, 
 whoso sin was covered ! Oh, the blessedness of him to whom the Lord 
 would not impute sin ! Oh, to have the infinite God who seemed so far away 
 brought near, and to see His face not darkened by the cloud, not glaring 
 through the pillar of fire, but as a man seeth the face of his friend ! Oh, 
 that a Man were a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, 
 as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land ! a 
 
 And so, again and again, he would realise with a sense of remorse that he 
 was yearning for, that he was gliding into, the very doctrines which he was 
 persecuting to the death. For to those Nazarenes their Son of Man was indeed 
 the image of the Invisible God. Could he be right in thus striving to stamp 
 out a faith so pure, so ennobling ? For whether it was heresy or not, that it 
 was pure and ennobling he could not fail to acknowledge. That face of Stephen 
 which he had seen bathed as with a light from heaven until it had been dimmed 
 in blood, must have haunted him then, as we know it did for long years after- 
 wards. Would the Mosaic law have inspired so heavenly an enthusiasm ? 
 would it have breathed into the sufferers so infinite a serenity, so bright a 
 hope ? And where in all the Holy Pentateuch could he find utterances so 
 tender, lessons so divine, love so unspeakable, motives which so mastered and 
 entranced the soul, as these had found in the words and in the love of their 
 Lord ? Those beatitudes which he had heard them speak of, the deeds of 
 healing tenderness which so many attested, the parables so full of divine illu- 
 mination the moral and spiritual truths of a Teacher who, though His nation 
 had crucified Him, had spoken as never man spake oh, Who was this who 
 had inspired simple fishermen and ignorant publicans with a wisdom unattain- 
 able by a Hillel or a Gamaliel ? Who was this to whom His followers turned 
 their last gaze and uttered their last prayer in death ; who seemed to breathe 
 upon them from the parted heavens a glory as of the Shechinah, a peace that 
 passed all understanding ? Who was this who, as they deckred, had risen 
 from the dead; whose body certainly had vanished from the rock-hewn sepulchre 
 in which it had been laid ; whom these good Galilseans these men who would 
 rather die than lie witnessed that they had seen, that they had heard, that He 
 had appeared to them in the garden, in the upper chamber, on the public road, 
 to four of them upon the misty lake, to more than five hundred of them at once 
 upon the Galilaean hill ? Could that have been a right path which led him to 
 
 1 Rom. Ix. 31. When Rabbi Eleazar was sick, and Akibha rejoiced because he feared 
 that Eleazar had been receiving his good things in this life, " Akibha," exclaimed the 
 sufferer, " is there anything in the whole Law which I have failed to fulfil? " "Rabbi," 
 replied Akibha, "thou hast taught me 'There is not a just man upon earth that doeth 
 good, and sinneth not.'" Eccles. vii 20. (Sanhedr. f. 101, 1.) 
 
 3 Isa. xxxii. 2. 
 9
 
 106 
 
 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. FAtTL : 
 
 persecute these P could it bo God's will which had driven him so fiercely along 
 a road that was stained in blood ? could he be required to pass through those 
 scenes of horror in which he had haled the wife and the mother to prison, and 
 seen the coarse menials of the synagogue remorselessly scourge men whose 
 
 MAP SHOWING THE ROADS FROM JERUSALEM TO DAMA8CC3. 
 
 life was love and humility and holiness P Had he after all been mistaking 
 pride for faithf ulness, and rage for zeal ? Had he been murdering the saints 
 that were upon the earth, and them that excelled in virtue ? Was Gamali el 
 right in suggesting the possibility that in meddling with these men they 
 might haply be fighting against God P 
 
 So day by day, his mind filled more and more with distracting doubts, hia 
 imagination haunted by eights of cruelty which, in spite of all zeal, harrowed
 
 THE CONVERSION OP SAtTL. 107 
 
 up his sonl, he journeyed on the road to Damascus. Under ordinary circum- 
 stances he might have felt an interest in the towns and scenes through which 
 he passed in Bethel and Shiloh in the soft green fields, that lie around the 
 base of Mount Gerizim in Jacob's tomb and Jacob's well in Bethshean, 
 with its memories of the miserable end of that old king of his tribe whose 
 name he bore in the blue glimpses of the Lake of Galileo with its numberless 
 memorials of that Prophet of Nazareth whose followers he was trying to 
 destroy. But during these days, if I judge rightly, his one desiro was to 
 press on, and by vehement action to get rid of painful thought. 
 
 And now the journey was nearly over. Hermon had long been gleaming 
 before them, and the chain of Antilibanus. They had been traversing 
 a bare, bleak, glaring, undulating plain, and had reached the village of 
 Kankab, or " the Star." At that point a vision of surpassing beauty bursts 
 upon the eye of the weary traveller. Thanks to the "golden Abana" 
 and the winding Pharpar, which flow on either side of the ridge, the 
 wilderness blossoms like the rose. Instead of brown and stony wastes, 
 we begin to pass under the flickering shadows of ancient olive-trees. Below, 
 out of a soft sea of verdure amid masses of the foliage of walnuts and 
 pomegranates and palms, steeped in the rich haze of sunshine rise the white 
 terraced roofa and glittering cupolas of the immemorial city of which the 
 beauty has been compared in every age to the beauty of a Paradise of God. 
 There amid its gardens of rose, and groves of delicious fruit, with the gleam 
 of waters that flowed through it, flooded with the gold of breathless morn, lay 
 the eye of the East. 1 To that land of streams, to that city of fountains, 
 to that Paradise of God, Saul was hastening not on messages of mercy, not 
 to add to the happiness and beauty of the world but to scourge and to slay 
 and to imprison, those perhaps of all its inhabitants who were the meekest, 
 the gentlest, the most pure of heart. And Saul, with all his tenacity of 
 purpose, was a man of almost emotional tenderness of character. 2 Though 
 zeal and passion might hurry him into acts of cruelty, they could not 
 crush within him the instincts of sympathy, and the horror of suffering 
 and blood. Can we doubt that at the sight of the lovely glittering city like 
 (if I may again quote the Eastern metaphor) "a handful of pearls in its 
 goblet of emerald " he felt one more terrible recoil from his unhallowed 
 task, one yet fiercer thrust from the wounding goad of a reproachful 
 conscience ? 
 
 It was high noon and in a Syrian noon the sun shines fiercely overhead in 
 an intolerable blaze of boundless light the cloudless sky glows like molten 
 brass ; the white earth under the feet glares like iron in the furnace ; the 
 whole air, as we breathe it, seems to quiver as though it were pervaded with 
 subtle flames. That Saul and liis comrades should at such a moment have 
 still been pressing forward on their journey would seem to argue a troubled 
 impatience, an impassioned haste. Generally at that time of day the traveller 
 
 1 See Porter's Syria, p. 435. 
 
 * See Adolphe Monoa s sermon, Les Lannes fa St.
 
 108 THE LIFE AND WOBX OF ST. TAtTL. 
 
 will be resting in his khan, or lying under the shelter of his tent. But it was 
 Saul who would regulate the movements of his little company ; and Saul was 
 pressing on. 
 
 Then suddenly all was ended the eager haste, the agonising struggle, the 
 deadly mission, the mad infatuation, the feverish desire to quench doubt 
 in persecution. Bound them suddenly from heaven there lightened a great 
 light. 1 It was not Saul alone who was conscious of it. It seemed as though 
 the whole atmosphere had caught fire, and they were suddenly wrapped 
 in sheets of blinding splendour. It might be imagined that nothing can 
 out-dazzle the glare of a Syrian sun at noon ; but this light was more vivid 
 than its brightness, more penetrating than its flame. And with the light 
 came to those who journeyed with Saul an awful but unintelligible sound. 
 As though by some universal flash from heaven they were all struck to earth 
 together, and when the others had arisen and had partially recovered from 
 their terror, Saul was still prostrate there. They were conscious that some- 
 thing awful had happened. Had we been able to ask them what it was, it is 
 more than doubtful whether they could have said. Had it been suggested to 
 them that it was some overwhelming sudden burst of thunder, some 
 inexpressibly vivid gleam of electric flauie some blinding, suffocating, 
 maddening breath of the sirocco some rare phenomenon unexperienced 
 before or since they might not have known. The vision was not for them. 
 They saw the light above the noonday they heard, and heard with terror, 
 the unknown sound which shattered the dead hush of noon ; but they were not 
 converted by this epiphany. To the Jew the whole earth was full of God's 
 visible ministrants. The winds were His spirits, the flaming fires His 
 messengers ; the thunder was the voice of the Lord shaking the cedars, yea, 
 shaking the cedars of Libanus. The bath-hoi might come to him in sounds 
 which none but he could understand : others might say it thundered when to 
 him an angel spake. 2 
 
 But that which happened was not meant for those who journeyed with 
 Saul : 3 it was meant for him ; and of that which he saw and which he heard 
 he confessedly could bo the only witness. They could only say that a light 
 had shone from heaven, but to Saul it was a light from Him who is the 
 light of the City of God a ray from the light which no man can approach 
 unto. 4 
 
 And about that which he saw and heard he never wavered. It was the 
 secret of his inmost being ; it was the most unalterable conviction of his soul : 
 
 1 Acts ix. 3, jrtpiTjoTpoufftv, " lightened round." The word is again used in xxii. 6, but 
 to not found in the LXX., and is unknown to classical Greek. 
 
 2 John xii. 29. 
 
 3 Acts ix. 7, et<m/ici<rai> jxT(SVa OtiapowTet. Cf. Dan. x. 7, "I Daniel alone saw the 
 vision ; for the men that were with me saw not the vision ; but a great quaking fell 
 upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves." So in ShemCth Rabba, sect. 2, f. 104. 
 3, it is said that others were with Moses, but that he alone saw the burning bush (Exod. 
 iu. 2). Similarly Rashi, at the beginning of his commentary on Leviticus, says that 
 when God called Moses the voice was heard by him alone. 
 
 4 1 Tim. vi. 1416; 2 Cor. xii. 1.
 
 THE CONVERSION OF SAUL. 109 
 
 it was the very crisis and most intense moment of his life. Others might hint 
 at explanations or whisper doubt: 1 Saul knew. At that instant God had 
 shown him His secret and His covenant. God had found him ; had flung him 
 to the ground in the career of victorious outrage, to lead him henceforth 
 in triumph, a willing spectacle to angels and to men. 2 God had spoken 
 to him, had struck him into darkness out of the noonday, only that Ho might 
 kindle a noon in the midnight of his heart. From that moment Saul 
 was converted. A change total, utter, final had passed over him, had 
 transformed him. God had called him, had revealed His Son in him, 3 had 
 given him grace and power to become an Apostle to the Gentiles, had sent 
 him forth to preach the faith which he had once destroyed, had shone in his 
 heart to give " the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ."* 
 
 And the means of this mighty change all lay in this one fact : at that 
 awful moment he had seen the Lord Jesus Christ. 6 To him the persecutor to 
 him as to the abortive-born of the Apostolic family 6 the risen, the glorified 
 Jesus had appeared. Ho had "been apprehended by Christ." On that 
 appearance all his faith was founded ; on that pledge of resurrection of im- 
 mortality to himself, and to the dead who die in Christ all his hopes were 
 anchored. 7 If that belief were unsubstantial, then all his life and all his labours 
 were a delusion and a snare he was a wretch more to be pitied than the 
 wretchedest of the children of the world. But if an angel from heaven 
 preached a different doctrine it was false, for he had been taught by the reve- 
 lation of Jesus Christ, and if this hope were vain, then to him 
 
 " The pillared firmament was rottenness, 
 And earth's base built on stubble." 
 
 The strength of this conviction became the leading force in Paul's future 
 life. He tells us that when the blaze of glory lightened round him he was 
 struck to the earth, and there he remained till the voice bade him rise, and 
 when he rose his eyes were blinded ; he opened them on darkness. Had he 
 been asked about the long controversies which have arisen in modern days, as 
 to whether the appearance of the Risen Christ to him was objective or sub- 
 jective, I am far from sure that he would even have understood them. 8 He 
 uses indeed of this very event the term " vision." " I was not disobedient," 
 ho says to King Agrippa, " to the heavenly vision." 9 But the word used for 
 
 1 We trace a sort of hesitating sneer in the Clementine Homilies, xvii. 13, "He who 
 believes a vision .... may indeed be deceived by an evil demon, .... which 
 really is nothing, and if he asks who it is that appears " [with an allusion to ils el, Ku'ptc; 
 (is.. 5)], " it can answer what it will ; " with very much more to the same effect. 
 
 2 2 Cor. ii. 14. 8 Acts xxii. 21 ; xxvi. 17, 18 ; Gal. L 15, 16. 
 4 2 Cor. iv. 6. 5 1 Cor. ix. 1 ; xv. 8 ; v. supra, p. 41 seq. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 8. 71 Cor. xv. 1029. 8 See 2 Cor. xii. 1. 
 
 9 Acts xxvi. 19, rg ovpavitf oirroo-i^. When Zacharias came out of the Temple speech- 
 less, the people recognised that he had seen an imraa-ia (Luke L 22). The women returning 
 from the tomb say they have seen an oirrao-ia ayye'Xa.i' (Luke xxiv. 23). The word, then, La 
 peculiar to Luke and the Acts, as are so many words. It is, however, the word used in
 
 110 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 vision means " a waking vision," and in what conceivable respect could St. 
 Paul have been more overpoweringly convinced that ho had in very truth seen, 
 and heard, and received a revelation and a mission from the Risen Christ ? Is 
 the essential miracle rendered less miraculous by a questioning of that objec- 
 tivity to which the language seems decidedly to point ? Are the eye and the 
 ear the only organs by which definite certainties can be conveyed to the human 
 soul ? are not rather these organs the poorest, the weakest, the most likely to 
 be deceived ? To the eyes of St. Paul's companions, God spoke by the blind- 
 ing light ; to their ears by the awful sound ; but to the soul of His chosen 
 servant He was visible indeed in the excellent glory, and He spoke in the 
 Hebrew tongue; but whether the vision and the voice came through the dull 
 organs of sense or in presentations infinitely more intense, more vivid, more 
 real, more unutterably convincing to the spirit by which only things spiritual 
 are discerned this is a question to which those only will attach importance to 
 whom the soul is nothing but the material organism who know of no indu- 
 bitable channels of intercourse between man and his Maker save those that 
 come clogged with the imperfections of mortal sense and who cannot imagine 
 anything real except that which they can grasp with both hands. One fact 
 remains upon any hypothesis and that is, that the conversion of St. Paul was 
 in the highest sense of the word a miracle, and one of which the spiritual con- 
 sequences have affected every subsequent age of the history of mankind. 1 
 
 For though there may bo trivial variations, obviously reconcilable, and ab- 
 solutely unimportant, in the thrice-repeated accounts of this event, yet in the 
 narration of the main fact there is no shadow of variation, and no possibility of 
 doubt. 2 And the main fact as St. Paul always related and referred to it was this 
 that, after several days' journey, when they were now near Damascus, some 
 awful incident which impressed them all alike as an infolding fire and a super- 
 natural sound arrested their progress, and in that light, as he lay prostrate on 
 
 the passage of the Corinthians just quoted, and the oirraata there leaves him no certainty 
 as to whether it was corporeal or spiritual. The LXX. use it (Dan. ix. 23, &c.) to render 
 n^no, which is used of a night vision in Gen. xlvi. 2. Phavorinus distinctly says that 
 opa/xa, whether by day or by night, is distinct from tmhrvtov "dream," and it seems as if 
 St. Luke, at any rate, meant by onreuria something more objective than he meant by 
 8po/ia (Acts ix. 10 12 ; xi. 5 ; xii. 9 ; xvi. 9 ; xviii. 9) or CKOTOO-I? (Acts xi. 5 ; xxii. 17). 
 'Opumt, in the N. T., only occurs in Eev. iv. 3; ix. 17: and in a quotation, Acts 
 ii. 17. 
 
 1 At Buch moments the spirit only lives, and the ^vxi, the animal life, is hardly 
 adequate as an opyavov topmKw to apprehend such revelations. See Augustine, De Gentsi 
 ad Litt. xii. 3. "La chose essentielle est que nous ne perdions pas de rue le grand prin- 
 cipe 6vangelique d'un contact direct de 1'esprit de Dieu avec celm de 1'homme, contact qui 
 echappe a 1'analyse du raisonnement . . . . Le mysticisme evangelique en reVelant au 
 sens chre'tien un monde de miracles incessants, lui eparjne la peine do so pr6occuper du 
 petit nombre de ceux qu' analysent contradictoirement le rationalisme critique et le 
 rationalisme orthodoxe" (Reuss, Hist. Apostolique, p. 114). "Christ stood before me," 
 said St. Teresa. "I taw Him with the eyes of the soul more distinctly than I could have 
 teen Him with the eyes of the body " (Vida, vii. 11). 
 
 2 It is superfluous to repeat the reconciliation of these small apparent contradictions, 
 because they are all reconciled and accounted for in the narrative of the text. Had they 
 been of the smallest importance, had they been such as one moment of common sense 
 could fail to solve, a writer so careful as St. Luke would not have left them side by Bide.
 
 THE CONVEE8ION OF SAUL. Ill 
 
 the earth, Saul saw a mortal shape 1 and heard a human voice syaing to 
 " Shaul, Shaul " for it is remarkable how the vividness of that impression is 
 incidentally preserved in each form of the narrative 2 " why persecutest thou 
 Me P It is hard for thee to kick against the goads." 3 But at that awful mo- 
 ment Saul did not recognise the speaker, whom on earth he had never seen. 
 " Who art Thou, Lord ? " he said. And He " I am Jesus of Nazareth whom 
 thou persecntest." 
 
 " Jesus of Nazareth 1" Why did the glorified speaker here adopt the name 
 of His obscurity on earth P Why, as St. Chrysostom asks, did He not say, " I 
 am the Son of God ; the Word that was in the beginning ; He that sitteth at 
 the right hand of the Father ; Ho who is in the form of God ; He who stretched 
 out the heaven ; Ho who made the earth ; He who levelled the sea ; He who 
 created the angels ; He who is everywhere and filleth all things ; He who was 
 pre-existent and was begotten P" Why did He not utter those awful titles, but 
 " I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou perseeutest " from the earthly city, 
 from the earthly home ? Because His persecutor know Him not ; for had he 
 known Him he would not have persecuted Him. He knew not that He had 
 been begotten of the Father, but that He was from Nazareth he knew. Had 
 He then said to him, " I am the Son of God, the Word that was in the begin- 
 ning, He who made the heaven," Saul might have said, " That is not He whom 
 I am persecuting." Had He uttered to him those vast, and bright, and lofty 
 titles, Saul might have said, " This is not the crucified." But that he may 
 know that he is persecuting Him who was made flesh, 4 who took the form of a 
 servant, who died, who was buried, naming Himself from the earthly place, 
 He says, " I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest." This, then, was 
 the Messiah whom he had hated and despised this was He who had been the 
 Heavenly Shepherd of his soul ; Ho who to guide back his wandering foot- 
 steps into the straight furrow had held in His hand that unseen goad against 
 which, like some stubborn ox, he had struggled and kicked in vain. 
 i And when the Voice of that speaker from out of the unapproachable 
 
 i l This, though not in the Acts asserted in so many words in the direct narrative, 
 seems to be most obviously implied in the u^>6ijv <rol of xxvi. 16, in the contrast of the 
 fj.rjSei'0. fli>poDyr of ix. 7, in the 'Ir)<ro0 o o^fict's o-oi iv T!J 65<3 of ver. 17. in the iris iv TJ} oS 
 ttSey rbr Kvptov of verse 27, and in the already quoted references (1 Cor. ix. 1 ; xv. 8). 
 The remark of Chrysostom, al ^v OUK <a<f>6y oAAa Sta npayiidriav <J><!hj, is meant to be 
 perfectly sincere and honest, but when compared with the above passage, seems to show 
 less than the great orator's usual care and discrimination. 
 
 2 Elsewhere he is always called SoCXo?, but here 2aoA. 
 
 3 This addition is genuine in Acts xxvi. 14 ; and o Nofwpcuoj certainly in xxiL 8. Of 
 the many illustrations quoted by Wetstein, and copied from him by subseqxient commen- 
 tators, the most apposite and interesting are ^Esch. Agam. 1633, Prom. 323, Eur. Bacch. 
 791, Ter. Phorm, L 22, 7. It is, however, remarkable that though ox-goads were 
 commonly used in the East, not one single Eastern or Semitic parallel can be adduced. 
 The reference to Deut. xxsii. 15 is wholly beside the mark, though goads are aUuded to 
 in Judg. iii. 31 ; Ecclus. xxxviii. 25. St. Paul would have been naturally familiar with 
 the common Greek proverbs, and those only will be startled that a Greek proverb should 
 be addressed to him by his glorified Lord, who can never be brought to understand the 
 simple principle that Inspiration must always speak (as even the Rabbis saw) " in the 
 tongue of the sons of men. " 
 
 * Chrysostora adds, rbx fttr wnv 9vyarourrpa4(rr<> t but this I believe to be ft mistake,
 
 112 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PATJL. 
 
 brightness had, as it were, smitten him to the very earth with remorse by the 
 sense of this awful truth, " But rise," it continued, and " stand upon thy 
 f eot, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do." 
 
 This is the form in which the words are, with trivial differences, given in 
 St. Luke's narrative, and in St. Paul's speech from the steps of Antonia. In 
 his speech before Agrippa, it might seem as if more had been spoken then. 
 But in this instance again it may be doubted whether, after the first appalling 
 question, " Shaul, Shaul, why persecutest thou Me ? " which remained branded 
 so vividly upon his heart, Paul could himself have said how much of the revela- 
 tion which henceforth transfigured his life was derived from the actual moment 
 when he lay blinded and trembling on the ground, and how much from the 
 subsequent hours of deep external darkness and brightening inward light. In 
 the annals of human lives there have been other spiritual crises analogous to 
 this in their startling suddenness, in their absolute finality. To many the 
 resurrection from the death of sin is a slow and life-long process ; but others 
 pass with one thrill of conviction, with one spasm of energy, from death to 
 life, from the power of Satan unto God. Such moments crowd eternity into 
 an hour, and stretch an hour into eternity. 
 
 " At such high hours 
 Of inspiration from the Living God 
 Thought is not." 
 
 When God's awful warnings burn before the soul in letters of flame, it can read 
 them indeed, and know their meaning to the very uttermost, but it does not 
 know, and it does not care, whether it was Perez or Upharsin that was written 
 on the wall. The utterances of the Eternal Sibyl are inscribed on records 
 scattered and multitudinous as are the forest leaves. As the anatomist may 
 dissect every joint and lay bare every nerve of the organism, yet be infinitely 
 distant from any discovery of the principle of life, so the critic and grammarian 
 may decipher the dim syllables and wrangle about the disputed discrepancies, 
 but it is not theirs to interpret. If we would in truth understand such 
 spiritual experiences, the records of them must be read by a light that never 
 was on land or sea. 
 
 Saul rose another man : he had fallen in death, he rose in life ; ho had 
 fallen in the midst of things temporal, he rose in awful consciousness of the 
 things eternal ; he had fallen a proud, intolerant, persecuting Jew, he rose a 
 humble, broken-hearted, penitent Christian. In that moment a new element 
 had been added to his being. Henceforth to use his own deep and dominant 
 expression ho was " in Christ." God had found him ; Jesus had spoken to 
 him, and in one flash changed him from a raging Pharisee into a true disciple 
 ' from the murderer of J/he saints into the Apostle of the Gentiles. It was a 
 new birth, a new creation. As we read the story of it, if we have one touch of 
 reverence within our souls, shall we not take off our shoos from ofE our feet, 
 for the place whorcon we stand is holy ground ? 
 
 Saul rose, and all was dark. The dazzling vision had pa=sod away, and
 
 THE CONVERSION OF SAUL. 113 
 
 with it also the glittering city, the fragrant gardens, the burning noon. Amazed 
 and startled, his attendants took him by the hand and led him to Damascus. 
 He had meant to enter the city in all the importance of a Commissioner from 
 the Sauhedrin, to bo received with distinction, not only as himself a great "pupil 
 of the wise," but even as the representative of all authority which the Jews 
 held most sacred. And he had meant to leave the city, perhaps, amid 
 multitudes of his applauding countrymen, accompanied by a captive train of 
 ho knew not how many dejected Nazarenes. How different were his actual 
 entrance and his actual exit ! He is led through the city gate, stricken, dejected, 
 trembling, no longer breathing threats and slaughter, but longing only to be 
 the learner and the suppliant, and the lowest brother among those whom he 
 had intended to destroy. He was ignominiously let out of the city, alone, in 
 imminent peril of arrest or assassination, through a window, in a basket, down 
 the wall. 
 
 They led him to the house of Judas, in that long street which leads through 
 the city and is still called Straight ; and there, in remorse, in blindness, iu 
 bodily suffering, in mental agitation, unable or unwilling to eat or drink, the 
 glare of that revealing light ever before his darkened eyes, the sound 
 of that reproachful voice ever in his ringing ears, Saul lay for three days. 
 None can ever tell what things in those three days passed through his 
 soul; what revelations of the past, what lessons for the present, what 
 guidance for the future. His old life, his old self, had been torn up by 
 the very roots, and though now he was a new creature, the crisis can never 
 pass over any one without agonies and energies without earthquake and 
 eclipse. At last the tumult of his being found relief in prayer; and, in a 
 vision full of peace, he saw one of those brethren for a visit from whom 
 ho seems hitherto to have yearned in vain, come to him and heal him. This 
 brother was Ananias, a Christian, but a Christian held in respect by all 
 the Jews, and therefore a fit envoy to come among the Pharisaic adherents 
 by whom we cannot but suppose that Saul was still surrounded. It was 
 not without shrinking that Ananias had been led to make this visit. He 
 had heard of Saul's ravages at Jerusalem, and his fierce designs against 
 the brethren at Damascus ; nay, even of the letters of authority from tho 
 High Priest which wore still in his hand. He had heard, too, of what hud 
 befallen him on the way, but it had not wholly conquered his not unnatural 
 distrust. A divine injunction aided the charity of one who, as u Christian, 
 felt the duty of believing all things, and hoping all things. The Lord, 
 appearing to him in a dream, told him that the zeal which had burned so 
 fiercely in the cause of Sadducees should henceforth be a fiery angel of tho 
 Cross, that this pitiless persecutor should be a chosen vessel to carry the 
 name of Christ before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. "For 
 I will show him," said the vision, "how much he must suffer for My 
 name." l The good Ananias, hesitated no longer. Ho entered into tho house 
 
 1 "Fortia agerc Romanum est; fortiapati Christianum " (Corn, a Lap.).
 
 114 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of Judas, and while his very presence seemed to breathe peaco, he addressed the 
 sufferer by the dear title of brother, and laying his hands upon the clouded 
 eyes, bade him rise, and see, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. " Be baptised," 
 he added, " and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord." The 
 words of blessing and trust were to the troubled nerves and aching heart of 
 the sufferer a healing in themselves. Immediately " there fell from his eyes as 
 it had been scales." l He rose, and saw, and took food and was strengthened, 
 and received from the hands of his humble brother that sacrament by which 
 he was admitted into the full privileges of the new faith. He became a member 
 of the Church of Christ, the extirpation of which had been for months the 
 most passionate desire and the most active purpose of his life. 
 
 Fruitful indeed must have been the conversation which he held with 
 Ananias, and doubtless with other brethren, in the delicious calni that fol- 
 lowed this heart-shaking moment of conviction. In those days Ananias must 
 more and more have confirmed him in the high destiny which the voice of 
 revelation had also marked out to himself. "What became of his commission ; 
 what ho did with the High Priest's letters ; how his subordinates demeaned 
 themselves ; what alarming reports they took back to Jerusalem ; with what 
 eyes he was regarded by the Judaic synagogues of Damascus, we do not 
 know ; but we do know that in those days, whether they wore few or many, it 
 became more and more clear to him that " God had chosen him to know His 
 will, and see that Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth, and be His 
 witness unto all men of what he had seen and heard." 2 
 
 And here let me pause to say that it is impossible to exaggerate the im- 
 portance of St. Paul's conversion as one of the evidences of Christianity. 
 That he should have passed, by one flash of conviction, not only from, dark- 
 ness to light, but from one direction of life to the very opposite, is not only 
 characteristic of the man, but evidential of the power and significance of 
 Christianity. That the same man who, just before, was persecuting Chris- 
 tianity with the most violent hatred, should come all at once to believe in Him 
 whose followers he had been seeking to destroy, and that in this faith he 
 should become a " new creature " what is this but a victory which Chris- 
 tianity owed to nothing but the spell of its own inherent power ? Of all 
 who have been converted to the faith of Christ, there is not one in whose case 
 the Christian principle broke so immediately through everything opposed to 
 it, and asserted so absolutely its triumphant eupericiity. Henceforth to Paul 
 Christianity was summed up in the one word Christ. And to what does 
 he testify respecting Jesus P To almost every single primarily important 
 fact respecting His Incarnation, Life, Sufferings, Betrayal, Last Supper, Trial, 
 Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Heavenly Exaltation. 3 We com- 
 
 1 There is a remarkable parallel in Tob. ad. 13, K<U eAewiotfij an-b rav Kav6uv 
 avrov TO. 
 
 3 Acte xrii. 14, 15. 
 
 8 See, among other passages, Rom. viii. 3, 11 ; 1 Tim. iii. 16 ; Rom. Ix. 5 ; 2 Cor. L 5 ; 
 OoL t 20; xi. 3; 1 Cor. i. 23; ii. 2; v. 7} x. 10; Gal. vi. 19; Eph. It 13; Horn. T. 6;
 
 THE RETIREMENT OF ST. PAUL. 115 
 
 plain that nearly two thousand years have passed away, and that the bright- 
 ness of historical events is apt to fade, and even their very outline to be 
 obliterated, as they sink into the " dark backward and abysm of time." "Well, 
 but are we more keen-sighted, more hostile, more eager to disprove the evi- 
 dence, than the consummate legalist, the admired rabbi, the commissioner of 
 the Sanhedrin, the leading intellect in the schools learned as Hillel, patriotic 
 as Judas of Gaulon, burning with zeal for the Law as intense as that of 
 Shammai P He was not separated from the events, as we are, by centuries of 
 time. He was not liable to be blinded, as we are, by the dazzling glamour of 
 a victorious Christendom. He had mingled daily with men who had watched 
 from Bethlehem to Golgotha the life of the Crucified, not only with His simple- 
 hearted followers, but with His learned and powerful enemies. He had talked 
 with the priests who had consigned Him to the cross; he had put to death 
 the followers who had wept beside His tomb. He had to face the unutterable 
 horror which, to any orthodox Jew, was involved in the thought of a Messiah 
 who " liad hung upon a tree." He had heard again and again the proofs 
 which satisfied an Annas and a Gamaliel that Jesus was a deceiver of the 
 people. 1 The events on which the Apostles relied, in proof of His divinity, 
 had taken place in the full blaze of contemporary knowledge. He had not to 
 deal with uncertainties of criticism or assaults on authenticity. He could 
 question, not ancient documents, but living men ; ho could analyse, not frag- 
 mentary records, but existing evidence. Ho had thousands of means close at 
 hand whereby to test the reality or unreality of the Resurrection in which, up 
 to this time, he had so passionately and contemptuously disbelieved. In 
 accepting this half -crushed and wholly execrated faith he had everything in 
 the world to lose he had nothing conceivable to gain; and yet, in spite of 
 all overwhelmed by a conviction which he felt to be irresistible Saul, the 
 Pharisee, became a witness of the Resurrection, a preacher of the Cross. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 IKE RETIREMENT OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 " Thou shalt have joy in sadness soon, 
 
 The pure calm hope be thine, 
 That brightens like the eastern moon, 
 When clay's wild lights decline." KEBLE. 
 
 SATJL was now a " Nazarone," but many a year of thought and training had to 
 elapse before he was prepared for the great mission of his life. 
 
 If, indeed, the Acts of the Apostles were oar only source of information 
 respecting him, wo should have been compelled to suppose that he instantly 
 
 vi. 4, 9 ; viii. 11 ; xiv. 15 ; zv. 3 ; 1 Cor. xv. patsim; Rom. x. 6 ; CoL iiL 1 j Eph. ii. 6; 
 1 Tiin. iii. 16, &c. 
 
 i John vii. 12, 47; ix. 16; x. 30.
 
 116 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 plunged into the work of teaching. " He was with the disciples in Damascus 
 certain days," says St. Luke ; " and immediately in the synagogues he began 
 to preach Jesus, that He is the Son of God j" 1 and he proceeds to narrate the 
 amazement of the Jews, the growing power of Saul's demonstrations, and, 
 after an indefinite period had elapsed, the plot of the Jews against him, and 
 his escape from Damascus. 
 
 But St. Luke never gives, nor professes to give, a complete biography. 
 During the time that he was the companion of the Apostle his details, indeed, 
 are numerous and exact ; but if even in this later part of his career he never 
 mentions Titus, or once alludes to the fact that St. Paul wrote a single epistle, 
 we cannot be surprised that his notices of the Apostle's earlier career are frag- 
 mentary, either because he knew no more, or because, in his brief space, he 
 suppresses all circumstances that did not bear on his immediate purpose. 
 
 Accordingly, if we turn to the biographic retrospect hi the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, in which St. Paul refers to this period to prove the independence of 
 his apostolate, we find that in the Acts the events of three years have been 
 compressed into as many verses, and that, instead of immediately beginning to 
 preach at Damascus, he immediately retired into Arabia. 2 For "when," he 
 says, " He who separated me from my mother's womb, and called mo by His 
 grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among 
 the Gentiles, immediately I did not communicate with flesh and blood, nor 
 went I up to Jerusalem to those who were Apostles before me, but I went 
 away into Arabia, and again I returned to Damascus." 
 
 No one, I think, who reads this passage attentively can deny that it gives 
 the impression of an intentional retirement from human intercourse. A multi- 
 tude of writers have assumed that St. Paul first preached at Damascus, then 
 retired to Arabia, and then returned, with increased zeal and power, to preach 
 in Damascus once more. Not only is St. Paul's own language unfavourable 
 to such a view, but it seems to exclude it. What would all psychological 
 
 1 Acts ix. 19, 20. 
 
 2 I understand the evOetn of Gal. i. 16 as immediately succeeding St. Paul's conversion; 
 the evfle'ws of Acts ix. 20 as immediately succeeding his return to Damascus. The re- 
 tirement into Arabia must be interpreted as a lacuna either at the middle of Acts ix. 19, 
 or at the end of that verse, or after verse 21. The reasons why I unhesitatingly 
 assume the first of these alternatives are given in the text. There is nothing to be said 
 for supposing with Kuinoel and Olshausen that it was subsequent to the escape from 
 Damascus, which seems directly to contradict, or at any rate to render superfluous, the 
 waAif of Gal i. 17. We may be quite sure that St. Paul did not talk promiscuously about 
 this period of his life. No man, even with familiar friends, will make the most solemn 
 crises of his life a subject of common conversation ; and Paul was by no means a man te 
 wear his heart upon his sleeve. How many hundreds who read this passage will by a 
 moment's thought become aware that apart from written memoranda, and possibly even 
 with their aid, there is no one living who could write his own biography with any approach 
 to accuracy ? What reason is there for supposing that it would have been otherwise 
 with St. Paul? What reason is there for the supposition that he entrusted St. Luke with 
 all the important facts which had occurred to him, when we see that what St. Luke was 
 able to record about him neither portrayed one-fourth of his character nor preserved a 
 memorial of one tithe of his sufferings ? And it is to be observed that in Acts xxii. 16, 17, 
 where it had no bearing on his immediate subject, St. Paul himself omits all reference Vo 
 this retirement into Arabia.
 
 THE RETIREMENT OF ST. PATTL. ^ 117 
 
 considerations lead us to think likely in the case of one circumstanced as Sanl 
 of Tarsus was after his sudden and strange conversion? The least likely 
 course the one which would place him at the greatest distance from all deep 
 and earnest spirits who have passed through a similar crisis would be for him 
 to have plunged at once into the arena of controversy, and to have passed, 
 without pause or breathing-space, from the position of a leading persecutor 
 into that of a prominent champion. In the case of men of shallow nature, or 
 superficial convictions, such a proceeding is possible ; but we cannot imagine it 
 of St. Paul. It is not thus with souls which have been arrested in mid-career 
 by the heart-searching voice of God. Just as an eagle which has been drenched 
 and battered by some fierce storm will alight to plume its ruffled wings, so 
 when a great soul has " passed through fire and through water " it needs some 
 safe and quiet place in which to rest. The lifelong convictions of any man 
 may be reversed in an instant, and that sudden reversion often causes a 
 marvellous change ; but it is never in an instant that the whole nature and 
 character of a man are transformed from what they were before. It is difficult 
 to conceive of any change more total, any rift of difference more deep, than 
 that which separated Saul the persecutor from Paul the Apostle ; and we are 
 sure that like Moses, like Elijah, like our Lord Himself, like almost every 
 great soul in ancient or modern times to whom has been entrusted the task of 
 swaying the destinies by moulding the convictions of mankind like Sakya 
 Mouni, like Mahomet in the cave of Hira, like St. Francis of Assisi in his 
 sickness, like Luther in the monastery of Erfurdt he would need a quiet 
 period in which to elaborate his thoughts, to still the tumult of his emotions, 
 to commune in secrecy and in silence with his own soul. It was necessary for 
 him to understand the Scriptures ; to co-ordinate his old with his new beliefs. 
 It is hardly too much to say that if Saul ignorant as yet of many essential 
 truths of Christianity, alien as yet from the experience of its deepest power 
 had begun at once to argue with and to preach to others, he could hardly have 
 done the work he did. To suppose that the truths of which afterwards ho 
 became the appointed teacher were all revealed to him as by one flash of light 
 in all their fulness, is to suppose that which is alien to God's dealings with the 
 human soul, and which utterly contradicts the phenomena of that long series 
 of Epistles in which we watch the progress of his thoughts. Even on grounds 
 of historic probability, it seems unlikely that Saul should at once have been 
 able to substitute a propaganda for an inquisition. Under such circumstances 
 it would have been difficult for the brethren to trust, and still more difficult 
 for the Jews to tolerate him. The latter would have treated him as a shame- 
 less i-enegade, 1 the former would have mistrusted him as a secret spy. 
 
 We might, perhaps, have expected that Saul would have stayed quietly 
 among the Christians at Damascus, mingling unobtrusively in their meetings, 
 listening to them, learning of them, taking at their love-feasts the humblest 
 place. We can hardly suppose that he cherished, in these first days of his 
 
 1 They would have called him a irno, one who had abandoned hia religions conviction*.
 
 118 THE LIFE JL3TD WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Christian career, the developed purpose of preaching an independent Gospel. 
 Assailed, as he subsequently was, on all sides, but thwarted most of all by the 
 espionage of false brethren, and the calumnies of those who desired to throw 
 doubt on his inspired authority, it was indeed a providential circumstance that 
 the events which followed his conversion were such as to separate him as far 
 as possible from the appearance of discipleship to human instructors. As a 
 Pharisee he had sat at the feet of Gamaliel ; as a Christian he called no man 
 his master. He asserts, with reiterated earnestness, that his teaching as well 
 as his authority, " his Gospel " no less than his Apostleship, had been received 
 immediately from God. Indeed, the main object of that intensely interesting 
 and characteristic narrative which occupies the two first chapters of the Epistle 
 to the Galatians is to establish the declaration which he felt it necessary to 
 make so strongly, that " the Gospel preached by him was not a human gospel, 
 and that he did not even receive it from any human being, nor was he taught 
 it, but through revelation of Jesus Christ." l Had he not been able to assure 
 his converts of this had he not been able to appeal to visions and revelations 
 of the Lord he might have furnished another instance of one whose opinions 
 have been crashed and silenced by the empty authority of names. It was from 
 no personal feeling of emulation a feeling of which a soul so passionately in 
 earnest as his is profoundly incapable but it was from the duty of ensuring 
 attention to the truths he preached that he felt it to be so necessary to con- 
 vince the churches which he had founded how deep would be their folly if 
 they allowed themselves to be seduced from the liberty of his Gospel by the re- 
 trograde mission of the evangelists of bondage. It was indispensable for the 
 dissemination of the truth that he should be listened to as an Apostle "neither 
 of man, nor by any man, but by Jesus Christ, and God, who raised him from 
 the dead." Had his Apostleship emanated from (avb) the Twelve, or been 
 conferred en him by the consecrating act of (Sia) any one of them, 8 then they 
 might be supposed to have a certain superior commission, a certain coercive 
 power. If, as far as ho was concerned, they had no such power, it was because 
 ho had received his commission directly from his Lord. And to this indepen- 
 dence of knowledge he often refers. He tells the Thessalonians, " by the 
 Word of the Lord," s that those who were still alive at the Second Advent 
 should not be beforehand with should gain no advantage or priority over 
 those that slept. He tells the Ephesians 4 that it was by revelation that God 
 " made known to him the mystery which in other generations was not made 
 known to the sons of men namely, that the Gentiles are co-heirs and co- 
 members and co-part ukers 6 of the promise in Christ Jesus, through the Gospel 
 of which he became a minister according to the gift of the grace of God, which 
 was given him according to the mighty working of His power." He tells the 
 Colossians 6 that he became a minister of the Church " in accordance with the 
 stewardship of God given to him for them, that he might fully preach the 
 
 1 Gal. i. 11, 12. 2 Gal. 1. 1, owe air' ai^pwrwr ov& SC a 
 
 8 1 Thess. iv. 15, i Myy Kvpimi. 4 Eph. iii._3 6. 
 
 * ovyeAj)pov6.'iO xail ovtro-wjua KOI <n>fiftlrox a> ' CoL i. 25,
 
 THE EETIKEME2TT OF 81. PAUL. 119 
 
 Word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and the generations." From 
 these and from other passages it Beenis clear that what St. Paul meant to 
 represent as special subjects of the revelation which he had received were 
 partly distinct views of what rule ought to be followed by Christiana in special 
 instances, partly great facts about the resurrection, 1 partly the direct vision of 
 a Saviour not only risen from the dead, but exalted at the right hand of God; 
 but especially the central and peculiar fact of his teaching " the mystery of 
 Christ " the truth once secret, but now revealed the deliverance which He 
 had wrought, the justification by faith which He had rendered possible, and, 
 most of all, the free offer of this great salvation to the Gentiles, without the 
 necessity of their incurring the yoke of bondage, which even the Jew had 
 found to be heavier than he could bear. 2 
 
 It can hardly, therefore, be doubted that after his recovery from the shock 
 of conviction with which his soul must long have continued to tremble, Paul 
 only spent a few quiet days with Ananias, and any other brethren who would 
 hold out to him the right hand of friendship. He might talk with them of 
 the life which Jesus had lived on earth. He might hear from them those 
 reminiscences of the 
 
 "Sinless years 
 Which breathed beneath the Syrian blue," 
 
 of which the most precious wore afterwards recorded by the four Evangelists. 
 In listening to these he would have been fed with "the spiritual guileless 
 milk." 3 Nor can we doubt that in those days more than ever he would 
 refrain his soul and keep it low that his soul was even as a weaned child. 
 But of the mystery which he was afterwards to preach of that which 
 emphatically he called "his Gospel" 4 neither Ananias (who was himself a 
 rigid Jew), nor any of the disciples, could toll him anything. That was 
 taught him by God alone. It came to him by the illuminating power of the 
 Spirit of Christ, in revelations which accompanied each step in that Divine 
 process of education which constituted his life. 
 
 But he could not in any case have stayed long in Damascus. His position 
 there was for the present untenable. Alike the terror with which his arrival 
 must have been expected by the brethren, and the expectation which it had 
 aroused among the Jews, would make him the centre of hatred and suspicion, 
 of rumour and curiosity. He may even have been in danger of arrest by the 
 very subordinates to whom his sudden change of purpose must have seemed 
 to delegate his commission. But a stronger motive for retirement than all 
 this would be the yearning for solitude; the intense desire, and even the 
 overpowering necessity, to be for a time alone with God. He was a stricken 
 doer, and was impelled as by a strong instinct to leave the herd. In solitude 
 a man may trace to their hidden source the fatal errors of the past ; he may 
 
 1 See 1 Cor. rv. 22 ; 1 Thess. iv. 15. 
 
 See Col. iv. 3 ; Eph. iii. 3 ; vi. 19 ; Rom. xvi. 25. 
 
 3 1 Pet. U. 2, TO AoyiicbK oJoXov yoAa. 
 
 1 Cor. ix. 17; Gal. ii. 2, 7j 2 Thess. ii. 14j 2 Tim. ii. 8.
 
 120 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 pray for that light from heaven no longer naming with more than noonday 
 fierceness, but shining quietly in dark places which shall enable him to 
 understand the many mysteries of life ; he may wait the healing of his deep 
 wounds by the same tender hand that in mercy has inflicted them ; he may 
 
 " Sit on the desert stone 
 Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone ; 
 And a gentle voice comes through the wild, 
 Like a father consoling his fretful child, 
 That banishes bitterness, wrath, and fear, 
 Saying, 'MAN is DISTANT, BUT GOD IB NEAR."' 
 
 And so Saul went to Arabia a word which must, I think, bo understood in 
 its popular and primary sense to mean the Sinaitic peninsula. 1 
 
 He who had been a persecutor in honour of Moses, would henceforth be 
 himself represented as a renegade from Moses. The most zealous of the 
 living servants of Mosaism was to be the man who should prove most 
 convincingly that Mosaism was to vanish away. Was it not natural, then, 
 that he should long to visit the holy ground where the bush had glowed 
 in unconsuining fire, and the granite crags had trembled at the voice which 
 uttered the fiery law ? Would the shadow of good things look so much of a 
 shadow if he visited the very spot where the great Lawgiver and the great 
 Prophet had held high communings with God p Could he indeed be sure that 
 he had come unto the Mount Sioii, and unto the city of the living God, thej 
 heavenly Jerusalem, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, until hei 
 had visited the mount that might be touched and that burned with fire, where 
 amid blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and' 
 the voice of words, Moses himself had exceedingly feared and quaked ? 
 
 How long he stayed, we do not know. It has usually been assumed that 
 his stay was brief ; to me it seems far more probable that it occupied no small 
 portion of those "three years " 2 which he tells us elapsed before he visited 
 Jerusalem. Few have doubted that those " three years " are to be dated from 
 his conversion. It seems clear that after his conversion he stayed but a few 
 days (fifj-epat T4s) with the disciples ; that then at the earliest practicable 
 moment he retired into Arabia ; that after his return he began to preach, 
 and that this ministry in Damascus was interrupted after a certain period 
 (yfufpai iKaval) by the conspiracy of the Jews. The latter expression is translated 
 " many days " in the Acts ; but though the continuance of his preaching may 
 have occupied days which in comparison with his first brief stay might have 
 been called " many," the phrase itself is so vague that it might be used of 
 almost any period from a fortnight to three years. 3 As to the general 
 correctness of this conclusion I can feel no doubt ; the only point which must 
 always remain dubious is whether the phrase "three years" means three 
 complete years, or whether it means one full year, and a part, however short, 
 of two other years. From the chronology of St. Paul's life we can attain no 
 
 See Excursus IX., " Saul in Arabia." 2 Gal. i. 18, 
 
 * It actually is used of three years in 1 Kings ii. 88.
 
 THE EETIEEMENT OF ST. PATJL. 121 
 
 certainty on this point, though such lights as we have are slightly in favour of 
 the longer rather than of the shorter period. 
 
 Very much depends upon the question whether physical infirmity, and 
 prostration of health, were in part the cause of this retirement and inactivity. 
 And here again we are on uncertain ground, because this at once opens the 
 often discussed problem as to the nature of the affliction to which St. Paul so 
 pathetically alludes as his " stake in the flesh." I am led to touch upon that 
 question here, because I believe that this dreadful affliction, whatever it may 
 have been, had its origin at this very time. 1 The melancholy through which, 
 like a fire at midnight, his enthusiasm burns its way the deep despondency 
 which sounds like an undertone even amid the bursts of exultation which 
 triumph over it, seem to me to have been in no small measure due to this. It 
 gave to St. Paul that painful self-consciousness which is in itself a daily trial to 
 any man who, in spite of an innate love for retirement, is thrust against his 
 will into publicity and conflict. It seems to break the wings of his spirit, so 
 that sometimes he drops as it were quite suddenly to the earth, checked and 
 beaten down in the very midst of his loftiest and strongest flights. 
 
 No one can even cursorily read St. Paul's Epistles without observing 
 that he was aware of something in his aspect or his personality which 
 distressed him with an agony of humiliation something which seems to 
 force him, against every natural instinct of his disposition, into language 
 which sounds to himself like a boastfulness which was abhorrent to him, 
 but which he finds to be more necessary to himself than to other men. It 
 is as though he felt that his appearance was against him. Whenever he 
 has ceased to be carried away by the current of some powerful argument, 
 whenever his sorrow at the insidious encroachment of errors against which 
 he had flung the whole force of his character has spent itself in words of 
 immeasurable indignation whenever he drops the high language of apos- 
 tolical authority and inspired conviction we hear a sort of wailing, pleading, 
 appealing tone in his personal addresses to his converts, which would be 
 almost impossible in one whose pride of personal manhood had not been 
 abashed by some external defects, to which he might indeed appeal as 
 marks at once of the service and the protection of his Saviour, but which 
 made him less able to cope face to face with the insults of opponents or 
 the ingratitude of friends. His language leaves on us the impression of 
 one who was acutely sensitive, and whoso sensitiveness of temperament has 
 been aggravated by a meanness of presence which is indeed forgotten by 
 the friends who know him, but which raises in strangers a prejudice not 
 always overcome. Many, indeed, of the brethren in the little churches 
 which he founded, had so " grappled him to their souls with hooks of steel," 
 th t he could speak in letter after letter of their abounding love and 
 
 f4--- lufM it-* tr o'^t^'^fi" :; >!! M '- 
 
 1 There is nothing to exclude this hi the Wofcj fioi of 2 Cor. xii. 7. The affliction 
 might not have arrived at its full intensity till that period, which was some years after 
 his conversion, about A.D. 43, when St. Paul was at Antioch or Jerusalem or 
 T&rsut.
 
 122 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL 
 
 tenderness and gratitude towards him 1 that he can call them "my little 
 children" that he can assume their intense desire to see him, and can 
 grant that desire as an express favour to them ; 2 and that he is even forced 
 to soothe those jealousies of affection which were caused by his acceptance 
 of aid from one church which he would not accept from others. But he 
 is also well aware that he is hated with a perfect virulence of hati-ed, and 
 (which is much more wounding to such a spirit) that with this hatred there 
 is a large mixture of unjust contempt. From this contempt even of the 
 contemptible, from this hatred even of the hateful, he could not but 
 shrink, though ho knew that it is often the penalty with which the world 
 rewards service, and the tribute which virtue receives from vice. 
 
 It is this which explains the whole style and character of his Epistles. 8 
 The charges which his enemies made against him have their foundation 
 in facts about his method and address, which made those charges all the 
 more dangerous and the more stinging by giving them a certain plausibility. 
 They were, in fact, yet another instance of those half-truths which are the 
 worst of lies. Thus adopting the taunts of his adversaries, as ho often 
 does he says that he is in presence "humble" among them, 4 and "rude in 
 speech," 6 and he quotes their own reproach that "his bodily presence was 
 weak, and his speech contemptible." 6 Being confessedly one who strove 
 for peace and unity, who endeavoured to meet all men half-way, who 
 was ready to be all things to all men if by any means he might save some, 
 he has more than once to vindicate his character from those charges of 
 insincerity, craftiness, dishonesty, guile, man-pleasing and flattery, 7 which 
 are, perhaps, summed up in the general depreciation which he so indignantly 
 rebuts that "he walked according to the flesh," 8 or in other words that 
 his motives were not spiritual, but low and selfish. He has, too, to defend 
 himself from the insinuation that his self-abasements had been needless 
 and excessive; 9 that even his apparent self-denials had only been assumed 
 as a cloak for ulterior views ; 10 and that his intercourse was so marked by 
 levity of purpose, that there was no trusting to his promises. 11 Now how 
 came St. Paul to be made the butt for such calumnies as these P Chiefly, 
 no doubt, because he was, most sorely against his will, the leader of a party, 
 and because there are in all ages souls which delight in lies men " whose 
 throat is an open sepulchre, and the poison of asps is under their lips ; " 
 but partly, also, because he regarded tact, concession, conciliatoriness, as 
 Divine weapons which God had permitted him to use against powerful 
 obstacles ; and partly because it was easy to satirise and misrepresent a 
 depression of spirits, a humility of demeanour, which were either the direct 
 results of some bodily affliction, or which the consciousness of this affliction 
 
 i Phil, passim. a 2 Oor. i. 15, 23. 
 
 3 See Excursus L : " The Style of St. Paul as illustrative of his Character." 
 
 * 2 Cor. x. 1,2. 8 2 Cor. x. 2. 
 
 4 2 Cor. xi. 6, i&uinp evA^yw. ' 2 Cor. xi. 7. 
 
 '2 Cor. x. 10. ' 2 Cor. xiL 16. 
 1 2 Cor. U. 17, iv. 2; 1 Thess. ii S-5, 2 Cor. i. 17.
 
 THE RETIEEMEN5? Of ST. PAUL. 123 
 
 had rendered habitual. We foci at once that this would be natural to the 
 bowed and weak figure which Albrecht Diirer has represented ; but that it 
 would be impossible to the imposing orator whora Raphael has placed on the 
 steps of the Areopagus. 1 
 
 And to this he constantly refers. There is hardly a letter in which he 
 does not allude to his mental trials, his physical sufferings, his persecutions, 
 his infirmities. He tells the Corinthians that his intercourse with them 
 had been characterised by physical weakness, fear, and much trembling. 2 
 He reminds the Galatians that he had preached among them in consequence 
 of an attack of severe sickness. 3 He speaks of the inexorable burden of 
 life, and its unceasing inoan. 4 The trouble, the perplexity, the persecution, 
 the prostrations which were invariable conditions of his life, seem to him 
 like a perpetual carrying about with him in his body of the mortification 
 the putting to death of Christ ; & a perpetual betrayal to death for Christ's 
 sake a perpetual exhibition of the energy of death in his outward life. 6 He 
 died daily, he was in deaths oft ; 7 he was being killed all the day long. 8 
 
 And this, too as well as the fact that he seems to write in Greek and 
 think in Syriac is the key to the peculiarities of St. Paul's language. The 
 feeling that he was inadequate for the mighty task which God had specially 
 entrusted to him ; the dread lest his personal insignificance should lead any 
 of his hearers at once to reject a doctrine announced by a weak, suffering, 
 distressed, overburdened man, who, though an ambassador of Christ, bore 
 in his own aspect so few of the credentials of an embassy ; the knowledge 
 that the fiery spirit which " o'erinformed its tenement of clay " was held, 
 like the light of Gideon's pitchers, in a fragile and earthen vessel, 9 seems to 
 be so constantly and so oppressively present with him, as to make all words 
 too weak for the weight of meaning they have to bear. Hence his language, 
 in many passages, bears the traces of almost morbid excitability in its 
 passionate alternations of humility with assertions of the real greatness of 
 his labours, 10 and of scorn and indignation against fickle weaklings and 
 intriguing calumniators with an intense and yearning love. 11 Sometimes his 
 heart beats with such quick emotion, his thoughts rush with such confused 
 impetuosity, that hi anakoluthon after anakoluthon, and parenthesis after 
 parenthesis, the whole meaning becomes uncertain. 12 His feeling is so intense 
 that his very words catch a life of their own they become " living creatures 
 with hands and feet." 13 Sometimes ho is almost contemptuous in his asser- 
 tion of the rectitude which makes him indifferent to vulgar criticism, 14 and 
 keenly bitter in the sarcasm of his self-depreciation. 16 In one or two 
 
 * Hausrath, p. 61. * 1 Cor. ii. 8. Gal. iv. IS. 
 
 4 2 Cor. V. 4, oi ovrts iv T<j! ffx^vei OTi'ac,uev ftc.povfj.eyot. 
 
 2 Cor. IV. 8 10, OXi/Jufxfvoi . . . ajropovfic^ot . . . StOK^fieyot . . . 
 . . . jrairoT* TT|v vfKpua-Lv ToO 'hjcrou iv Tif tnafiari vepuf>tpovrff. 
 Id. 11, oi yap Tjueis oi {Jiwjre*, eif 6a.va.-rov irapai2dfieda. 
 
 7 2 Cor. xi. 23 ; 1 Cor. rv. 31. 8 Ro m> ^iti. 36. 
 
 2 Cor. iv. 7. 10 1 Cor. rv. 10. Gal. and 2 Cor. passim. 
 
 Gal. iv. 12. w Gal. iv. 14; 1 Cor. iv. 13; Phil. iii. 8. 
 
 * 1 Cor. iv. 3. 1 Cor. iy, 10; x, 16; 2 Cor. xi. 1619; xii. U.
 
 124 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATH*, 
 
 instances an enemy might almost apply the word " brutal " to the language 
 in which he ridicules, or denounces, or unmasks the impugners of his gospel ; 1 
 in one or two passages he speaks with a tinge of irony, almost of irritation, 
 about those " accounted to be pillars " the " out-and-out Apostles," who 
 even if they were Apostles ten times over added nothing to him : 2 but the 
 storm of passion dies away in a moment; he is sorry even for the most 
 necessary and justly-deserved severity, and all ends in expressions of tender- 
 ness and, as it were, with a burst of tears. 3 
 
 Now it is true that we recognise in Saul of Tarsus the restlessness, the 
 vehemence, the impetuous eagerness which we see in Paul the Apostle ; 
 but it is hard to imagine in Saul of Tarsus the nervous shrinking, the 
 tremulous sensibility, the profound distrust of his own gifts and powers 
 apart from Divine grace, which are so repeatedly manifest in the language of 
 Paul, the fettered captive of Jesus Christ. It is hard to imagine that siich a 
 man as the Apostle became could ever have been the furious inquisitor, 
 the intruder even into the sacred retirement of peaceful homes, the eager 
 candidate for power to suppress a heresy even in distant cities, which Saul 
 was before the vision on the way to Damascus. It is a matter of common 
 experience that some physical humiliation, especially if it take the form 
 of terrible disfigurement, often acts in this very way upon human character.* 
 It makes the bold shrink ; it makes the arrogant humble ; it makes the 
 self-confident timid; it makes those who once loved publicity long to hide 
 themselves from the crowd ; it turns every thought of the heart from trust in 
 self to humblest submission to the will of God. Even a dangerous illness 
 is sometimes sufficient to produce results like these; but when the illness 
 leaves its physical marks for life upon the frame, its effects are intensified ; 
 it changes a mirthful reveller, like Francis of Assisi, into a squalid ascetic ; 
 a favourite of society, like Francis Xavier, into a toilsome missionary ; a gay 
 soldier, like Ignatius Loyola, into a rigid devotee. 
 
 Gal. iii. 1 ; iv. 17 (in the Greek). 
 
 ^ Gill. ii. 6, TUP SoKOvvriav etna ri, oiroiai irore fi<rav, ov&tv fxot Siatftepti ; 9, oi ioKovvrer (rrvXoi 
 (Tvat ; 11, KaTeyvwcr/ieVoj V- 1 Cor. XV. 9 ; 2 Cor. xi. 5, TUV virrpXtav airomi^av. 2 Cor. xii. 11, 
 oii&ev inrrepijora riov \nrtp\Cav oTroOToAajv el Kai ovSiv elfit. 
 
 3 Gal. iv. 19 ; 2 Cor. ii. 4 ; Eom. be. 1 3. As bearing on this subject, every one will 
 read with interest the verses of Dr. Newman 
 
 " I dreamed that with a passionate complaint 
 I wished me born amid God's deeds of might, 
 And envied those who had the presence bright 
 Of gifted prophet or strong-hearted saint, 
 Whom my heart loves, and fancy strives to paint 
 I turned, when straight a stranger met my sight, 
 Came as my guest, and did awhile unite 
 A! - " His lot with mine, and lived without restraint. 
 Courteous he was, and grave ; so meek in mien. 
 It seemed untrue, or told a purpose weak ; 
 Yet, in the mood, could he with aptness speak 
 Or with stern force, or show of feeling keen, 
 Marking deep craft, methought, and hidden pride; 
 Then came a voice, ' St. Paul is at thy side 1 ' " 
 
 * The IMOq of 2 Cor. xii. 7 shows that the "stake in the flesh" was nothing, 
 congenital.
 
 THE BEGINNING OF A LONG MARTYRDOM. 125 
 
 What was the nature of this stake in the flesh, we shall examine fully in a 
 separate essay ; l but that, whatever it may have been, it came to St. Paul as a 
 direct consequence of visions and revelations, and as a direct counteraction to 
 the inflation and self-importance which such exceptional insight might 
 otherwise have caused to such a character as his, he has himself informed us. 
 We are, therefore, naturally led to suppose that the first impalement of his 
 health by this wounding splinter accompanied, or resulted from, that greatest 
 of all his revelations, the appearance to him of the risen Christ as he was 
 travelling at noonday nigh unto Damascus. If so, we see yet another 
 reason for a retirement from all exertion and publicity, which was as necessary 
 for his body as for his soul. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF A LONG MARTYRDOM. 
 
 " Be bold as a leopard, swift as an eagle, bounding as a stag, brave as a lion, to 
 do the will of thy Father which ia in heaven." FESACHIM, f. 112, 2. 
 
 CALMED by retirement, confirmed, it may be, by fresh revelations of the will 
 of God, clearer in his conceptions of truth and duty, Saul returned tc 
 Damascus. We need look for no further motives of his return than such as 
 rose from the conviction that he was now sufficiently prepared to do the work 
 to which Christ had called him. 
 
 He did not at once begin his mission to the Gentiles. " To the Jew first " 
 was the understood rule of the Apostolic teaching, 2 and had been involved in 
 the directions given by Christ Himself. 3 Moreover, the Gentiles were 
 so unfamiliar with the institution of preaching, their whole idea of worship was 
 so alien from every form of doctrinal or moral exhortation, that to begin 
 by preaching to them was almost impossible. It was through the Jews that 
 the Gentiles were most easily reached. The proselytes, numerous in every 
 city, were specially numerous at Damascus, and by their agency it was certain 
 that every truth propounded in the Jewish synagogue would, even if only by 
 the agency of female proselytes, be rapidly communicated to the Gentile 
 agora. 
 
 It was, therefore, to the synagogues that Saul naturally resorted, and 
 there that he first began to deliver his message. Since the Christians were 
 still in communion with the synagogue and the Toiuple since their leader, 
 Ananias, was so devout according to the law as to have won the willing 
 testimony of all the Jews who lived in Damascus 4 no obstacle would be placed 
 in the way of the youthful Eabbi ; and as he had been a scholar in the most 
 
 1 See Excursus X., "St. Paul's 'Stake in the Flesh.'" 
 
 2 Rom. i. 16 ; Acts iii. 26 ; xiii. 38, 39, 46 ; John iv. 22. 
 
 * Luke xxiv. 47 ; cf. Isa. ii. 2, 3 ; xlix. 6 ; Mic. iv. 2. 4 Acts xxit. 12.
 
 126 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 ominent of Jewish schools, his earliest appearances on the arena of controversy 
 would be awaited with contention and curiosity. We have no reason to 
 suppose that the animosity against the Nazarenes, which Saul himself had 
 kept ah' ve in Jerusalem, had as yet penetrated to Damascus. News is slow to 
 travel in Eastern countries, and those instantaneous waves of opinion which 
 flood our modem civilisation were unknown to ancient times* In the capital 
 of Syria, Jews and Christians were still living together in mutual toleration, 
 if not in mutual esteem. They had been thus living in Jerusalem until the 
 spark of hatred had been struck out by the collision of the Hellenists of the 
 liberal with those of the narrow school the Christian Hellenists of the 
 Hagadoth with the Jewish Hellenists of the Halacha. To Saul, if not solely, 
 yet in great measure, this collision had been due ; and Saul had been on his 
 way to stir up the same wrath and strife in Damascus, when he had been 
 resistlessly arrested 1 on his unhallowed mission by the vision and the 
 reproach of his ascended Lord. 
 
 But the authority, and the letters, had been entrusted to him alone, and 
 none but a few hot zealots really desired that pious and respectable persons 
 like Ananias children of Abraham, servants of Moses should be dragged, 
 with a halter round their necks, from peaceful homes, scourged by the people 
 with whom they had lived without any serious disagreement, and haled to 
 Jerusalem by fanatics who would do their best to procure against them the 
 fatal vote which might consign them to the revolting horrors of an almost 
 obsolete execution. 
 
 So that each Euler of a Synagogue over whom Saul might have been 
 domineering with all the pride of superior learning, and all the intemperance 
 of flaming zeal, might be glad enough to see and hoar a man who could no 
 longer hold in terror over him the commission of the Sanhedrin, and who had 
 now rendered himself liable to the very penalties which, not long before, he 
 had been so eager to inflict. 
 
 And had Saul proved to be but an ordinary disputant, the placidity of 
 Jewish self-esteem would not have been disturbed, nor would he have ruffled 
 the sluggish stream of legal self-satisfaction. He did not speak of circum- 
 cision as superfluous ; he said nothing about the evanescence of the Temple 
 service, or the substitution for it of a more spiritual worship. He did not 
 breathe a word about turning to the Gentiles. The subject of his preaching 
 was that "Jesus is the Son of God." 2 At first this preaching excited no 
 special indignation. The worshippers in tho synagogue only felt a keen 
 astonishment 3 that this was the uiau who had ravaged in Jerusalem thosa 
 who called on " this name," 4 and who had coine to Damascus for the express 
 purpose of leading them bound to tho High Priest. But when once self-love 
 is seriously wounded, toleration rarely survives. This was the case with tho 
 Jews of Damascus. They very soon discovered that it was no mere Ananias 
 
 * Phil. iii. 12, icaTA.!J<J>0jjv irirb ToO Xpiorov 'IrjcroS. 
 
 3 'lipn/vv, not xptarbc, ia here the true reading (, A, B, O, E). 
 
 Acts ix. 21, ItitrnvTo, * V.
 
 THE BEGINNING OF A LONG MARTYBDOM. 127 
 
 with whom they had to deaL It was, throughout life, Paul's unhappy fate to 
 kindle the most virulent animosities, because, though conciliatory and courteous 
 by temperament, he yet carried into his arguments that intensity and forth- 
 lightness which awaken dormant opposition. A languid controversialist will 
 always meet with a languid tolerance. But any controversialist whose honest 
 belief in his own doctrines makes him terribly in earnest, may count on a life 
 embittered by the anger of those on whom he has forced the disagreeable task 
 of re-considering their own assumptions. No one likes to be suddenly 
 awakened. The Jews were indignant with one who disturbed the deep 
 slumber of decided opinions. Their accredited teachers did not like to be 
 deposed from the papacy of infallible ignorance. They began at Damascus to 
 feel towards Saul that fierce detestation which dogged him thenceforward to 
 the last day of his Me. Out of their own Scriptures, by their own methods 
 of exegesis, in their own style of dialectics, by the interpretation of prophecies 
 of which they did not dispute the validity, he simply confounded them. He 
 could now apply the very same principles which in the mouth of Stephen he 
 had found it impossible to resist. The result was an unanswerable proof that 
 the last aeon of God's earthly dispensations had now dawned, that old things 
 had passed away, and all things had become new. 
 
 If arguments are such as cannot be refuted, and yet if those who hear 
 them will not yield to them, they inevitably excite a bitter rage. It was so 
 with the Jews. Some time had now elapsed since Saul's return from Arabia, 1 
 and they saw no immediate chance of getting rid of this dangerous intruder. 
 They therefore took refuge in what St. Chrysostom calls " the syllogism of 
 violence." They might at least plead the excuse aud how bitter was the 
 remorse which such a plea would excite in Saul's own conscience that they 
 were only treating him in the way in which he himself had treated all who 
 held the same opinions. Even-handed justice was thus commending to his 
 own lips the ingredients of that poisoned chalice of intolerance which he had 
 forced on others. It is a far from improbable conjecture that it was at this 
 early period that the Apostle endured one, and perhaps more than one, of 
 those five Jewish scourgings which he tells the Corinthians that he had 
 suffered at the hands of the Jews. For it is hardly likely that they would 
 resort at once to the strongest measures, and the scourgings might be taken 
 as a reminder that worse was yet to come. Indeed, there are few more 
 striking proofs of the severity of that life which the Apostle so cheerfully 
 nay, even so joyfully endured, than the fact that in his actual biography not 
 one of these five inflictions, terrible as we know that they must have been, is 
 so much as mentioned, and that in his Epistles they are only recorded, among 
 trials yet more insupportable, in a passing and casual allusion. 2 
 
 But we know from the example of the Apostles at Jerusalem that no such 
 pain or danger would have put a stop to his ministry. Like them, he would 
 have seen an honour in such disgrace. At last, exasperated beyond all en- 
 
 * cts Ix. 23, wtfxu Uswu. s See Excursus XI., " On Jewish Scourging*. 5
 
 128 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 durance at one whom they hated as a renegade, and whom they could uot even 
 enjoy the luxury of despising as a heretic, they made a secret plot to kill him. 1 
 The conspiracy was made known to Saul, and he was on his guard against it. 
 The Jews then took stronger and more open measures. They watched the 
 gates night and day to prevent the possibility of his escape. In this they 
 were assisted by the Ethnarch, who supplied them with the means of doing it. 
 This Ethnarch was either the Arab viceroy of Hareth, or the chief official of the 
 Jews themselves, 2 who well might possess this authority under a friendly prince. 
 
 There was thus an imminent danger that Saul would be cut off at the 
 very beginning of his career. But this was not to be. The disciples " took 
 Saul " 3 another of the expressions which would tend to show that he was 
 exceptionally in need of help and putting him in a large rope basket, 4 
 let him down through the window of a house which abutted on the wall. 6 
 It may be that they chose a favourable moment when the patrol had 
 passed, and had not yet turned round again. At any rate, the escape was 
 full of ignominy ; and it may have been this humiliation, or else the fact of 
 its being among the earliest perils which he had undergone, that fixed it 
 so indelibly on the memory of St. Paul. Nearly twenty years afterwards 
 he mentions it to the Corinthians with special emphasis, after agonies and 
 hair-breadth escapes which to us would have seemed far more formidable. 6 
 
 Here, then, closed in shame and danger the first page in tliis chequered 
 and sad career. How ho made his way to Jerusalem must bo left to con- 
 jecture. Doubtless, as he stole through the dark night alone above all, 
 as he passed the very spot where Christ had taken hold of him, and into 
 one moment of his life had been crowded a whole eternity his heart 
 would be full of thoughts too deep for words. It has been supposed, from 
 the expression of which he makes use in his speech to Agrippa, that 
 he may have preached in many synagogues on the days which were occu- 
 pied on his journey to Jerusalem. 7 But this seems inconsistent with his 
 own statement that he was " unknown by face to the churches of Judaea 
 which were in Chi-ist." 8 It is not, however, unlikely that he may some- 
 times have availed himself of the guest-chambers which were attached to 
 Jewish synagogues j and if such was the case, he might have taught the 
 first truths of the Gospel to the Jews without being thrown into close 
 contact with Christian communities. 
 
 1 These secret plots were fearfully rife in these days of the Sicarii (Jos. Antt. xi. 8, 5). 
 
 * 2 Cor. xi. 32, o cflpapxi? t^poupei rrji' TroAii/ ; Acts IX. 24, 01 'lovSaioi Trapenjpovi' ras TrvAas. 
 
 Ethnarch, as well as Alabarch, was a title of Jewish governors in heathen cities. 
 
 3 Acts ix. 25. The reading ol paJBrfrcu, ovroC, though well attested, can hardly be 
 correct. 
 
 4 On oTrvpis see my Life of Christ, i. 403, 480. In 2 Cor. xi. 33 it is called <rapya>r/, 
 which is denned by Hesych. as wX^a TI o^ou/iow. 
 
 s Such windows are still to be seen at Damascus. For similar escapes, see Josh. ii. 15 ; 
 1 Sam. xix. 12. 
 
 6 2 Cor. xi. 32. St. Paul's conversion was about A.D. 37. The Second Epistle to the 
 Corinthians was written A.D. 57, or early in A.D. 58. 
 
 7 Acts xxvi 20. 8 Gal. i. 22.
 
 SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM 129 
 
 In any case, his journey could not have been much prolonged, for he 
 tells us that it was his express object to visit Peter, whose recognition 
 must have been invaluable to him, apart from the help and insight which 
 he could not but derive from conversing with one who had long lived in 
 such intimate friendship with the Lord. 
 
 CHAPTER XTTT. 
 
 SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM. 
 
 " Cogitemus ipsum Paulum, licet caelesti voce prostratum et instructum, ad 
 hominem tamen missum esse, ut sacramenta perciperet." AUG. Dt Doctr. Christ., 
 Prol 
 
 To re- visit Jerusalem must have cost the future Apostle no slight effort. How 
 deep must have been his remorse as he neared the spot where he had seen 
 the corpse of Stephen lying crushed under the stones ! With what awful 
 interest must he now have looked on the scene of the Crucifixion, and the 
 spot where He who was now risen and glorified had lain in the garden-tomb ! 
 How dreadful must have been the revulsion of feeling which rose from the 
 utter change of his present relations towards the priests whose belief he 
 had abandoned, and the Christians whose Gospel he had embraced ! He 
 had left Jerusalem a Rabbi, a Pharisee, a fanatic defender of the Oral Law ; 
 he was entering it as one who utterly distrusted the value of legal right- 
 eousness, who wholly despised the beggarly elements of tradition. The 
 proud man had become unspeakably humble; the savage persecutor un- 
 speakably tender ; the self-satisfied Rabbi had abandoned in one moment 
 his pride of nationality, his exclusive scorn, his Pharisaic pre-eminence, to 
 take in exchange for them the beatitude of unjust persecution, and to become 
 the suffering preacher of an execrated faith. What had he to expect from 
 Theophilus, whose letters he had perhaps destroyed ? from the Sanhedrists, 
 whose zeal he had fired? from his old fellow-pupils in the lecture-room of 
 Gamaliel, who had seen in Saul of Tarsus one who in learning was the glory 
 of the school of Hillel, and in zeal the rival of the school of Shammai? 
 How would he be treated by these friends of his youth, by these teachers and 
 companions of his life, now that proclaiming his system, his learning, his 
 convictions, his whole life and therefore theirs no less than his to have 
 been irremediably wrong, he had become an open adherent of the little Church 
 which he once ravaged and destroyed P 
 
 But amid the natural shrinking with which he could not but anticipate an 
 encounter so full of trial, he would doubtless console himself with the thought 
 that he would find a brother's welcome among those sweet and gentle spirits 
 whose faith he had witnessed, whose love for each other he had envied while 
 he hated. How exquisite would be the pleasure of sharing that peace which
 
 130 THE LIFE AND WOSK OS 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 he had tried to shatter; of urging on others those arguments which had 
 been bringing conviction to his own mind even while he was most passionately 
 resisting them ; of hearing again and again from holy and gentle lips the 
 words of Him whom he had once blasphemed ! Saul might well have thought 
 that the love, the nobleness, the enthusiasm of his new brethren would more 
 than compensate for the influence and admiration which he had voluntarily 
 forfeited ; and that to pluck with them the fair fruit of the Spirit love, joy, 
 peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance 
 would be a bliss for which he might cheerfully abandon the whole world 
 beside. No wonder that " he essayed to join himself to the disciples." 1 His 
 knowledge of human nature might indeed have warned him that " confidence 
 is a plant of slow growth " that such a reception as he yearned for was 
 hardly possible. It may be that he counted too much on the change wrought 
 in human dispositions by the grace of God. The old Adam is oftentimes too 
 strong for young Helancthon. 
 
 For, alas ! a new trial awaited him. Peter, indeed, whom he had expressly 
 come to see, at once received him with the large generosity of that impulsive 
 heart, and being a married man, offered him hospitality without grudging. 2 
 But at first that was all. It speaks no little for the greatness and goodness of 
 Peter it is quite in accordance with that natural nobleness which we should 
 expect to find in one whom Jesus Himself had loved and blessed that he was 
 the earliest among the brethren to rise above the influence of suspicion. He 
 was at this time the leader of the Church in Jerusalem. As such he had not 
 been among those who fled before the storm. He must haA^e known that it was 
 at the feet of this young Pharisee that the garments of Stephen's murderers 
 had been hud. He must have feared him, perhaps even have hidden himself 
 from him, when he forced his way into Christian homes. Nay, more, the heart 
 of Peter must have sorely ached when he saw his little congregation skin, 
 scattered, destroyed, and the ccenobitic community, the faith of which had been 
 so bright, the enthusiasm so contagious, the common love so tender and so 
 pure, rudely broken up by the pitiless persecution of a Pupil of the Schools. 
 Yet, with the unquestioning trustfulness of a sunny nature with that spiritual 
 insight into character by which a Divine charity not only perceives real worth, 
 but even creates worthiness where it did not before exist Peter opens his door 
 to one whom a meaner man might well have excluded as still too possibly a 
 wolf amid the fold. 
 
 But of the other leaders of the Church if there were any at that time in 
 Jerusalem not one came near the new convert, not one so much as spoke to 
 him. He was met on every -side by cold, distrustful looks. At one stroke he 
 had lost all his old friends ; it seemed to be too likely that he would gain no 
 new ones in their place. The brethren regarded him with terror and mistrust; 
 they did not believe that he was a disciple at all. 3 The fads which accoin- 
 
 l Acts ix. 26. * Gal. 1. 18. 
 
 * Acts be. 26, iirtipiiTo KoAXacr&u TO"? paJhira.lt' (the imperfect marks an unsuccessful 
 effort) eci irorw t^oSoC-n-o avrbf, pq mffTevorrtt Sri fa
 
 SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM. 131 
 
 panied his alleged conversion they may indeed have heard of ; but they had 
 occurred three years before. The news of his recent preaching and recent peril 
 in Damascus was not likely to have reached them ; but even if it had, it would 
 have seemed so strange that they might be pardoned for looking with doubt on 
 the persecutor turned brother for even fearing that the asserted conversion 
 might only be a ruse to enable Saul to learn their secrets, and so entrap them 
 to their final ruin. And thus at first his intercourse with the brethren in the 
 Church of Jerusalem was almost confined to his reception in the house of 
 Peter. "Other of the Apostles saw I none," he writes to the Galatians, 
 " save James the Lord's brother." But though he saw James, Paul seems to 
 have had but little communion with him. All that we know of the first Bishop 
 of Jerusalem shows us the immense dissimilarity, the almost antipathetic 
 peculiarities which separated the characters of the two men. Even with the 
 Lord Himself, if we may follow the plain language of the Gospels, 1 the eldest 
 of His brethren seems, during His life on earth, to have had but little commu- 
 nion. He accepted indeed His Messianic claims, but ho accepted them in the 
 Judaic sense, and was displeased at that in His life which was most unmis- 
 takably Divine. If ho be rightly represented by tradition as a Legalist, a 
 Nazarite, almost an Essene, spending his whole life in prayer in the Templo, 
 it was his obedience to Mosaism scarcely modified in any external particular 
 by his conversion to Christianity which had gained for him even from the 
 Jews the surname of " the Just*" If, as seems almost demonstrable, he bo 
 the author of the Epistle which bears his name, we see how slight was the ex- 
 tent to which his spiritual life had been penetrated by those special aspects 
 of the one great truth which were to Paul the very breath and life of Chris- 
 tianity. In that Epistle we find a stern and noble morality which raises it 
 infinitely above the reproach of being " a mere Epistle of straw ;" 2 but we 
 nevertheless do not find one direct word about the Incarnation, or the Cruci- 
 fixion, or the Atonement, or Justification by Faith, or Sanctification by the 
 Spirit, or the Resurrection of the Dead. The notion that it was written to 
 counteract either the teaching of St. Paul, or the dangerous consequences 
 which might sometimes bo deduced from that teaching, is indeed most 
 extremely questionable ; and all that wo can say of that supposition is, that it 
 is not quite so monstrous a chimera as that which has been invented by the 
 German theologians, who soe St. Paul and his followers indignantly though 
 covertly denounced in the Balaam and Jezebel of the Churches of Pergarnos 
 and Thyatira, 3 and the Nieolaitans of the Church of Ephesus, 4 and the 
 " synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie," of the 
 Church of Philadelphia. 6 And yet no one can road the Epistle of James side 
 by side with any Epistle of St. Paul's without perceiving how wide were the 
 differences between the two Apostles. St. James was a man eminently inflex- 
 
 Matt. xiL 46; Mark iii. 31 ; Luke vilL 19; John vii. 6. 
 
 a "Ein reclit strohern Epistel, dcnn rie doch kein evangeliBch Art an ilia hat" 
 (Luther, Praef. N. T. t 1522) ; but he afterwards modified his opinion. 
 
 Bev. ii, 20. * Rev. il. 6. Kev. UL 9.
 
 132 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 ible ; St. Paul knew indeed how to yield, but then the very points which he 
 was least inclined to yield were those which most commanded the sympathy of 
 James. What we know of Peter is exactly in accordance with the kind readi- 
 ness with which he received the suspected and friendless Hellenist. What we 
 know of James would have led us a priori to assume that his relations with 
 Paul would never get beyond the formal character which they wear in the Acts 
 of the Apostles, and still more in the Epistle to the Galatians. But let it not 
 be assumed that because there was little apparent sympathy and co- operation 
 between St. Paul and St. James, and because they dwell on apparently opposite 
 aspects of the truth, we should for one moment be justified in disparaging 
 either the one or the other. The divergences which seem to arise from the 
 analysis of truth by individual minds are merged in the catholicity of a wider 
 synthesis. When St. Paul teaches that we are "justified by faith," he is 
 teaching a truth infinitely precious ; and St. James is also teaching a precious 
 truth when, with a different shade of meaning in both words, he says that 
 " by works a man is justified." l The truths which these two great Apostles 
 were commissioned to teach were complementary and supplementary, but not 
 contradictory of each other. Of both aspects of truth we are the inheritors. 
 If it be true that they did not cordially sympathise with each other in their 
 life- time, the loss was theirs ; but, even in that case, they were not the first 
 instances in the Church of God nor will they be the last in which two good 
 men, through the narrowness of one or the vehemence of the other, have been 
 too much beset by the spirit of human infirmity to be able, in all perfectness, 
 to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. 
 
 The man who saved the new convert from this humiliating isolation an 
 isolation which must at that moment have been doubly painful was the wise 
 and generous Joseph. He has already been mentioned in the Acts as a Levite 
 of Cyprus who, in spite of the prejudices of his rank, had been among the 
 earliest to join the new community, and to sanction its happy communism by 
 the sale of his own possessions. The dignity and sweetness of his character, 
 no less than the sacrifices which he had made, gave him a deservedly high 
 position among the persecuted brethren ; and the power with which he 
 preached the faith had won for him the surname of Barnabas, or " the son of 
 exhortation." 2 His intimate relations with Paul in after-days, his journey all 
 the way to Tarsus from Autioch to invite his assistance, and the unity of their 
 purposes until the sad quarrel finally separated them, would alone render it 
 probable that they had known each other at that earlier period of life during 
 which, for the most part, the closest intimacies are formed. Tradition asserts 
 that Joseph had been a scholar of Gamaliel, and the same feeling which led 
 him to join a school of which one peculiarity was its permission of Greek 
 
 1 James U. 24. It IB hardly a paradox to say that St. James meant by "faith" 
 omething analogous to what St. Paul meant by works. 
 
 2 nia: 13, " son of prophecy." That he had been one of the Seventy is probably a 
 mere guess. (Euseb. H. E. L 12; Clem. Alex. Strom, ii. 176.) " napaA>j<rtt late patet j 
 obi deeides excitat est hortatio, ubi tristitiae modetur est solatium " (Bengel).
 
 SAUL'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM. 133 
 
 learning, might hare led him yet earlier to take a few hours' sail from Cyprus 
 to see what could be learnt in the University of Tarsus. If so, he would 
 naturally have come into contact with the family of Saul, and the friendship 
 thus commenced would be continued at Jerusalem. It had been broken by the 
 conversion of Barnabas, it was now renewed by the conversion of Saul. 
 
 Perhaps also it was to this friendship that Saul owed his admission as a 
 guest into Peter's house. There was a close link of union between Barnabas 
 and Peter in the person of Mark, who was the cousin l of Barnabas, and whom 
 Peter loved so tenderly that he calls him his son. The very house in which 
 Peter lived may have been the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. It is 
 hardly probable that the poor fisherman of Galilee possessed any dwelling of 
 his own in the Holy City. At any rate, Peter goes to this house immediately 
 after his liberation from prison, and if Peter lived in it, the relation of 
 Barnabas to its owner would have given him some claim to ask that Saul 
 should share its hospitality. Generous as Peter was, it would have required 
 an almost superhuman amount of confidence to receive at once under his roof 
 a man who had tried by the utmost violence to extirpate the very fibres of the 
 Church. But if one so highly honoured as Barnabas was ready to vouch for 
 him, Peter was not the man to stand coldly aloof. Thus it happened that 
 Saul's earliest introduction to the families of those whom he had scattered 
 would be made under the high auspices of the greatest of the Twelve. 
 
 The imagination tries in vain to penetrate the veil of two thousand years 
 which hangs between us and the intercourse of the two Apostles. Barnabas, 
 we may be sure, must have been often present in the little circle, and must 
 have held many an earnest conversation with his former friend. Mary, the 
 mother of Mark, would have something to telL 2 Mark may have been an eye- 
 witness of more than one pathetic scene. But how boundless would be the 
 wealth of spiritual wisdom which Peter must have unfolded ! Is it not certain 
 that from those lips St. Paul must have heard about the Divine brightness of 
 the dawning ministry of Jesus during the Galilaean year about the raising of 
 Jairus' daughter, and the Transfiguration on Hermon, and the discourse in the 
 synagogue of Capernaum, and the awful scenes which had occurred on the 
 day of the Crucifixion ? And is it not natural to suppose that such a hearer 
 a hearer of exceptional culture, and enlightened to an extraordinary degree by 
 the Holy Spirit of God would grasp many of the words of the Lord with a 
 firmness of grasp, and see into the very inmost heart of their significance 
 with a keenness of insight, from which his informant might, in his turn, be 
 glad to learn ? 
 
 It must be a dull imagination that does not desire to linger for a moment 
 on the few days during which two such men were inmates together of one 
 obscure house in the city of Jerusalem. But however fruitful their inter- 
 course, it did not at once secure to the new disciple a footing among the 
 
 1 Col. iv. 10. 
 
 2 St. John and other Apostles were probably absent, partly perhaps as a consequence 
 of the very persecution in which Paul had been the prime mover.
 
 ISi IHE LIFE AND WORK O? SO?. PAUL. 
 
 brethren whose poverty and persecutions he came to share. Then it was (h*t- 
 Barnabas canie forward, aud saved Saul for the work of the Church. The 
 same discrimination of character, the same charity of insight which afterwards 
 made him prove Mark to be a worthy comrade of their second mission, in spite 
 of his first defection, now made him vouch unhesitatingly for the sincerity of 
 Saul. Taking him by the hand, he led him into the presence of the Apostles 
 the term being here used for Peter, 1 and James the Lord's brother, 2 and the 
 elders of the assembled church and there narrated to them the circumstances, 
 which either they had never heard, or of the truth of which they had not yet been 
 convinced. He told them of the vision on the road to Damascus, and of the 
 fearlessness with which Saul had vindicated his sincerity in the very city to 
 which he had come as an enemy. The words of Barnabas carried weight, and 
 his confidence was^contagious. Saul was admitted among the Christians on 
 a footing of friendship, " going in and out among them." To the generosity 
 and clear-sightedness of Joseph of Cyprus, on this and on a later occasion, the 
 Apostle owed a vast debt of gratitude. Next only to the man who achieves 
 the greatest and most blessed deeds is he who, perhaps himself wholly incap- 
 able of such high work, is yet the first to help and encourage the genius of 
 others. "We often do more good by our sympathy than by our labours, and 
 render to the world a more lasting service by absence of jealousy, and recog- 
 nition of merit, than we could ever render by the straining efforts of personal 
 ambition. 
 
 No sooner was Saul recognised as a brother, than he renewed the ministry 
 which he had begun at Damascus. It is, however, remarkable that he did not 
 venture to preach to the Hebrew Christians. He sought the synagogues of 
 the Hellenists in which the voice of Stephen had first been heard, and disputed 
 with an energy not inferior to his. It was incumbent on him, though it was a 
 duty which required no little courage, that his voice should be uplifted in the 
 name of the Lord Jesus in the places where it had been heard of old in 
 blasphemy against Him. But this very circumstance increased his danger. 
 His preaching was again cut short by a conspiracy to murder him. 3 
 
 It was useless to continue in a place where to stay was certain death. 
 The little Galilcean community got information of the plot. To do the Jews 
 justice, they showed little skill in keeping the secret of these deadly 
 
 1 Acts ix. 27 ; GaL i. 19. The true reading in GaL i. 18 seems to be " Kephas " (N, A, B, 
 and the most important versions) ; as also in iL 9, 11, 14. This Hebrew form of the 
 name also occurs in 1 Cor. ix. 5 ; xv. 6. Although elsewhere (e.g. ii. 7, 8) St. Paul uses 
 "Peter" indifferently with Cephas, as is there shown by the unanimity of the MSS., it 
 seems clear that St. Paul's conception of St. Peter was one which far more identified him 
 with the Judaic Church than with the Church in general. In the eyes of St. Paul, Simon 
 was specially the Apostle of the Circumcision. 
 
 2 Gal. i. 19, frepoi/ Se riav o.TtotTTo\<av oiiic tl&ov el fir) 'laKiaflov . . . It is impossibta from 
 
 the form of the words to tell whether James is here regarded as in the strictest sense an 
 Apostle or not. The addition of " the Lord's brother " TO o-e^voXdyii/iia, as Chrysostom 
 calls it distinguishes him from Jamea the brother of John, and from James the Less, 
 the son of Alphseus. 
 
 3 Acts ix. 29, irex'pow airbv oveXsIc. We know of at least ten such perils of assassi- 
 nation in the life of St. Paul.
 
 SAtft'S RECEPTION AT JERUSALEM, 135 
 
 combinations. It was natural that the Church should not only desire to save 
 Said's life, but also to avoid the danger of a fresh outbreak. Tot it was not 
 without a struggle, and a distinct intimation that auch was the will of God, 
 that Saul yielded to the solicitations of his brethren. How deeply he felt this 
 compulsory flight may be seen in the bitterness with which he alludes to it 1 
 even after the lapse of many years. He had scarcely been a fortnight in 
 Jerusalem when the intensity of his prayers and emotions ended in a trance, 2 
 during which he again saw the Divine figure and heard the Divine voice 
 which had arrested his mad progress towards the gates of Damascus. " Make 
 instant haste, and depart in speed from Jerusalem," said Jesus to him ; " for 
 they will not receive thy testimony concerning Me." But to Saul it seemed 
 incredible that his testimony could be resisted. If the vision of the risen 
 Christ by which he had been converted was an argument which, from the 
 nature of the case, could not, alone, be convincing to others, yet it seemed to 
 Saul that, knowing what they did know of his intellectual power, and 
 contrasting his present earnestness with his former persecution, they could 
 not but listen to such a teacher as himself. He longed also to undo, so far as 
 in him lay, the misery and mischief of the past havoc he had wrought. But 
 however deep may have been his yearnings, however ardent his hopes, the 
 answer came, brief and peremptory, "Go! for I will send thee forth afar to 
 the Gentiles." 3 
 
 All reluctance was now at an end ; and we can see what at the time must 
 have been utterly dark and mysterious to St. Paul that the coldness with 
 which he was received at Jerusalem, and the half-apparent desire to 
 precipitate his departure events so alien to his own plans and wishes, that he 
 pleads even against the Divine voice which enforced the indications of 
 circumstance wore part of a deep providential design. Tears afterward, 
 when St. Paul " stood pilloried on infamy's high stage," he was able with one 
 of his strongest asseverations to appeal to the brevity of his stay in 
 Jerusalem, and the paucity of those with whom he had any intercourse, in 
 proof that it was not from the Church of Jerusalem that he had received his 
 commission, and not to the Apostles at Jerusalem that he owed his alle- 
 giance. But though at present all this was unforeseen by him, he yielded to 
 the suggestions of his brethren, and scarcely a fortnight after his arrival they 
 not, perhaps, wholly sorry to part with one whose presence was a source of 
 many embarrassments conducted him to the coast town of Csesarea Stratonis 4 
 
 1 1 Thess. ii. 15, " who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and drove 
 
 US OUt " (jj/iaj exOKoJarrwy). 
 
 2 Acts xsii. 17. 
 
 3 Acts xsii. 17 21. The omission of this vision In the direct narrative of Acts ix. is 
 a proof that silence as to this or that occurrence in the brief narrative of St. Luke must 
 not be taken as a proof that he was unaware of the event which he omits. "We may also 
 note, in this passage, the first appearance of the interesting word fiaprvt. Here doubtless 
 it has its primary sense of " witness ; " but it contains the germ of its later sense of one 
 who testified to Christ by voluntary death. 
 
 4 That he was not sent to Csesarca PhUippi IB almost too obvious to need argument. 
 Neither xaT^yayov, which means a going downwards i.e., to the coast nor efaireVmAa*,
 
 136 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 to start him on his way to bis native Tarsus. Of bis movements on this 
 occasion we hear no more in the Acts of the Apostles ; but in the Epistle to 
 the Galatians he says that he came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, but 
 remained a complete stranger to the churches of Judtea that were in Christ, 
 all that they had heard of him being the rumours that their former persecutor 
 was now an evangelist of the faith of which he was once a destroyer ; news 
 which gave them occasion to glorify God in him. 1 
 
 Since we next find him at Tarsus, it might have been supposed that he 
 sailed there direct, and there remained. The expression, however, that " ha 
 came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia," seems to imply that this was not 
 the case. 2 Syria and Cilicia were at this time politically separated, and there 
 is room for the conjecture that the ship in which the Apostle sailed was 
 destined, not for Tarsus, but for Tyre, or Sidon, or Seleucia, the port of 
 Antioch. The existence of friends and disciples of Saul in the Phoenician 
 towns, and the churches of Syria as well as Cilicia, 3 point, though only with 
 dim uncertainty, to the possibility that he performed part of his journey to 
 Tarsus by land, and preached on the way. There is even nothing impossible 
 in Mr. Lewin's suggestion* that his course may have been determined by one 
 of those three shipwrecks which he mentions that he had undergone. But 
 the occasions and circumstances of the three shipwrecks must be left to the 
 merest conjecture. They occurred during the period when St. Luke was not 
 a companion of St. Paul, and he has thought it sufficient to give from his own 
 journal the graphic narrative of that Liter catastrophe of which he shared the 
 perils. The active ministry in Syria and Cilicia may have occupied the period 
 between Saul's departure in the direction of Tarsus, and his summons to 
 fresh fields of labour La the Syrian Antioch. During this time he may have 
 won over to the faith some of the members of his own family, and may have 
 enjoyed the society of others who were in Christ before him. But all is 
 uncertain, nor can we with the least confidence restore the probabilities of a 
 period of which even the traditions have for centuries been obliterated. The 
 stay of Saul at Tarsus was on any supposition a period mainly of waiting and 
 of preparation, of which the records had no large significance in the history 
 of the Christian faith. The fields in which he was to reap were whitening for 
 the harvest ; the arms of the reaper were being strengthened and his heart 
 prepared. 
 
 would at all suit the long journey northwards to Caesarea Philippi ; nor is it probable 
 that Saul would go to Tarsus by land, travelling in the direction of the dangerous 
 Damascus, when he could go so much more easily by sea. It is a more interesting 
 inquiry whether, as has been suggested, these words Karriyayov and iane<rrti\a.v, imply a 
 more than ordinary amount of passivity in the movements of Paul ; and whether in this 
 case the passiveness was due to the attacks of illness which were the sequel of his late 
 vision. 
 
 1 Gal. i. 21 24, fi^yv ayvoovntvat . . . iucovovrtf JI<T<H> . . . tvayyeAifeTat . > . 
 irdpOti. 
 
 3 Gal. i. 21. The expression is not indeed decisive, since Cilicia might easily be 
 regarded as a mere definitive addition to describe the part of Syria to which he went. 
 (Ewald, Gesch. d. Apost. Zeitalt. p. 439.) 
 
 Acts xxL 2; xxvii. 3; xv. 23, 4L * St. Paul, I 77.
 
 GAITJS AND THE JEWS PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 137 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 CAIUS AND THE JEWS PEACE OF THE CHTJECE. 
 " Reliqua ut de monstro narranda aunt." SUET. Calig. 
 
 IMMEDIATELY after the hasty flight of Saul from Jerusalem, St. Luke adds, 1 
 " Then had the church rest throughout the whole of Judaea, and Galilee, and 
 Samaria, being built up, and walking in the fear of the Lord ; and by the 
 exhortation of the Holy Spirit was multiplied." At first sight it might 
 almost seem as though this internal peace, which produced such happy 
 growth, was connected in the writer's mind with the absence of one whose 
 conversion stirred up to madness the prominent opponents of the Church. It 
 may be, however, that the turn of his expression is simply meant to resume 
 the broken thread of his narrative. The absence of molestation, which caused 
 the prosperity of the faith, is sufficiently accounted for by the events which 
 were now happening in the Pagan world. The pause in the recorded career 
 of the Apostle enables us also to pause and survey some of the conflicting 
 conditions of Jewish and Gentile life as they were illustrated at this time by 
 prominent events. It need hardly be said that such a survey has an im- 
 mediate bearing on the conditions of the Days after Christ, and on the work 
 of His groat Apostle. 
 
 A multitude of concurrent arguments tend to show that Saul was con- 
 verted early A.D. 37, and this brief stay at Jerusalem must therefore have 
 occurred in the year 39. Now in the March of A.D. 37 Tiberius died, and 
 Gaius whose nickname of Caligula, or " Bootling," given him in his infancy 
 by the soldiers of his father Germanicus, has been allowed to displace his true 
 name succeeded to the lordship of the world. Grim as had been the 
 despotism of Tiberius, he extended to the religion of the Jews that contemp- 
 tuous toleration which was the recognised principle of Roman policy. When 
 Pilate had kindled their fanaticism by hanging the gilt shields in his palace at 
 Jerusalem, 2 Tiberius, on an appeal being made to him, reprimanded the 
 officiousness of his Procurator, and ordered him to remove the shields to 
 Ceesarea. It is true that ho allowed four thousand Jews to be deported from 
 Rome to Sardinia, and punished with remorseless severity those who, from 
 dread of violating the Mosiac law, refused to take military service. 3 This 
 severity was not, however, due to any enmity against the race, but only to his 
 indignation against the designing hypocrisy which, under pretence of prose- 
 lytising, had won the adhesion of Fulvia, a noble Roman lady, to the Jewish 
 religion ; and to the detestable rascality with which her teacher and his com- 
 panions had embezzled the presents of gold and purple which she had 
 entrusted to them as an offering for the Temple at Jerusalem. Even this did 
 
 1 Acts lx. 81, $ niv e&v x>)<ria (*, A, B, C, and the chief versions). I follow what 
 seems to me to be the best punctuation of the verse. 
 
 8 Life of Christ, ii 363. Jos. Antt. xviil 3, 5 ; Suet. Tib. xxxvL
 
 138 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 not prevent him from protecting the Jews as far as he could in their own 
 country ; and when Yitellius, the Legate of Syria, had decided that there was 
 primd facie cause for the complaints which had been raised against the 
 Procurator in all three divisions of his district, it is probable that Pilate, who 
 was sent to Borne to answer for his misdemeanours, would have received 
 strict justice from the aged Emperor. But before Pilate arrived Tiberius 
 had ended his long life of disappointment, crime, and gloom. 
 
 The accession of Gaius was hailed by the whole Roman world with a burst 
 of rapture, 1 and there were none to whom it seemed more likely to introduce a 
 golden era of prosperity than to the Jews. For if the young Emperor had 
 any living friend, it was Herod Agrippa. That prince, if he could command 
 but little affection as a grandson of Herod the Great, had yet a claim to 
 Jewish loyalty as a son of the murdered Aristobulus, a grandson of the 
 murdered Mariamne, and therefore a direct lineal descendant of that great 
 line of Asmonsean princes whose names recalled the last glories of Jewish 
 independence. Accordingly, when the news reached Jerusalem that Tiberius 
 at last was dead, the Jews heaved a sigh of relief, and not only took with 
 perfect readiness the oath of allegiance to Gaius, which was administered by 
 Vitellius to the myriads who had thronged to the Feast of Pentecost, but 
 offered speedy and willing holocausts for the prosperity of that reign which 
 was to bring them a deeper misery, and a more absolute humiliation, than any 
 which had been inflicted on them during the previous dominion of Rome. 2 
 
 Gaius lost no time in publicly displaying his regard for the Herodian 
 prince, who, with remarkable insight, had courted his friendship, not only 
 before his accession was certain, but even in spite of the distinct recommenda- 
 tion of the former Emperor. 3 
 
 One day, while riding in the same carriage as Gaius, Agrippa was im- 
 prudent enough to express his wish for the time when Tiberius would bequeath 
 the Empire to a worthier successor. Such a remark might easily be construed 
 into a crime of high treason, or laesa majestas. In a court which abounded 
 with spies, and in which few dared to express above a whisper their real 
 thoughts, it was natural that the obsequious slave who drove the chariot 
 should seek an audience from Tiberius to communicate what he had heard; 
 and when by the influence of Agrippa himself he had gained this opportunity, 
 his report made the old Emperor so indignant, that he ordered the Jewish 
 
 1 Suet. Calig. 13, 14. 
 
 2 Compare for this entire narrative Suet. Caligula ; Philo, Leg. ad Gfaium, and in 
 Flaccwn ; Jos. Antt. xviii. 68; I>. J. ii. 10, 1; Dion Cass. lix. 8, seq. ; Griitz, iii. 
 270277 ; Jahn, Hebr. Commonwealth, 174. 
 
 * The adventures of Herod Agrippa I. form one of the numerous romances which 
 give us so clear a glimpse of the state of society during the early Empire. Sent to Borne 
 by his grandfather, he had breathed from early youth the perfumed and intoxicating 
 atmosphere of the Imperial Court as a companion of Drusus, the son of Tiberius. On 
 the death of Drusus he was excluded from Court, and was brought to the verge of 
 suicide by the indigence which followed a course of extravagance. Saved from his 
 purpose by his wife Cypros, he went through a series of debts, disgraces, and escapades. 
 *ntu he was once more admitted to favour by Tiberius at Caprese,
 
 3AIUS AND THE JETfS PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 139 
 
 prince to be instantly arrested. Clothed as he was in royal purple, Agrippa 
 was seized, pnt in chains, and taken off to a prison, in which he languished 
 for the six remaining months of the life of Tiberius. Almost the first 
 thought of Gaius on his accession was to relieve the friend who had paid him 
 such assiduous court before his fortunes were revealed. Agrippa was at once 
 released from custody. A few days after, Gaius sent for him, put a tSadem 
 on his head, conferred on him the tetrarchies of Herod Philip and of 
 Lysanias, and presented him with a golden chain of equal weight with the 
 iron one with which he had been bound. 
 
 Now, although Agrippa was a mere unprincipled adventurer, yet he had 
 the one redeeming feature of respect for the external religion of his race. 
 The Edomite admixture in his blood had not quite effaced the more generous 
 instincts of an Asmonaean prince, nor had the sty of Caprese altogether made 
 him forget that he drew his line from the Priest of Modin. The Jews might 
 well have expected that, under an Emperor with whom their prince was a 
 bosom friend, their interests would be more secure than they had been even 
 under a magnanimous Julius and a liberal Augustus. Their hopes were 
 doomed to the bitterest disappointment ; nor did any reign plunge them into 
 more dreadful disasters than the reign of Agrippa's friend. 
 
 In August, A.D. 38, Agrippa arrived at Alexandria on his way to his new 
 kingdom. His arrival was so entirely free from ostentation for, indeed, 
 Alexandria, where his antecedents were not unknown, was the last city in 
 which he would have wished to air his brand-new royalty that though he 
 came in sight of the Pharos about twilight, he ordered the captain to stay in 
 the offing till dark, that he might land unnoticed. 1 But the presence in the 
 city of one who was at once a Jew, a king, an Idumsean, a Herod, and a 
 favourite of Caesar, would not be likely to remain long a secret ; and if it was 
 some matter of exultation to the Jews, it exasperated beyond all bounds the 
 envy of the Egyptians. Flaccus, the Governor of Alexandria, chose to regard 
 Agrippa's visit as an intentional insult to himself, and by the abuse which he 
 heaped in secret upon the Jewish prince, encouraged the insults in which the 
 mob of Alexandria were only too ready to indulge. Unpopular everywhere, 
 the Jews were regarded in Alexandria with special hatred. Their wealth , 
 their numbers, their usuries, their exclusiveness, the immunities which the 
 two first Caesars had granted them, 2 filled the worthless populace of a hybrid 
 city with fury and loathing. A Jewish king was to them a conception at once 
 ludicrous and offensive. Every street rang with lampoons against him, every 
 theatre and puppet-show echoed with ribald farces composed in his insult, 
 At last the wanton mob seized on a poor naked idiot named Carabbas, 
 who had long been the butt of mischievous boys, and carrying him off to 
 the Gymnasium, clothed him in a door-mat, by way of tallith, flattened a 
 
 1 Derenbourg is therefore mistaken (p. 222) that Agrippa " se donna la pu6rile satis- 
 faction d'etaler son luxe royal dans 1'endroit oil naguere it avait traln6 une si honteuse 
 misere." 
 
 3 Jos. Antt. xiv. 7, 2 ; xix. 5. 2, and xiv. 10, passim (Decrees of Julius).
 
 140 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PATH* 
 
 papyrus leaf as his diadem, gave him a stalk of papyrus for a sceptre, and 
 surrounding him with a mimic body-guard of youths armed with sticks, pro- 
 ceeded to bow the knee before him, and consult him on state affairs. They 
 ended the derisive pageant by loud shouts of Moris I Maris I the Syriac word 
 for " Lord." 
 
 Encouraged by impunity and the connivance of the Praefect they then 
 bribed him to acquiesce in more serious outrages. First they raised a cry 
 to erect images of Gains in the synagogues, hoping thereby to provoke the 
 Jews into a resistance which might be interpreted as treason. This was to 
 set an example which might be fatal to the Jews, not only in Egypt, but in 
 all other countries. Irritated, perhaps, by the determined attitude of the 
 Jews, Flaccus, in spite of the privileges which had long been secured to them 
 by law and charter, published an edict in which he called them " foreigners 
 and aliens," and drove them all into a part of a single quarter of the city in 
 which it was impossible for them to live. The mob then proceeded to break 
 open and plunder the shops of the deserted quarter, .blockaded the Jews in 
 their narrow precincts, beat and murdered all who in the pangs of hunger 
 ventured to leave it, and burnt whole families alive, sometimes with green 
 fuel, which added terribly to their tortures. Flaccus, for his part, arrested 
 thirty-eight leading members of their Council, and after having stripped them 
 of all their possessions, had them beaten, not with rods by the lictors, but 
 with scourges by the lowest executioners, with such severity that some of 
 them died in consequence. Their houses were rifled, in the hope of finding 
 arms ; but though nothing whatever was found, except common table-knives, 
 men and women were dragged into the theatre, commanded to eat swine's 
 flesh, and tortured if they refused. 1 
 
 But neither those attempts to win popularity among the Gentile inhabi- 
 tants by letting loose their rage against their Jewish neighbours, nor his 
 ostentatious public loyalty and fulsome private flatteries saved Flaccus from 
 the fate which ho deserved. These proceedings had barely been going on for 
 two months, when Gains sent a centurion with a party of soldiers, who 
 landing after dark, proceeded at once to the house of Stephanion, a freed- 
 man of Tiberius, with whom Flaccus happened to be dining, arrested him 
 without difficulty, and brought him to Rome. Here he found that two low 
 demagogues, Isidoras and Lampo, who had hitherto been among his parasites, 
 and who had constantly fomented his hatred of the Jews, were now his chief 
 accusers. He was found guilty. His property was confiscated, and he was 
 banished, first to the miserable rock of Gyara, in the uEgean, and then to 
 Andros. In one of those sleepless nights which were at once a symptom and 
 an aggravation of his madness, Gains, meditating on the speech of an exile whom 
 he had restored, that during his banishment he used to pray for the death ol 
 Tiberius, determined to put an end to the crowd of distinguished criminals 
 which imperial tyranny had collected on the barren islets of the Mediterranean. 
 
 I There seem to be distinct allusions to these troubles in 3 Mace, (passim.].
 
 QAItJS AND THE JEWS PEACH OF THE CHURCH. 141 
 
 Flaccus was among the earliest victims, and Philo narrates with too gloating 
 a vindictiveness the horrible manner in which he was hewn to pieces in a ditch 
 by the despot's emissaries. 1 
 
 Gains had begun his reign with moderation, bnt the sudden change from 
 the enforced simplicity of his tutelage to the boundless luxuries and lusts of 
 his autocracy the sudden plunge into all things which, as Philo a says, 
 " destroy both soul and body and all the bonds which unite and strengthen 
 the two " brought on the illness which altered the entire organism of his 
 brain. Up to that time he had been a vile and cruel man ; thenceforth he 
 was a mad and sanguinary monster. It was after this illness, and the im- 
 mediately subsequent murders of Tiberius Gemellus, Macro, and Marcus 
 Silanus, which delivered him from all apprehension of rivalry or restraint, 
 that he began most violently to assert his godhead. His predecessors would 
 have regarded it as far less impious to allow themselves or their fortunes to 
 be regarded as divine, than to arrogate to themselves the actual style and 
 attributes of existing deities. 3 But disdaining all mere demi-gods like Tro- 
 phonius and Amphiaraus, Gains began to appear in public, first in the guise 
 of Hercules, or Bacchus, or one of the Dioscuri, and then as Apollo, or Mars, 
 or Mercury, or even Venus (!), and demanded that choruses should be sung in 
 his honour under these attributes ; and, lastly, he did not hesitate to assert his 
 perfect equality with Jupiter himself. The majority of the Romans, partly 
 out of abject terror, partly out of contemptuous indifference, would feel little 
 difficulty in humouring these vagaries ; but the Jews, to their eternal honour, 
 refused at all costs to sanction this frightful concession of divine honours to 
 the basest of mankind. As there were plenty of parasites in the Court of 
 Gains who would lose no opportunity of indulging their spite against the 
 Jews, an ingrained hatred of the whole nation soon took possession of his 
 mind. The Alexandrians were not slow to avail themselves of this antipathy. 
 They were well aware that the most acceptable flattery to the Emperor, and 
 the most overwhelming insult to the Jews, was to erect images of Gaius in 
 Jewish synagogues, and they not only did this, but even in the superb and 
 celebrated Chief Synagogue of Alexandria * they erected a bronze statue in 
 an old gilt quadriga which had once been dedicated to Cleopatra. 
 
 Of all these proceedings Gaius was kept informed, partly by his delighted 
 study of Alexandrian newspapers, which Philo says that he preferred to all 
 other literature, and partly by the incessant insults against the Jews distilled 
 into his ears by Egyptian buffoons like the infamous Helicon. 6 
 
 The sufferings of the Jews in Alexandria at last became so frightful that 
 they despatched the venerable Philo with four others on an embassy to the 
 
 1 It Is not impossible that Herod Antipas may have perished in consequence of thia 
 mime order of Gaius. It is true that Suetonius (Calig. 28) only says, "Misit circum 
 insulcu qui omnes (exsules) trucidarent ; " but the cause would apply as much to all 
 political exiles, and Dion (lix. 18) distinctly says that he put Antipas to death (aTr<f>af ). 
 The trial of Antipas took place at Puteoli shortly before the Philonian embassy, A.D. 39. 
 3 De Leg. 2. * See Excursus XII., "Apotheosis of Roman Emperors." 
 
 The Dvapleuaton, * Philo, Leg. John ad Gai, TXT.
 
 142 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 insane youth whom they refused to adore. Philo has left us an account of 
 this embassy, which, though written with his usual rhetorical diffuseness, is 
 intensely interesting as a record of the times. It opens for us a little window 
 into the daily life of the Imperial Court at Rome within ten years of the death 
 of Christ. 
 
 The first interview of the ambassadors with Gaius took place while he 
 was walking in his mother's garden on the banks of the Tiber, and the 
 apparent graciousness of his reception deceived all of them except Philo him- 
 self. After having been kept waiting for some time, the Jews were ordered 
 to follow him to Puteoli, and there it was that a man with disordered aspect 
 and bloodshot eyes rushed up to them, and with a frame that shivered with 
 agony and in a voice broken with sobs, barely succeeded in giving utterance to 
 the horrible intelligence that Gaius had asserted his intention of erecting a 
 golden colossus of himself with the attributes of Jupiter in the Holy of Holies 
 at Jerusalem. After giving way to their terror and agitation, the ambassadors 
 asked the cause of this diabolical sacrilege, and were informed that it was due 
 to the advice of " that scorpion-like slave," Helicon, who with " a poisonous 
 Ascalonite " named Apelles a low tragic actor had made the suggestion 
 during the fit of rage with which Gaius heard that the Jews of Jamnia had 
 torn down a trumpery altar which the Gentiles of the city had erected to his 
 deity with no other intention than that of wounding and insulting them. 
 
 So far from this being a transient or idle threat, Gaius wrote to Petronius, 
 the Legate of Syria, and ordered him to carry it out with every precaution and 
 by main force ; and though the legate was well aware of the perilous nature of 
 the undertaking, he had been obliged to furnish the necessary materials for 
 the statue to the artists of Sidon. 
 
 No sooner had the miserable Jews heard of this threatened abomination of 
 desolation, than they yielded themselves to such a passion of horror as made 
 them forget every other interest. It was no time to be persecuting Christians 
 when the most precious heritage of their religion was at stake. Flocking to 
 Phoenicia in myriads, until they occupied the whole country like a cloud, they 
 divided themselves into six companies of eld men, youths, boys, aged women, 
 matrons, and virgins, and rent the air with their howls and supplications, as 
 they lay prostrate on the earth and scattered the dust in haudfuls upon their 
 heads. Petronius, a sensible and honourable man, was moved by their abject 
 misery, and with the object of gaining time, ordered the Sidonian artists to 
 make their statue very perfect, intimating not very obscurely that he wished 
 them to be as long over it as possible. Meanwhile, in order to test the Jews, 
 he went from Acre to Tiberias, and there the same scenes were repeated. For 
 forty days, neglecting the sowing of their fields, they lay prostrate on the 
 ground, and when the legate asked them whether they meant to make war 
 against Csesar, they said, No, but they were ready to die rather than see their 
 temple desecrated, and in proof of their sincerity stretched out their throats. 
 Seeing the obstinacy of their resolution, besieged by the entreaties of Aris- 
 tobulus and Helcias the elder, afraid, too, that a famine would be caused by
 
 OAIUS AND THE JEWS PEACE OP THE OHTJECH. 143 
 
 fehe neglect of tillage, Petronius, though at the risk of his own life, promised the 
 Jews that he would write and intercede for them, if they would separate peace- 
 ably and attend to their husbandry. It was accepted by both Jews and Gentiles 
 as a sign of the special blessing of God on this bravo arid humane decision, 
 that no sooner had Petronius finished his speech than, after long drought, the 
 sky grew black with clouds, and there was an abundant rain. He kept his 
 word. He wrote a letter to Gaius, telling him. that if the affair of the statue 
 were pressed the Jews would neglect their harvest and there would be great 
 danger lest he should find tho whole country in a state of starvation, which 
 might be even dangerous for himself and his suite, if he carried out his 
 intended visit. 
 
 Meanwhile, in entire ignorance of all that had taken place, Agrippa had 
 arrived at Borne, and he at once read in tho countenance of the Emperor that 
 something had gone wrong. On hearing what it was, he fell down in a fit, 
 and lay for some time in a deep stupor. By the exertion of his whole influence 
 with Gaius he only succeeded in procuring a temporary suspension of the 
 design j and it was not long before tho Emperor announced the intention of 
 taking with him from Rome a colossus of gilded bronze in order to out o 
 all excuse for delay and of personally superintending its erection in the 
 Temple, which would henceforth bo regarded as dedicated to " the new 
 Jupiter, the illustrious Gaius." Even during his brief period of indecision he 
 was so angry with Petronius for the humanity that he had shown that he 
 wrote him a letter commanding him to commit suicide if he did not want to 
 die by the hands of the executioner. 
 
 These events, and the celebrated embassy of Philo to Gaius, of which he has 
 left us so painfully graphic a description, probably took place in the August 
 of the year 40. In the January of the following year the avenging sword of 
 the brave tribune Oassius Chaerea rid the world of the intolerable despot. 1 
 The vessel which had carried to Petronius the command to commit suicide, 
 was fortunately delayed by stormy weather, and only arrived twenty-seven 
 days after intelligence had been received that the tp*ant was dead. From 
 Claudius who owed his throne entirely to tho subtle intrigues of Agrippa 
 tho Jews received both kindness and consideration. Petronius was ordered 
 thenceforth to suppress and punish all attempts to insult them 2 in the quiet 
 exercise of their religious duties; and Claudius utterly forbad that prayers 
 should be addressed or sacrifices offered to himself. 8 
 
 1 Tlie Jews believed that a Bath K61 from the Holy of Holies had announced his death 
 to the High Priest (Simon the Just), and the anniversary was forbidden to be ever 
 observed as a fast day (MegUlath Taanith, 26 : Sotah, f. S3, 1 ; Derenbourg, Palest. 
 p. 207). 
 
 2 Sr-e the decree of Claudius against the inhabitants of Dor, who had set up his statue 
 In a Jewish synagogue. 
 
 * Dion Caas. Ix. 5.
 
 144 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 THE RECOGNITION OF THE GENTILES. 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE SAMARITANS THE EUNUCH THE OENTUBIOH. 
 
 " Whenever I look at Peter, my very heart leaps for joy. If I could paint a 
 portrait of Peter I would paint upon every hair of his head ' I believe in the for- 
 giveness of sins.' " LVTHBK. 
 
 " Quel Padre vetusto 
 Di santa chiesa, a cui Cristo le chiavi 
 Kacommand6 di questo fior venusto." 
 
 DANTE, Paradito, xxxii. 124. 
 
 " Blessed is the eunuch, which with his hands hath wrought no iniquity, nor 
 imagined wicked things against God : for unto him shall be given the special gift of 
 faith, and an inheritance in the temple of the Lord more acceptable to his mind. 
 For glorious is the fruit of good labours : and the root of wisdom shall never fall 
 away." WISD. iii. 14, 16. 
 
 THE peace, the progress, the edification, the holiness of the Church, were 
 caused, no doubt, by that rest from persecution which seems to have been due 
 to the absorption of the Jews in the desire to avert the outrageous sacrilege of 
 Gaius. And yet we cannot but ask with surprise whether the Christians 
 looked on with indifference at the awful insult which was being aimed at their 
 national religion. It would mark a state of opinion very different from what 
 we should imagine if they had learnt to regard the unsullied sanctity of 
 Jehovah's Temple as a thing in which they had no longer any immediate 
 concern. Can we for one moment suppose that James the Lord's brother, or 
 Simon the Zealot, were content to enjoy their freedom from molestation, 
 without caring to take part in the despairing efforts of their people to move 
 the compassion of the Legate of Syria ? Is it conceivable that they would 
 have stayed quietly at home while the other Jews in tens of thousands were 
 streaming to his headquarters at Csesarea, or flinging the dust upon their heads 
 as they lay prostrate before him at Tiberias P Or was it their own personal 
 peril which kept them from mingling among masses of fanatics who indignantly 
 rejected their co-operation ? Were they forced to confine their energies to the 
 teaching of the infant churches of Palestine because they were not even 
 allowed to participate in the hopes and fears of their compatriots ? We may 
 fairly assume that the Jewish Christians abhorred the purposed sacrilege ; but 
 if the schools of Hillol and Shammai, and the cliques of Hauan and Herod, 
 hated them only one degree less than they hated the minions of Gaius, it is 
 evident that there could have been nothing for the Apostles to do but to rejoice 
 over their immediate immunity from danger, and to employ the rest thus 
 granted them for the spread of the Kingdom of God. The kings of the earth 
 might rage, and the princes imagine Tain things, but they, at least, could kiss
 
 THE SAMABITAN8 THE ETTNUCH THE CENTURION. 145 
 
 the Son, 1 and win the blessing of those who trusted in the Lord. It was the 
 darkest midnight of the world's history, but the Goshen of Christ's Church 
 was brightening more and more with the silver dawn. 
 
 To this ontward peace and inward development was due an event which 
 must continue to have the most memorable importance to the end of time the 
 admission of Gentiles, as Gentiles, into the Church of Christ. This great 
 event must have seemed inevitable to men like St. Stephen, whose training as 
 Hellenists had emancipated them from the crude spirit of Jewish isolation. 
 But the experience of all history shows how difficult it is for the mind to shako 
 itself free from views which have become rather instinctive than volitional ; 
 and though Jesus had uttered words which could only have one logical explana- 
 tion, the older disciples, even the Apostles themselves, had not yet learnt their 
 full significance. The revelation of God in Christ had been a beam in the 
 darkness. To pour suddenly upon the midnight a full flood of spiritual 
 illumination would have been alien to the method of God's dealings with our 
 race. The dayspring had risen, but many a long year was to elapse before it 
 broadened into the boundless noon. 
 
 But the time had now fully come in which those other sheep of which Jesus 
 had spoken the other sheep which were not of this fold 2 must be brought 
 to hear His voice. Indirectly, as well as directly, the result was due to St. 
 Paul in a degree immeasurably greater than to any other man. To St. Peter, 
 indeed, as a reward for his great confession, had been entrusted the keys of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven ; and, in accordance with this high metaphor, to him was 
 permitted the honour of opening to the Gentiles the doors of the Christian 
 Church. And that this was so ordained is a subject for deep thankfulness. 
 The struggle of St. Paul against the hostility of Judaism from without and 
 the leaven of Judaism from within was severe and lifelong, and even at his 
 death faith alone could have enabled him to see that it had not been in vain. 
 But the glorious effort of his life must have been fruitless had not the principle 
 at stake been publicly conceded conceded in direct obedience to sanctions 
 which none ventured to dispute by the most eminent and most authoritative 
 of the Twelve. And yet, though St. Peter was thus set apart by Divine fore- 
 sight to take the initiative, it was to one whom even the Twelve formally 
 recognised as the Apostle of the Uncircumcision, that the world owes under 
 God the development of Christian faith into a Christian theology, and the 
 emancipation of Christianity from those Judaic limitations which would have 
 been fatal to its universal acceptance. 3 To us, indeed, it is obvious that " it 
 would have been impossible for the Gentiles to adopt the bye-laws of a 
 Ghetto." If the followers of Christ had refused thorn the right-hand of 
 fellowship on any other conditions, then the world would have gone its own 
 
 1 Ps. ii. 12, 13-^3, either "kiss the Son," or "worship purely." Which rendering ig 
 right has been a disputed point ever since Jerome's clay (Adv. Ruff. L). See Perowne, 
 Psalms, i. 116. 
 
 2 John x. 16. In thin verse it is a pity that the English version makes no distinction 
 between aiAij, "fold," and W^, " flock." 
 
 3 Immer, Neut. Theol, 206 
 
 6*
 
 146 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 way, and Mammon and Belial and Beelzebub would have rejoiced in the 
 undisturbed corruption of a Paganism which was sinking deeper and deeper into 
 the abyss of shame. 
 
 And as this deliverance of the Gentiles was due directly to the letters and 
 labours of St. Paul, so the first beginnings of it rose indirectly from the 
 consequences of the persecutions of which he had been the most fiery agent. 
 The Ravager of the Faith was unconsciously proving himself its most 
 powerful propagator. When he was making havoc of the Church, its 
 members, who were thus scattered abroad, went everywhere preaching the 
 word. To the liberal Hellenists this was a golden opportunity, and Philip, 
 who had been a fellow-worker with Stephen, gladly seized it to preach the 
 Gospel to the hated Samaritans. The eye of Jesus had already gazed in that 
 country on fields whitening to the harvests, and the zeal of Philip, aided by 
 high spiritual gifts, not only won a multitude of converts, but even arrested 
 the influence of a powerful goes, or sorcerer, named Simon. 1 Justin Martyr 
 calls him Simon of Gitton, and he has been generally identified with Simon 
 Magus, the first heresiarcn, 2 and with Simon the Cyprian, whom Felix 
 employed to entiap the wandering affections of the Queen Drusilla. This 
 man, though as afterwards appeared with the most interested and unworthy 
 motives, went so far as to receive baptism; and the progress of the faith 
 among his former dupes was so remarkable as to require the immediate pre- 
 sence of the Apostles. St. Peter and St. John went from Jerusalem to confirm 
 the converts, and their presence resulted not only in the public discomfiture 
 of Simon, 3 but also in that outpouring of special manifestations which 
 accompanied the gift of the promised Comforter. 
 
 But Philip had the honour of achieving yet another great conversion, 
 destined to prove yet more decisively that the day was at hand when the 
 rules of Judaism were to be regarded as obsolete. Guided by divine im- 
 pressions and angel voices he had turned his steps southward along the 
 desert road which leads from Eleutheropolis to Gaza, 4 and there had en- 
 
 1 As I have no space to give an account of the strange career and opinions of this 
 "hero of the Eomance of Heresy," as given in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and 
 Recognitions, I must content myself by referring to Hippolyt. Philosoph. p. 161 seq. ; 
 Iren. Haer. i. 23 ; Neander, Ch. Hist. i. 454 ; Planting, 5164 ; Gieseler, Ecd. Hist. L 
 49 ; Hansel, Gnostic Heresies, 91 94 ; De Pressense, i. 396 seq. The stories about him 
 are fabulous (Arnob. Adv. Gent. 11, 12), and the supposed statue to him (Just. Mart. 
 Apol. i. 26, 56 ; Iren. Adv. Haer. i. 23 ; Tert. Apol. 13) is believed, from a tablet found 
 in 1574 on the Insula Tiberina, to have been a statue to the Sabine God Semo Sancut 
 (Baronius, in ann. 44 ; Burton, Bampt. Lect. 375). A typical impostor of this epoch was 
 Alexander of Abonoteichos (see Lucian, Pseudo-mantis, 10 51, and on the general 
 prevalence of magic and theurgy, Dollinger, Judenth. u. Heidenth. viii. 2, 7). 
 
 2 na<np <up'<rcw evpenjs (Cyril, Ircn. adv. HcEr. i. 27 ; ii. praef.). " Gitton " may very 
 likely be a confusion with Citium, whence "Chittim," &c. 
 
 3 From his endeavour to obtain spiritual functions by a bribe IB derived the word 
 timony. 
 
 4 The own) early cpi)po$ of viii. 26 probably refers to the road. Gaza was not destroyed 
 till A.D. 65 (Robinson, BM. Res. ii. 640). Lange's notion (Apost. Zeit. ii. 109) that 
 JpW"* means "a moral desert" is out of the question. Although paronomasia is so 
 frequent a figure in the N. T., yet I cannot think that there ia anything intentional in 
 the cU iX<tv of 26, and the rfc y<^V of 27.
 
 THE SAMARITANS THE EUNUCH THE CENTURION. 147 
 
 countered the retinue of a wealthy Ethiopian eunuch, who held the high 
 position of treasurer to the Kandake of Meroe. 1 There seems to be some 
 reason for believing that this region had been to a certain extent converted to 
 Judaism by Jews who penetrated into it from Egypt in the days of 
 Psammetiehus, whose descendants still exist under the name of Fal&syan. 8 
 The eunuch, in pious fulfilment of the duties of a Proselyte of the Gate and 
 his very condition rendered more than this impossible had gone up to 
 Jerusalem to worship, and not improbably to be present at one of the great 
 yearly festivals. As he rode in his chariot at the head of his retinue he 
 occupied his time, in accordance with the rules of the Rabbis, in studying the 
 Scriptures, and he happened at the moment to be reading aloud in the LXX. 
 version 3 the prophecy of Isaiah, " Ho was led as a sheep to slaughter, and as 
 a lamb before his shearer is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. In his 
 humiliation his judgment was taken away, and his generation who shall 
 declare? for his life is being taken from the earth."* Philip asked him 
 whether he understood what he was reading P The eunuch confessed that it 
 was all dark to him, and after having courteously invited Philip to take a seat 
 in his chariot, asked who it was to whom the prophet was referring. Philip 
 was thus enabled to unfold the Christian interpretation of the great scheme 
 of prophecy, and so completely did he command the assent of his listener, 
 that on their reaching a spring of water possibly that at Bethsoron, not far 
 from Hebron 6 the eunuch asked to be baptised. The request was addressed 
 to a large-hearted Hellenist, and was instantly granted, though there were 
 reasons which might have made a James or a Simon hesitate. But in spite 
 of the prohibition of Deuteronomy, 6 Philip saw that the Christian Church was 
 to be an infinitely wider and more spiritual communion than that which had 
 been formed by the Mosaic ritual. Recalling, perhaps, the magnificent 
 prediction of Isaiah, 7 which seemed to rise above the Levitical prohibition 
 recalling, perhaps, also some of the tender words and promises of his Master, 
 Christ he instantly stepped down with the eunuch into the water. Without 
 any recorded confession of creed or faith for that which is introduced into 
 Acts viii. 37 is one of the early instances of interpolation 8 he administered 
 
 1 The title of the Queen of Meroe (Pliny, H.N. vi. 35 ; Dion Cass. liv. 5). (For the 
 " treasure " of Ethiopia see Isa. xlv. 14). Ethiopian tradition gives the eunuch the name 
 of Indich. On the relation of the Jews with Ethiopia see Zeph. iii. 10 ; Ps. Ixviii. 81 ; and 
 for another faithful Ethiopian eunuch, also a "king's servant" (Ebed-melech), Jer. 
 xxxviii. 7 ; xxxix. 16. 
 
 2 Kenan, Les Apdtret, p. 158. 
 
 3 Isa. liii. 7, 8. The quotation in Acts viii. 33 is from the LXX. We might have 
 supposed that the eunuch was reading the ancient Ethiopio version founded on the LXX.; 
 but in that case Philip would not have understood him. 
 
 4 This passage differs in several respects from our Hebrew text. 
 
 8 Josh. xv. 58 ; Neh. iii. 16 ; Jer. Ep. ciii. The spring is called Ain edh-Dhirweh. 
 But Dr. Robinson fixes the site near Tell el-Hasy (Bibl. Res. ii. 641). The tradition which 
 fixes it at Ain Haniyeh, near Jerusalem, is much later. 
 
 6 Deut. xxiii. 1. As for the nationality of the Ethiopian it must be borne in mind 
 that even Moses himself had onoe married an Ethiopian wife (Numb. xii. 1). 
 
 7 Isa. Ivi. 3. 8. 
 
 * It is not found In M, A, B, 0, G, H, and the phrase rbv 'ITJO-OUF Xprr&> k unknown to
 
 148 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 to one who was not only (as is probable) a Gentile by birth, but a eunuch by 
 condition, the rite of baptism. The law of Deuteronomy forbade him to 
 become a member of the Jewish Church, but Philip admitted him into that 
 Christian communion 1 in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male 
 nor female, neither bond nor free. 2 
 
 The subsequent work of Philip in the towns of Philistia and the sea-coast, 
 as well as during his long subsequent residence at Csesarea, 3 was doubtless 
 fruitful, but for Christian history the main significance of his life lay in his 
 successful mission to detested Samaritans, and in that bold baptism of the 
 mutilated alien. Deacon though he was, he had not shrunk from putting into 
 effect the Divine intimation which foreshadowed the ultimate obliteration 
 of exclusive privileges. We cannot doubt that it was the fearless initiative 
 of Philip which helped to shape the convictions of St. Peter, just as it was the 
 avowed act of St. Peter which involved a logical concession of all those truths 
 that were dearest to the heart of St. Paul. 
 
 In the peaceful visitation of the communities which the undisturbed 
 prosperity of the new faith rendered both possible and desirable, Peter had 
 journeyed westward, and, encouraged by the many conversions caused by the 
 healing of JBneas and the raising of Tabitha, he had fixed his home at Joppa, 
 in order to strengthen the young but flourishing churches on the plain 
 of Sharon. That he lodged in the house of Simon, a tanner, is merely 
 mentioned as one of those incidental circumstances which are never wanting in 
 the narratives of writers familiar with the events which they describe. But 
 we may now see in it a remarkable significance. It shows on the one hand 
 how humble must have been the circumstances of even the chiefest of the 
 Apostles, since nothing but poverty could have induced the choice of such 
 a residence. But it shows further that Peter had already abandoned Rabbinic 
 scrupulosities, for we can scarcely imagine that he would have found it 
 impossible to procure another home, 4 and at the house of a tanner no strict and 
 uncompromising follower of the Oral Law could have been induced to dwell. 
 The daily contact with the hides and carcases of various animals necessitated 
 by this trade, and the materials which it requires, rendered it impure and 
 disgusting in the eyes of all rigid legalists. If a tanner married without 
 mentioning his trade, his wife was permitted to get a divorce. 6 The law of 
 
 St. Luke. It is moreover obvious that while there was to some a strong temptation to insert 
 something of the kind, there was no conceivable reason to omit it if it had been genuine. 
 
 1 The significance of the act on those grounds is probably the main if not the sole 
 reason for its narration ; and if tvvoCxos had merely meant chamberlain," there would 
 have been no reason to add the word Swatm^ in ver. 27. Dr. Plumptre ( New Testament 
 Commentary, in loc.} adduces the interesting parallel furnished by the first decree of the 
 first (Ecumenical Council (Cone. Nic. Can. 1). 
 
 2 Gal. iii. 28. In Iron. Haer. iii. 12, Euseb. H. E. ii. 1, he is said to have evangelised 
 his own country. 
 
 a Acts. xxi. 8, 9. Observe the undesigned coincidence in his welcome of the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles. At this point he disappears from Christian history. The Philip wh 
 died at Hierapolis (Euseb. H. E. iii. 31) is probably Philip the Apostle. 
 
 4 Lydda and Joppa were thoroughly Judaic (Joa. B, J. ii. 19, 1), 
 
 KetubMth, f. 77, L
 
 THE SAMABITANS THE EUNUCH THE CENTURION. 149 
 
 levirate marriage might be set aside if the brother-in-law of the childless 
 widow was a tanner. A tanner's yard must be at least fifty cubits distant 
 from any town, 1 and it must be even further off, said Rabbi Akibha, if built 
 to the west of a town, from which quarter the effluvium is more easily blown- 
 Now, a trade that is looked on with disgust tends to lower the self-respect of 
 all who undertake it, and although Simon's yard may not have been contiguous 
 to his house, yet the choice of his house as a residence not only proves 
 how modest were the only resources which Peter could command, but 
 also that he had learnt to rise superior to prejudice, and to recognise the 
 dignity of honest labour in even the humblest trade. 
 
 It is certain that two problems of vast importance must constantly have 
 been present to the mind of Peter at this time: namely, the relation of 
 the Church to the Gentiles, and the relation alike of Jewish and Gentile 
 Christians to the Mosaic, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say though 
 the distinction was not then realised to the Levitical law. In the tanner's 
 house at Joppa these difficulties were to meet with their divine and final 
 solution. 
 
 They were problems extremely perplexing. As regards the first question, 
 if the Gentiles were now to be admitted to the possession of full and equal 
 privileges, then had God cast off His people ? had the olden promises failed ? 
 As regards the second question, was not the Law divine ? had it not been 
 delivered amid the terrors of Sinai? Could it have been enforced on one 
 nation if it had not been intended for all? Had not Jesus himself been 
 obedient to the commandments P If a distinction were to be drawn between 
 commandments ceremonial and moral, where were the traces of any distinction 
 in the legislation itself, or in the words of Christ ? Had He not bidden the 
 leper go show himself to the priest, and offer for his cleansing such things as 
 Moses has commanded for a testimony unto them? 2 Had He not said 
 " Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets ; I am not 
 come to destroy, but to fulfil?" 3 Had He not even said, "Till heaven 
 and earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the 
 law till all be fulfilled?" 4 
 
 These perplexing scruples had yet to wait for their removal, until, by the 
 experience of missionary labour, God had ripened into its richest maturity tho 
 inspired genius of Saul of Tarsus. At that period it is probable that no living 
 man could have accurately defined the future relations between Jewand Gentile, 
 or met the difficulties which rose from these considerations. St. Stephen, 
 who might have enlightened the minds of the Apostles on these great 
 subjects, had passed away. St. Paul was still a suspected novice. The day 
 when, in the great Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, such problems 
 should be fully solved, was still far distant. There is no hurry in the designs 
 
 1 Bdbha Bathra, t. 25, 1, 16, 2 (where the remark is attributed to Bar Kappara). 
 "No trade," says Kabbi, " will ever pass away from the earth ; but happy be he whose 
 parents belong to a respectable trade . . . The world cannot exist without tanners, 
 , . . but woe unto him who is a tanner " (Kiddushtn, f. 82, 2). 
 
 Matt. viii. 4 ; Mark 1. 44, Matt. v. 17. * Matt. T. 18; Luke rri. 17,
 
 150 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of God. It is only when the servitude is at its worst that Moses is called 
 forth. It is only when the perplexity is deepest that Sanl enters the 
 arena of controversy. It was only in the fulness of time that Christ was 
 born. ^ 
 
 But even at this period St. Peter especially when he had left Jerusalem 
 must have been forced to see that the objections of the orthodox Jew to the 
 equal participation of the Gentiles in Gospel privileges could be met by counter 
 objections of serious importance ; and that the arguments of Hebraists as to 
 the eternal validity of the Mosaic system were being confronted by the logic 
 of facts with opposing arguments which could not long be set aside. 
 
 For if Christ had said that He came to fulfil the Law, had He not also said 
 many things which showed that those words had a deeper meaning than the 
 primd fade application which might be attached to them P Had He not six 
 times vindicated for the Sabbath a larger freedom than the scribes admitted P 1 
 Had He not poured something like contempt on needless ceremonial ablutions P 8 
 Had He not Himself abstained from going up thrice yearly to Jerusalem to 
 the three great festivals P Had He not often quoted with approval the words 
 of Hoshea : " I will have mercy and not sacrifice ? " 8 Had He not repeatedly 
 said that all the Law and the Prophets hang on two broad and simple 
 commandments P 4 Had He not both by word and action, showed His light 
 estimation of mere ceremonial defilement, to which the Law attached a deep 
 importance P ' Had He not refused to sanction the stoning of an adulteress P 
 Had He not even gone so far as to say that Moses had conceded some things, 
 which were in themselves undesirable, only because of the hardness of 
 Jewish hearts P Had He not said, " The Law and the Prophets were UNTIL 
 
 JOHN?" 6 
 
 And, besides all this, was it not clear that He meant His Church to be an 
 Universal Church P Was not this universality of the offered message of mercy 
 and adoption clearly indicated in the language of the Old Testament ? Had 
 not the Prophets again and again implied the ultimate calling of the Gentiles? 7 
 But if the Gentiles were to be admitted into the number of saints and brethren; 
 if, as Jesus Himself had prophesied, there was to be at last one flock and one 
 Shepherd, 8 how could this be if the Mosaic Law was to be considered as of 
 permanent and universal validity? Was it not certain that the Gentiles, as a 
 body, never would accept the whole system of Mosaism, and never would 
 accept, above all, the crucial ordinance of circumcision P Would not such a 
 demand upon them be a certain way of ensuring the refusal of the Gospel 
 message P Or, if they did embrace it, was it conceivable that the Gentiles 
 were never to be anything but mere Proselytes of the Gate, thrust as it were 
 outside the portals of the True Spiritual Temple P If so, were not the most 
 
 Luke xiv. 16 ; John v. 10 ; Mark ii. 23; Matt. xli. 10 ; John ix. 14 ; Luke xiii. 14; 
 xvi. 16. (See Life of Christ, ii. 114.) 
 2 Matt. xv. 20. 
 
 Mark xil. 33 ; Matt. ix. 13 ; xu. 7. Matt. xix. 8 ; Mark x. 5-9, 
 
 * Matt. xxii. 40. 7 See Rom. XT. 9, 10, 11, 
 
 Matt, xv, 17 ; Mark vii. 19, John x. 16, ro^n,.
 
 THE SAMABITANS THE EUNUCH THE CENTURION. 151 
 
 primary conceptions of Christianity cut away at the very roots P were not- its 
 most beautiful and essential institutions rendered impossible P How could 
 there be lore-feasts, how could there be celebrations of the Lord's Supper, how 
 could there be the beautiful spectacle of Christian love and Christian unity, if 
 the Church was to be composed, not of members joined together in equal 
 brotherhood, but of a proletariate of tolerated Gentiles, excluded even from 
 the privilege of eating with an aristocracy of superior Jews P Dim and 
 dwarfed and maimed did such an ideal look beside the grand conception of the 
 redeemed nations of the world coming to Sion, singing, and with everlasting 
 joy upon their heads ! 
 
 And behind all these uncertainties towered a yet vaster and more eternal 
 question. Christ had died to take away the sins of the world ; what need, 
 then, could there be of sacrifices ? What significance could there be any more 
 in the shadow, when the substance had been granted? l Where was the mean- 
 ing of types, after they had been fulfilled in the glorious Antitype P What 
 use was left for the lamp of the Tabernacle when the Sun of Righteousness 
 had risen with healing in His wings ? 
 
 Such thoughts, such problems, such perplexities, pressing for a decided 
 principle which should guide men in their course of action amid daily 
 multiplying difficulties, must inevitably have occupied, at this period, the 
 thoughts of many of the brethren. In the heart of Peter they must have as- 
 sumed yet more momentous proportions, because on him in many respects the 
 initiative would depend. 8 The destinies of the world during centuries of his- 
 tory the question whether, ere that brief aeon closed, the inestimable benefits 
 of the Life and Death of Christ should be confined to the sectaries of an 
 obsolete covenant and a perishing nationality, or extended freely to all the 
 races of mankind the question whether weary generations should be forced 
 to accept the peculiarities of a Semitic tribe, or else look for no other refuge 
 than the shrines of Isis or the Stoa of Athens all depended, humanly speak- 
 ing, on the line which should be taken by one who claimed no higher earthly 
 intelligence than that of a Jewish fisherman. But God always chooses His 
 own fitting instruments. In the decision of momentous questions rectitude 
 of heart is a far surer guarantee of wisdom than power of intellect. When 
 the unselfish purpose is ready to obey, the supernatural illumination is never 
 wanting. When we desire only to do what is right, it is never long before we 
 hear the voice behind us saying, " This is the way, walk ye in it," however 
 much we might be otherwise inclined to turn aside to the right hand or to the 
 left. 
 
 With such uncertainties in his heart, but also with such desire to bo guided 
 aright, one day at noon Peter mounted to the flat roof of the tanner's house 
 for his mid-day prayer. 3 It is far from impossible that the house may have 
 
 l 1 Cor. xiil. 10: CoL il. 17 ; Heb. x. L 
 
 " Lo maggior Padre di famiglia " (Dante, Pafad. xxxii. 136). 
 
 s Matt. x. 27 ; xziv. 17 ; Luke xvii, 31. House-tops in old days had been the com- 
 mon scenes of idol-worship (Jer. xix. 13 ; Zeph. i. 5, <xc.).
 
 152 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 been on the very spot with the one with which it has long been identified. It 
 is at the south-west corner of the little town, and the spring in the courtyard 
 would have been useful to the tanner if he carried on his trade in the place 
 where he lived. A fig-tree now overshadows it, and there may have been one 
 even then to protect the Apostle from the Syrian sun. In any case his eyes 
 must have looked on identically the same scene which we may now witness 
 from that spot : a small Oriental town with the outline of its flat roofs and 
 low square houses relieved by trees and gardens ; a line of low dunes and 
 sandy shore ; a sea stretching far away to the Isles of the Gentiles a golden 
 mirror burning under the rays of the Eastern noon in unbroken light, except 
 where it is rippled by the wings of the sea-birds which congregate on the 
 slippery rocks beneath the town, or where its lazy swell breaks over the line of 
 reef which legend has connected with the story of Andromeda. It is a 
 meeting-point of the East and West. Behind us lie Philistia and the Holy 
 Land. Beyond the Jordan, and beyond the purple hills which form the eastern 
 ramparts of its valley, and far away beyond the Euphrates, were the countries 
 of those immemorial and colossal despotisms the giant forms of empires 
 which had passed long ago " on their way to ruin ; " before us a highway for 
 the nations are the inland waters of the sea whose shores during long ages of 
 history have been the scene of all that is best and greatest in the progress of 
 mankind. As he gazed dreamily on sea and town did Peter think of that old 
 prophet who, eight centuries before, had been sent by God from that very port 
 to preach repentance to one of those mighty kingdoms of the perishing 
 Gentiles, and whom in strange ways God had taught? 1 
 
 It was high noon, and while he prayed and meditated, the Apostle, who all 
 his life had been familiar with the scanty fare of poverty, became very hungry. 
 But the mid-day meal was not yet ready, and, while he waited, his hunger, his 
 uncertainties, his prayers for guidance, were all moulded by the providence of 
 God, to the fulfilment of His own high ends. There is something inimitably 
 natural in the way in which truths of transcendent importance were brought 
 home to the seeker's thoughts amid the fantastic cnidities of mental imagery. 
 The narrative bears upon the face of it the marks of authenticity, and we feel 
 instinctively that it is the closest possible reflection of the form in which 
 divine guidance came to the honest and impetuous Apostle as, in the hungry 
 pause which followed his mid-day supplications, he half -dozed, half -meditated, 
 on the hot flat roof under the blazing sky, with his gaze towards the West and 
 towards the future, over the blazing sea. 
 
 A sort of trance came over him. 2 
 
 The heaven seemed to open. Instead of the burning radiance of sky and 
 sea there shone before him something like a great linen sheet, 3 which was 
 being let down to him from heaven to earth by ropes which held it at the 
 four corners. 4 In its vast capacity, as in the hollow of some great ark, he saw 
 
 1 Jonah 1. 3. 3 Acts X. 10, fyfV.ro eV avrbc JKOTaalc (* A, B, 0, E, &0.). 
 
 3 o66vn (cf. John ill. 40). 
 
 4 This seems to he implied In the &p\w (see Ear. ffippol. 762, and Wetst. ad loe.). Bat
 
 THE SAMAEITAN8 THE EUNUCH THE CENTUBION. 153 
 
 all the four-footed beasts, and reptiles of the earth, and fowls of the air, 1 
 while a voice said to him, "Rise, Peter, slay and eat." But even in his 
 hunger, kindled yet more keenly by the sight of food, Peter did not forget the 
 habits of his training. Among these animals and creeping things were swine, 
 and camels, and rabbits, and creatures which did not chew the cud or divide the 
 hoof all of which had been distinctly forbidden by the Law as articles of 
 food. Better die of hunger than violate the rules of the Kashar, and eat such 
 things, the very thought of which caused a shudder to a Jew. 2 It seemed 
 strange to Peter that a voice from heaven should bid him, without exception 
 or distinction, to slay and eat creatures among which the unclean were thus 
 mingled with the clean ; nay, the very presence of the unclean among them 
 seemed to defile the entire sheet. 3 Brief as is the narrative of this trance in 
 which bodily sensations assuming the grotesque form of objective images 
 became a medium of spiritual illumination, 4 it is clearly implied that though 
 pure and impure animals were freely mingled in the great white sheet, it was 
 mainly on the latter that the glance of Peter fell, just as it was with 
 " sinners " of the Gentiles, and their admission to the privileges of brother- 
 hood, that his thoughts must have been mainly occupied. Accordingly, with 
 that simple and audacious self-confidence which in his character was so singu- 
 larly mingled with fits of timidity and depression, he boldly corrects the Voice 
 which orders him, and reminds the Divine Interlocutor that he must, so to 
 speak, have made an oversight. 6 
 
 " By no means, Lord ! " and the reader will immediately recall the scene 
 of the Gospel, in which St. Peter, emboldened by Christ's words of praise, 
 took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying, " Be it far from Thee, Lord," 
 
 SeSfnevov Kol are wanting in , A, B, E. The Vulgate has " quatuor initiis submit li da 
 caelo." 
 
 1 Acts x. 12, iravm rt, "all the," not "all kinds of," which would be navrola. Augustine 
 uses the comparison of the ark (c, Faust, xii 15) ; omit xai TO. (fypia (N, A, B, &c.). 
 
 2 On the Kashar, see infra, p. 245. The example of Daniel (i. 8 16) made the Jews 
 more particular. Josephus (Fit. 3) tells us that some priests imprisoned at Borne lived 
 only on figs and nuts. 
 
 3 In the Talmud (Sanhedr. f. 59, coL 2) there is a curious story about unclean animals 
 Bupernaturally represented to R. Shimon Ben Chalaphtha, who slays them for food. This 
 leads to the remark, "Nothing unclean comet down from heaven," Have we here aa 
 oblique argument against the significance of St. Peter's vision ? B. Ishmael said that the 
 care of Israel to avoid creeping things would alone have been a reason why God saved 
 them from Egypt (Babha Metzia, L 61, 2). Yet every Sanhedrist must be ingenious 
 enough to prove that a creeping thing is clean (Sanhedrin, f. 17, 1). 
 
 4 See some excellent remarks of Neander, Planting, i. 73. 
 
 6 Of. John xiii. 8. Increased familiarity with Jewish writings invariably deepens our 
 conviction that in the New Testament we are dealing with truthful records. Knowing 
 as we do the reverence of the Jews for divine intimations, we might well have supposed 
 that not even in a trance would Peter have raised objections to the mandate of the Bath- 
 Kol. And yet we find exactly the same thing in Scripture (1 Kings six. 14 ; Jonah iv. 
 1, 9 ; Jer. i. 6), in the previous accounts of Peter himself (Matt. xvi. 22) ; of St. Paul 
 (Acts xxii. 19) ; and in the Talmudic writings. Few stories of the Talmud convey a 
 more unshaken conviction of the indefeasible obligatoriness of the Law than that of the 
 resistance even to a voice from heaven by the assembled Rabbis, in Babha Metzia, f . 59, 
 2 (I have quoted it in the Expositor, 1877). It not only illustrates the point immediately 
 before us, but also shows more clearly than anything else could do the overwhelming 
 forcos against which St. Paul had to fight his way. - . ,, .
 
 154 THK LIFK AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 " for," he added, with & touch of genuine Judaic pride, " I never ate anything 
 profane or unclean." And the Voice spake a second time: "What God 
 cleansed, 'profane' not thou;" or, in the less energetic periphrasis of our 
 Version, " What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." This was 
 done thrice, and then the vision vanished. The sheet was suddenly drawn up 
 into heaven. The trance was over. Peter was alone with his own thoughts ; 
 all was hushed j there came no murmur more from the blazing heaven; at his 
 feet rolled silently the blazing sea. 
 
 What did it mean P St. Peter's hunger was absorbed in the perplexity of 
 interpreting the strange symbols by which he felt at once that the Holy 
 Spirit was guiding him to truth to truth on which he must act, however 
 momentous were the issues, however painful the immediate results. Was that 
 great linen sheet in its whiteness the image of a world washed white, 1 and 
 were its four corners a sign that they who dwelt therein were to be gathered 
 from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south ; and 
 were all the animals and creeping things, clean and unclean, the image of all 
 the races which inhabit it P And if so, was the permission nay, the com- 
 mand to eat of the unclean no less than of the clean an indication that the 
 Levitical Law was now "ready to vanish away;" 3 and that with it must 
 vanish away, no less inevitably, that horror of any communion with Gentile 
 races which rested mainly upon its provisions P What else could be meant by 
 a command which directly contradicted the command of Moses P 8 Was it 
 really meant that all things were to become new ? that even these unclean 
 things were to be regarded as let down from heaven P and that in this new 
 world, this pure world, Gentiles were no longer to be called " dogs," but Jew 
 and Gentile were to meet on a footing of perfect equality, cleansed alike by 
 the blood of Christ P 
 
 Nor is the connexion between the symbol and the thing signified quite so 
 distant and arbitrary as has been generally supposed. The distinction 
 between clean and unclean meats was one of tho insuperable barriers between 
 the Gentile and the Jew a barrier which prevented all intercourse between 
 them, because it rendered it impossible for them to meet at the same table or 
 in social life. In the society of a Gentile, a Jew was liable at any moment to 
 those ceremonial defilements which involved all kinds of seclusion and incon- 
 venience ; and not only so, but it was mainly by partaking of unclean food 
 that the Gentiles became themselves so unclean in the eyes of the Jews. It 
 is hardly possible to put into words the intensity of horror and revolt with 
 which the Jew regarded swine. 4 They were to him the very ideal and quint- 
 essence of all that must be looked upon with an energetic concentration of 
 disgust. He would not even mention a pig by name, but spoke of it as 
 dabhar acheer, or " the other thing." When, in the days of Hyrcanus, a pig 
 
 1 So CEcumenius. * Heb. viii. 13. * Lev. ri. 7 ; Deut. adv. 8. 
 
 * Isa. Ixv. 4 ; Ixvi. 3 ; 2 Mace. vL 18, 19 ; Jos. e. Ap. ii. 14. The abhorrence wa 
 shared by many Eastern nations (Hdt. ii. 47 ; Pliny, If. N, viii. 52 ; Koran). This was 
 partly due to its filthy habits (2 Pet. ii. 22),
 
 THB 8AMABITAN8 THE EUNUCH THE OENTUBION. 165 
 
 had been surreptitiously put into a box and drawn up the walls of Jerusalem, 
 the Jews declared that a shudder of earthquake had run through four hundred 
 parasangs of the Holy Land. 1 Yet this filthy and atrocious creature, which could 
 hardly even be thought of without pollution, was not only the chief delicacy 
 at Gentile banquets, 2 but was, in one form or other, one of the commonest 
 articles of Gentile consumption. How could a Jew touch or speak to a human 
 being who of deliberate choice had banqueted on swine's flesh, and who might 
 on that very day have partaken of tho abomination P The cleansing of all 
 articles of food involved far more immediately than has yet been noticed the 
 acceptance of Gentiles on equal footing to equal privileges. 
 
 And doubtless, as such thoughts passed through the soul of Peter, he 
 remembered also that remarkable " parable " of Jesus of which he and his 
 brother disciples had once asked the explanation. Jesus in a few words, but 
 with both of the emphatic formulae which Ho adopted to call special attention 
 to any utterance of more than ordinary depth and solemnity " Hearken unto 
 me, every one of you, and understand ; '' " If any man haih ears to liear, le,i 
 him hear," 3 had said, " There is nothing from without a man entering into 
 him which can defile him." What He had proceeded to say that what 
 truly denies a man is that which comes out of him was easy enough to 
 understand, and was a truth of deep meaning; but so difficult had it been 
 to grasp the first half of the clause, that they had asked Him to explain a 
 " parable " which seemed to be in direct contradiction to the Mosaic Law. 
 Expressing His astonishment at their want of insight, He had shown them 
 that what entered into a man from without did but become a part of his 
 material organism, entering, " not into the heart, but into the belly, and so 
 passing into the draught." THIS, HE SAID as now for the first time, 
 perhaps, flashed with full conviction into the mind of Peter MAKING- ALL 
 MEATS PURE ; * as ho proceeded afterwards to develop those weighty truths 
 about the inward character of all real pollution, and the genesis of all crime 
 from evil thoughts, which convey so solemn a warning. To me it seems that 
 it was the trance and vision of Joppa which first made Peter realise the true 
 meaning of Christ in one of those few distinct utterances in which he had 
 intimated the coming annulment o the Mosaic Law. It is, doubtless, due to 
 the fact that St. Peter, as_the informant of St. Mark in writing his Gospel, 
 
 1 Jer. EeracMth, iv. 1 ; Derenbourg, Palest. 114 ; Gratz. iii. 480. (The story IB also 
 told in Babha Kama, f. 82, 2 ; Mcnachoth, f. 64, 2 ; Sotah, f. 49, 2.) 
 
 * Sumen, in Plaut. Cure. ii. 3, 44 ; Pers. i. 53 ; Plin. H. N. xi. 37.- 
 Mark vii. 14, 16. 
 
 * Mark vii. 19. This interpretation, due originally to the early Fathers being found 
 in Chrysostom, Horn, in Matt. li. p. 526, and Gregory Thaumaturgus was revived, forty 
 years ago, by the Rev. F. Field, in a note of his edition of St. Chrysostom's Homilies 
 (iii. 112). (See Expositor for 1876, where I have examined the passage at length.) Here, 
 however, it lay unnoticed, till it gained, quite recently, the attention which it deserved. 
 The true reading is certainly Ka.0api&v not the KaBapifrv of our edition a reading due, in 
 all probability, to the impossibility of making KaiBaplfrv agree with a^ejpira. The loss of 
 the true interpretation has been very serious. Now, however, it is happily revived. It 
 has a more direct bearing than any other on the main practical difficulty of the Apostolic
 
 156 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 and the sole ultimate authority for this vision in the Acts, is the source of 
 both narratives, that we owe the hitherto unnoticed circumstance that the two 
 verbs "cleanse" and "profane" both in a peculiarly pregnant sense are 
 the two most prominent words in the narrative of both events. 
 
 While Peter thus pondered perplexed, indeed, but with a new light 
 dawning in his soul the circumstance occurred which gave to his vision 
 its full significance. 'Trained, like all Jews, in unquestioning belief of a 
 daily Providence exercised over the minutest no less than over the greatest 
 events of life, Peter would have been exactly in the mood which was prepared 
 to accept any further indication of God's will from whatever source it came. 
 The recognised source of such guidance at this epoch was the utterance of 
 voices apparently accidental which the Jews reckoned as their sole remaining 
 kind of inspired teaching, and to which they gave the name of Bath-Kol. 1 
 The first words heard by Peter after his singular trance were in the voices of 
 Gentiles. In the courtyard below him were three Gentiles, of whom one was 
 in the garb of a soldier. Having asked their way to the house of Simon the 
 Tanner, they were now inquiring whether a certain Simon, who bore the 
 surname of Peter, was lodging there. Instantly there shot through his mind 
 a gleam of heavenly light. He saw the divine connexion between the vision 
 of his trance and the inquiry of these Gentiles, and a Yoice within him 
 warned him that these men had come in accordance with an express intima- 
 tion of God's will, and that he was to go with them without question or 
 hesitation. He instantly obeyed. He descended from the roof, told the 
 messengers he was the person whom they were seeking, and asked their 
 business. They were the bearers of a strange message. " Cornelius," they 
 said, " a centurion, a just man, and a worshipper of God, to whose virtues the 
 entire Jewish nation bore testimony, had received an angelic intimation to 
 send for him, and hear his instructions." Peter at once offered them the free 
 and simple hospitality of the East ; and as it was too hot and they were too 
 tired to start at once on their homeward journey, they rested there until the 
 following morning. Further conversation would have made Peter aware that 
 Cornelius was a centurion of the Italian band ; 2 that not only he, but all his 
 house, " feared God ; " that the generosity of his almsgiving and the earnest- 
 ness of his prayers were widely known ; and that the intimation to send for 
 Peter had been given to him while he was fasting on the previous day at throe 
 o'clock. He had acted upon it so immediately that, in spite of the heat and 
 the distance of thirty miles along shore and plain, his messengers had arrived 
 at Joppa by the following noon. 
 
 The next morning they all started on the journey which was to involve 
 such momentous issues How deeply alive St. Peter himself was to the 
 consequences which might ensue from his act is significantly shown by his 
 
 1 Liffpf Christ, 1. 118. 
 
 2 The Italian cohort wa probably one composed of " Velones," Italian volunteer*. 
 " Cohors militum voluntaria, quae est in Syria" (Grater, Inter, i. 434 ; Akerman, Hum, 
 niustr. 34). It would be specially required at Caosarea,
 
 THE SAMARITANS THE EUNUCH THE CENTUfclON. 157 
 
 inviting no fewer than six of the brethren at Joppa to accompany him, and to 
 be witnesses of all that should take place. 1 
 
 The journey since Orientals are leisurely in their movements, and they 
 could only travel during the cool hours occupied two days. Thus it was not 
 until the fourth day after the vision of Cornelius that, for the first time 
 during two thousand years, the Jew and the Gentile met on the broad 
 grounds of perfect religious equality before God their Father. Struck with 
 the sacredness of the occasion struck, too, it may be, by something in the 
 appearance of the chief of the Apostles Cornelius, who had risen to meet 
 Peter on the threshold, prostrated himself at his feet, 2 as we are told that, 
 three hundred years before, Alexander the Great had done at the feet of the 
 High Priest Jaddua, 3 and, six hundred years afterwards, Edwin of Deira did 
 at the feet of Paulinus. 4 Instantly Peter raised the pious soldier, and, to tlie 
 amazement doubtless of the brethren who accompanied him, perhaps even to 
 his own astonishment, violated all the traditions of a lifetime, as well as the 
 national customs of many centuries, by walking side by side with him in free 
 conversation into the presence of his assembled Gentile relatives. This he 
 did, not from the forgetfulness of an enthusiastic moment, but with the 
 avowal that he was doing that which had been hitherto regarded as irreligious, 6 
 but doing it in accordance with a divine revelation. Cornelius then related 
 the causes which had led him to send for Peter, and the Apostle began his 
 solemn address to them with the memorable statement that now he perceived 
 with undoubted certainty that " GOD is NO RESPECTER OF PEBSONS, BUT 
 
 IN EVERY NATION HE THAT FEARETH HlM AND WORKETH RIGHTEOUS- 
 NESS IS ACCEPTABLE TO HIM." 6 Never were words more noble uttered. 
 But we must not interpret them to mean the same proposition as that which 
 is so emphatically repudiated by the English Reformers, " That e'very man 
 shall be saved by the law or sect which he prof esseth, so that he be diligent to 
 frame his life according to that law and the light of Nature." Had this 
 been the meaning of the Apostle a meaning which it would be an immense 
 anachronism to attribute to him it would have been needless for him to 
 preach to Cornelius, as he proceeded to do, the leading doctrines of the 
 Christian faith ; it would have been sufficient for him to bid Cornelius con- 
 tinue in prayer and charity without unfolding to him "only the name of 
 Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved." The indifference of nationality 
 was the thought in Peter's mind; not by any means the indifference of 
 
 1 Compare Acts x. 23 with xi. 12. 
 
 2 D and the Syr. have the pragmatic addition, "And when Peter drew near to 
 Csesarea, one of the slaves running forward gave notice that he had arrived; and 
 Cornelius springing forth, and moeting him, falling at his feet, worshipped him." 
 
 See Jos. Antt. xi. 8, 5. 
 
 The story is told in Bede, Ecd, Hist. Angl. ii. 12. 
 
 Acts x. 28, adiiurov ; of. John xviii. 28. Lightf. Hvr. Hebr. ad Matt, xyiii. 17. 
 
 St. Peter's words are the most categorical contradiction of the Rabbinic comments 
 on Prov. xiv. 34, which asserted that any righteous acts done by the Gentiles were sin to 
 them. Such was the thesis maintained even by Hiflelites like Gamaliel II, aud K, 
 Eliezer of Modin (Babha Bathra, f. 10, 2). (V, infra, pp. 429, 454.)
 
 158 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 religions. All who, to the utmost of the opportunities vouchsafed to them, 
 fear and love God with sincerity of heart, shall be saved by Christ's redemp- 
 tion ; some of them many of them will He lead to a knowledge of Him in 
 this life ; all of them shall see Him and know Him in the life to come. 1 
 
 Accordingly Peter proceeded to recall to these Gentiles all that they had 
 heard a of the preaching of peace by Jesus Chriet the Lord of all ; of His life 
 and ministry after the baptism of John ; how God anointed Him with the 
 Holy Spirit and with power ; how He went about doing good, and healing all 
 who were under the tyranny of the devil ; and then of the Crucifixion and 
 Resurrection from the dead, of which the disciples were the appointed wit- 
 nesses, commissioned by the Voice of their risen Lord to testify that He is the 
 destined Judge of quick and dead. And while Peter was proceeding to show 
 from the Prophets that all who believed on Him should through His name 
 receive remission of sins, suddenly on these unbaptised Gentiles no less than 
 on the Jews who were present, fell that inspired emotion of superhuman 
 utterance which was the signature of Pentecost. " The Holy Ghost fell upon 
 them." The six brethren who had accompanied Peter from Joppa might well 
 be amazed. Here were men unbaptised, uncircumcised, unclean men who 
 had been idolaters, dogs of the Gentiles, eaters of the unclean beast, whose 
 touch involved ceremonial pollution speaking and praising God in the 
 utterances which could only come from hearts stirred by divine influence to 
 their most secret depth. With bold readiness Peter seized the favourable 
 moment. The spectacle which ho had witnessed raised him above ignoble 
 prejudices, and the rising tide of conviction swept away the dogmas and 
 habits of his earlier years. Appealing to this proof of the spiritual equality 
 of the Gentile with the Jew, he asked " whether any one could forbid water 
 for their baptism ? " No one cared to dispute the cogency of this proof that 
 it was God's will to admit Cornelius and his friends to the privileges of 
 Christian brotherhood. Peter not only commanded them to be baptised in 
 the name of the Lord, but even freely accepted their invitation " to tarry with 
 them certain days." 
 
 The news of a revolution so astounding was not long in reaching Jerusalem, 
 and when Peter returned to the Holy City he was met by the sterner zealots 
 who had joined Christianity, by those of whom we shall henceforth hear so 
 often as " those of the circumcision," with the fierce indignant murmur, 
 " Thou wentest into the house of men uncircumcieed, and didst SAT WITH 
 THEM/" 3 To associate with them, to enter their houses, was not that pol- 
 lution enough P to touch in familiar intercourse men who had never received 
 the seal of the covenant, to be in daily contact with people who might, no one 
 knew how recently, have had " broth of abominable things in their vessels '' 
 
 Of. Rom. ii. 6, 10, 14, 15. 
 
 J Acts x. 86. To understand it* Arfyov here in the Johannino sense seem* to me 
 utterly uncritical. 
 
 * " He who eats with an unoircumclsed person, eats, as it were, with a dog ; he who 
 touches him, touches, as it were, a dead body ; and he who bathes in the same place with 
 him, bathes, as it were, with a leper " (Pirke Eabbi Slieter, 29).
 
 THE SAMABITANS THE EUNUCH THE CENTURION. 159 
 
 was not this sufficiently horrible? Bnt "to eat with them" to eat food 
 prepared by Gentiles to taste meat which had been illegally killed by Gentile 
 hands to neglect the roles of the Kashar to take food from dishes which 
 any sort of unclean insect or animal, nay even " the other thing," might have 
 denied was it to be thought of without a shudder? 1 
 
 Thus Peter was met at Jerusalem by something very like an impeachment, 
 but he confronted the storm with perfect courage. 3 What he had done he 
 had not done arbitrarily, but step by step under direct divine guidance. He 
 detailed to them his vision on the roof at Joppa, and the angelic appearance 
 which had suggested the message of Cornelius. Finally he appealed to the 
 outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which had been manifested in these Gentiles 
 by the very same signs as in themselves. Was not this the promised baptism 
 with the Holy Ghost ? was it not a proof that God accepted these Gentiles 
 no less fully than He accepted them 1 " What was I that I could withstand 
 God?" 
 
 The bold defence silenced for a time the adversaries of an innovation which 
 they regarded as unscriptural and disloyal. They could not dispute facts 
 authenticated by the direct testimony of their six brethren whom Peter, 
 conscious of the seriousness of the crisis, had very prudently brought with 
 him from Joppa nor could they deny the apparent approval of heaven. 
 The feeling of the majority was in favour of astonished but grateful acquies- 
 cence. Subsequent events prove only too plainly that there was at any rate 
 a displeased minority, who were quite unprepared to sacrifice their monopoly 
 of precedence in the equal kingdom of God. Even in the language of the 
 others 3 we seem to catch a faint echo of reluctance and surprise. Nor would 
 they admit any general principle. The only point which they conceded was 
 not that the Gentiles were to be admitted, without circumcision, to full com- 
 munion, still less that Jews would be generally justified in eating with them, 
 as Peter had done but only that " God had, it seemed, to the Gentiles also 
 granted repentance unto life." 
 
 Meanwhile, and, so far as we are aware, in entire independence of these 
 initial movements, the Church had been undergoing a new and vast develop- 
 ment in Syria, which transferred the position of the metropolis of Christianity 
 from Jerusalem to Antioch, as completely as it was to be afterwards trans- 
 ferred from Antioch to Borne. 
 
 1 To this day orthodox Jews submit to any inconvenience rather than touch meat 
 killed by a Gentile butcher (McOaul, Old Paths, 397, seq.). This leads sometimes not 
 only to a monopoly, but even to a downright tyranny on the part of the butcher who 
 has the kadima (Frankl, Jews in the East, ii. ). 
 
 2 Acts xi. 2. SuKpivovro irpbs avTov. Cf. Jud. 9, 
 * Acts xi. 18, apayt KCU TOIS i9vt<rur.
 
 160 THB LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 ANTIOOH, 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THK SECOND CA.PITJLL OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 " Quos, per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianas appellabat." TAC. Ann. xv. 44. 
 
 ~X.piffTia.v6s eifjil. Mart. Polyc. iii. 
 
 'E.v-XapKTTOvfi.fv ffol Sn ri> OVQJJ.O. rov Xptffrov crov twiKfK\ijTai <p TJHUS, fol ffol 
 irpofftf>Kfi<[4f0a. CLEM. Koxi. 
 
 QVK avrbt f}\aff<pripovffi rb Ka\bt> tvofj.0. rb iviK\i)Sfv 3<f>' vfj.iis; JAS. ii. 7- 
 
 El ovei8tfffOe tv ov6fj.an Xpurrov, jjuucdpioi. 1 PET. iv. 14. 
 
 " Nomen . . . quod sicut unguentum diffusum longe lateque redolet." GAL. 
 Tyr. iv. 9. 
 
 " Oditur ergo in hominibus innocuis etiam nemen innocuum." TERT. Apol. 3. 
 
 THE overruling Providence of God is so clearly marked in the progress of 
 human events that the Christian hardly needs any further proof that "there 
 is a hand that guides." In the events of his own little life the perspective of 
 God's dealings is often hidden from him, but when he watches the story of 
 nations and of religions he can clearly trace the divine purposes, and see the 
 lessons which God's hand has written on every page of history. What seems 
 to be utter ruin is often complete salvation; what was regarded as cruel 
 disaster constantly turns out to be essential blessing. 
 
 It was so with the persecution which ensued on the death of Stephen. 
 Had it been less inquisitorial, it would not have accomplished its destined 
 purpose. The Saul who hud in ruins the Church of Jerusalem was uncon- 
 sciously deepening the foundations of circumstance on which hereafter the 
 same and not the same he should rear the superstructure of the Church of 
 God. Saul the persecutor was doing, by opposite means, the same work as 
 Paul the Apostle. 
 
 For when the members of the infant Church fled terror-stricken from the 
 Holy City, they carried with them far and wide the good tidings of the 
 Jerusalem above. At first, as was natural, they spoke to Jews alone. It 1 
 would be long before they would hear how Philip had evangelised Samaria, 
 and how, by his baptism of the eunuch, he had admitted into the Church of 
 Christ one whom Moses had excluded from the congregation of Israel. The 
 naptism of the pious soldier had taken place still later, and the knowledge of 
 it could not at once reach the scattered Christians. In Phoenicia, therefore, 
 and in Cyprus, their preaching was confined at first within the limits of 
 Judaism; nor was it until the wandering Hellenists had reached Antioch 
 that they boldly ventured TO PREACH TO THB GEOTILES. 1 Whether these 
 
 1 Acts xi. 20. There can be no doubt that EAAijvaf, and not 'EAAqvurrac (which IB 
 accepted by our version, and rendered "Grecians") is the true reading. (1) External
 
 THE SECOND CAPITAL OP CHRISTIAKITY. 161 
 
 Gentiles were such only as had already embraced the " Noachian dispensation," 
 or whether they included others who had in no sense become adherents of the 
 synagogue, we are not told. Greek proselytes were at this period common in 
 every considerable city of the Empire, 1 and it is reasonable to suppose that 
 they furnished a majority, at any rate, of the new converts. However this 
 may have been, the work of these nameless Evangelists was eminently 
 successful. It received the seal of God's blessing, and a large multitude of 
 Greeks turned to the Lord. The fact, so much obscured by the wrong read- 
 ing followed by our English Version, is nothing less than the beginning, on a 
 large scale, of the conversion of the Gentiles. It is one of the great momenta 
 in the asceusive work begun by Stephen, advanced by Philip, authorised by 
 Peter, and finally culminating in the life, mission, and Epistles of St. Paul. 
 
 When the news reached Jerusalem, it excited great attention, and the 
 members of the Church determined to despatch one of their number to watch 
 what was going on. Their choice of an emissary showed that as yet the counsels 
 of the party of moderation prevailed, for they despatched the large-hearted and 
 conciliatory Barnabas. His Levitical descent, and the sacrifice which he had 
 made of his property to the common fund, combined with his sympathetic 
 spirit and liberal culture to give him a natural authority, which he had always 
 used on the side of charity and wisdom. 
 
 The arrival of such a man was an especial blessing. This new church, 
 which was so largely composed of Gentiles, was destined to be a fresh starting, 
 point in the career of Christianity. Barnabas saw the grace of God at work, 
 and rejoiced at it, and justified his happy title of " the son of exhortation," 
 
 evidence in favour of *EAAi)[>< is indeed defective, since it is only found in A (which also 
 has 'EXAi^M, even in is. 29, where EXA/nncras is the only possible reading) and D. N has 
 ayyeXrra!, which has been altered into 'EXA^a*; hut both N and B read *al before 
 cAaAovp, which indicates a new and important statement. Some of the most important 
 versions are valueless as evidence of reading in this instance, because they have no 
 specific word by which to distinguish 'E\\tivi<na.l and 'E\Aji>. CEcumenius and Theophy- 
 lact read 'EXATJI'IO-TOS, and so does Chrysostom in his text, but in his commentary he 
 accepts 'EAAjjra*, as does Eusebius. But (2) if we turn to internal evidence it is clear 
 that " Greeks," not " Grecians " i.e., Gentiles, not Greek-speaking Jews is the only 
 admissible reading ; for (i.) Hellenists were, of course, Jews, and as it is perfectly 
 certain that the 'lovScuW of the previous verse cannot mean only Hebraists, this verse 
 20 would add nothing whatever to the narrative if " Hellenists " were the right reading, 
 (ii.) The statement comes as the sequel and crowning point of narratives, of which it has 
 been the express object to describe the admission of Gentiles into the Church. The 
 reading " Hellenists " obscures the verse on which the entire narrative of the Acts 
 hinges, (iii.) The conversion of a number of Hellenists at Antioch would have excited 
 no special notice, and required no special mission of inquiry, seeing that the existing 
 Church at Jerusalem itself consisted largely of Hellenists. The entire context, therefore, 
 conclusively proves that 'EXArji/a? is the right reading, and it has accordingly been received 
 into the text, in spite of the external evidence against it, by all the best editors 
 Griesbach, Lachmann, Scholz, Tischendorf, Meyer, Alford, &c. The reason for the 
 corruption of the text seems to have been an assumption that this narrative is retrospec- 
 tive, and that to suppose the admission of Gentiles into the faith before Peter had opened 
 to them the doors of the kingdom would be to derogate from his authority. But thii 
 preaching at Antioch may have been subsequent to the conversion of Cornelius ; and it 
 was, in any case, the authority of Peter which for the majority of the Church incon- 
 trovertibly settled the claim of the Gentiles. 
 1 See Acts xiv. 1 ; xviii. 4 ; John xii, 20.
 
 162 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 by exhorting the believers to cleave to the Lord with purpose of heart. 
 His ministry won over converts in still lai'ger numbers, for, as Luke adds 
 with emphatic commendation, " he was a good man, and full of the Holy 
 Ghost and faith." 
 
 The work multiplied in his hands, and needed so much wisdom, knowledge, 
 and energy, that he soon felt the need of a colleague. Doubtless, had he 
 desired it, he could have secured the co-operation of one of the Apostles, or of 
 their trusted adherents. But Barnabas instinctively perceived that a fresher 
 point of view, a clearer insight, a wider culture, a more complete immunity 
 from prejudices were needed for so large and delicate a task. Himself a 
 Grecian, and now called upon to minister not only to Grecians but to Greeks, 
 he longed for the aid of one who would maintain the cause of truth and 
 liberality with superior ability and more unflinching conviction. There was 
 but one man who in any degree met his requirements it was the delegate of 
 the Sanhedrin, the zealot of the Pharisees, the once persecuting Saul of Tarsus. 
 Since his escape from Jerusalem, Saul had been more or less unnoticed by the 
 leading Apostles. We lose sight of him at Csesarea, apparently starting on his 
 way to Tarsus, and all that Barnabas now know about him was that he was 
 living quietly at home, waiting the Lord's call. Accordingly ho set out, to 
 seek for him, and the turn of expression seems to imply that it was not with- 
 out difficulty that he found him. Paul readily accepted the invitation to 
 leave his seclusion, and join his friend in this new work in the great capital of 
 Syria. Thus, twice over, did Barnabas save Saul for the work of Christianity. 
 To his self -effacing nobleness is due the honour of recognising, before they 
 had yet been revealed to others, the fiery vigour, the indomitable energy, the 
 splendid courage, the illuminated and illuminating intellect, which were 
 destined to spend themselves in the high endeavour to ennoble and evangelise 
 the world. 
 
 No place could have been more suitable than Antioch for the initial stage 
 of such a ministry. The queen of the East, the third metropolis of the world, 
 the residence of the imperial Legate of Syria, this vast city of perhaps 500,000 
 souls must not be judged of by the diminished, shrunken, and earthquake- 
 shattered AntaMeh of to-day. 1 It was no mere Oriental town, with low flat 
 roofs and dingy narrow streets, but a Greek capital enriched and enlarged by 
 Roman munificence. It is situated at the point of junction between the chains 
 of Lebanon and Taurus. Its natural position on the northern slope of Mount 
 Silpius, with a navigable river, the broad, historic Orontes, flowing at its feet, 
 was at once commanding and beautiful. The windings of the river enriched 
 the whole well-wooded plain, and as the city was but sixteen miles from the 
 shore, the sea-breezes gave it health and coolness. These natural advantages 
 had been largely increased by the lavish genius of ancient art. Built by the 
 SeleucidsB 2 as the royal residence of their dynasty, its wide circuit of many 
 miles was surrounded by walls of astonishing height and thickness, which had 
 
 1 It IB now a fifth-rate Turkish town of 6,000 inhabitants. (Porter's Syria, p. 668.) 
 8 B.O. 301, Apr, 23,
 
 RUINS OF THE WALLS OF ANTIOCH,
 
 THE SECOND CAPITAL OF CHBISTIANITY. 163 
 
 been carried across ravines and over mountain summits with such daring 
 magnificence of conception as to give the city the aspect of being defended by 
 its own encircling mountains, as though those gigantic bulwarks were but its 
 natural walls. The palace of the kings of Syria was on an island formed by 
 an artificial channel of the river. Through the entire length of the city, from 
 the Golden or Daphne gate on the west, ran for nearly five miles a fine corso 
 adorned with trees, colonnades, and statues. Originally constructed by 
 Seicucus Nicator, it had been continued by Herod the Great, who, at once to 
 gratify his passion for architecture, and to reward the people of Antioch for 
 their good-will towards the Jews, had paved it for two miles and a half with 
 blocks of white marble. 1 Broad bridges spanned the river and ite various 
 affluents; baths, aqueducts, basilicas, villas, theatres, clustered on the level 
 plain, and, overshadowed by picturesque and rugged eminences, gave the 
 city a splendour worthy of its fame as only inferior in grandeur to Alex- 
 andria and Rome. Mingled with this splendour were innumerable signs 
 of luxury and comfort. Under the spreading plane-trees that shaded tho 
 banks of the river, and among gardens brightened with masses of flowers, 
 sparkled amid groves of laurel and myrtle the gay villas of the wealthier 
 inhabitants, bright with Greek frescoes, and adorned with every refinement 
 which Roman wealth had borrowed from Ionian luxury. Art had lent its aid 
 to enhance the beauties of nature, and one colossal crag of Mount Silpius, 
 which overlooked the city, had been carved into human semblance by the skill 
 of Le'ios. In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, a pestilence had ravaged the 
 kingdom, and to appease the anger of the gods, the king had ordered the 
 sculptor to hew tho mountain-mass into one vast statue. The huge grim face, 
 under the rocky semblance of a crown, stared over the Forum of the city, and 
 was known to tho Antiochenes as tho Charonium, being supposed to represent 
 the head of 
 
 " That grim ferryman which poets write of," 
 
 who conveyed the souls of the dead in his dim-gleaming boat across the waters 
 of tho Styx. 
 
 It was natural that such a city should attract a vast multitude of inhabi- 
 tants, and those inhabitants were of very various nationalities. The basis of 
 the population was composed of native Syrians, represented to this day by the 
 Maronites ; 2 but the Syrian kings had invited many colonists to people their 
 Presidenco, and the most important of these were Greeks and Jews. To these, 
 after the conquest of Syria by Poinpey, had been added a garrison of Romans. 3 
 The court of tho Legato of Syria, surrounded as it was by military pomp, 
 attracted into its glittering circle, not only a multitude of rapacious and 
 domineering officials, but also that large retinue of flatterers, slaves, artists, 
 literary companions, and general hangers-on, whoso presence was deemed 
 
 1 Jos, Antt. xvi. 5, 3. 2 Kenan, Lea Apdtres, p. 228. 
 
 ' Syria was made a Roman province B.C. 64, M. JEmil. Scaurus went there aa 
 Quaestor pro fraetore B.C. 62,
 
 164 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 essential to the state of an imperial viceroy. The autonomy of the city, and 
 its consequent freedom from the property tax, made it a pleasant place of 
 abode to many others. The soft, yielding, and voluptuous Syrians, the 
 cunning, versatile, and degraded Greeks, added their special contributions to 
 the general corruption engendered by an enervating climate and a frivolous 
 society. Side by side with these governed, as at Alexandria, by their own 
 Archon and their own mimic Sanhedrin, but owing allegiance to the central 
 government at Jerusalem lived an immense colony of Jews. Libanius could 
 affirm from personal experience that he who sat in the agora of Antioch might 
 study the customs of the world. 
 
 Cities liable to the influx of heterogeneous races are rarely otherwise than 
 immoral and debased. Even Rome, in the decadence of its Caesarism, could 
 groan to think of the dregs of degradation the quacks, and pandars, and 
 musicians, and dancing-girls poured into the Tiber by the Syrian Orontes. 
 Her satirists spoke of this infusion of Orientalism as adding a fresh miasma 
 even to the corruption which the ebbing tide of glory had left upon the 
 naked sands of Grecian life. 1 It seems as though it were a law of human 
 intercourse, that when races are commingled in large masses, the worst 
 qualities of each appear intensified in the general iniquity. The mud and 
 silt of the combining streams pollute any clearness or sweetness they may 
 previously have enjoyed. If the Jews had been less exclusive, less haughtily 
 indifferent to the moral good of any but themselves, they might have 
 checked the tide of immorality. But their disdainful isolation either pre- 
 vented them from making any efforts to ameliorate the condition of their 
 fellow-citizens, or rendered their efforts nugatory. Their synagogues one, 
 at least, of which was a building of some pretensions, adorned with brazen 
 spoils which had once belonged to the Temple of Jerusalem, 2 and had been 
 resigned by Antiochus Epiphanes, in a fit of remorse, to the Jews of 
 Antioch rose in considerable numbers among the radiant temples of the 
 gods of Hellas. But the spirit of those who worshipped in them rendered 
 them an ineffectual witness; and the Jews, absorbed in the conviction that 
 they were the sole favourites of Jehovah, passed with a scowl of contempt, 
 or " spat, devoutly brutal, in the face " of the many statues which no ckssic 
 beauty could redeem from the disgrace of being " dumb idols." There were 
 doubtless, indeed, other proselytes besides Nicolas and Luke ; but those 
 proselytes, whether few or many in number, had, up to this period, exercised 
 no appreciable influence on the gay and guilty city. And if the best Jews 
 despised all attempts at active propagandism, there were sure to be many 
 lewd and wicked Jews who furthered their own interests by a propaganda of 
 iniquity. If the Jewish nationality has produced some of the best and greatest, 
 
 > " Jam prldem Syrus In Tiberiin defluxit Orontes 
 Et linguam, et mores, et cum tibicine chordas 
 Obliquas, necnon gentilia tympana secum 
 Vexit, et ad circum jussas prostare puellas." 
 
 Juv. Sat. ill. -. 
 * Jot. B. J. vii. 3, 8,
 
 THE SECOND CAPITAL OF CHRISTIANITY. 165 
 
 it has also produced some of the basest and vilest of mankind. The Jews at 
 Antioch were of just the same mixed character as the Jews at Alexandria, or 
 Borne, or Paris, or London ; and we may be quite sure that there must have 
 been many among them who, instead of witnessing for Jehovah, would only 
 add a tinge of original wickedness to the seething mass of atheism, idolatry, 
 and polluted life. 
 
 And thus for the great mass of the population in Antioch there was nothing 
 that could be truly called a religion to serve as a barrier against the ever-rising 
 flood of Roman sensuality and Graeco-Syrian suppleness. What religion there 
 was took the form of the crudest nature-worship, or the most imbecile super- 
 stition. A few years before the foundation of a Christian Church at Antioch, 
 iu the year 37, there had occurred one of those terrible earthquakes to which, 
 in all ages, the city had been liable. 1 It might have seemed at first sight 
 incredible that an intellectual and literary city like Antioch a city of wits and 
 philosophers, of casuists and rhetoricians, of poets and satirists should at once 
 have become the dupes of a wretched quack named Debborius, who professed 
 to avert such terrors by talismans as ludicrous as the famous earthquake-pills 
 which so often point an allusion in modern literature. Yet there is in reality 
 nothing strange in such apparent contrasts. History more than once has 
 shown that the border-lands of Atheism reach to the confines of strange 
 credulity. 3 
 
 Into this city of Pagan pleasure into the midst of a population pauperised 
 by public doles, and polluted by the indulgences which they procured among 
 the intrigues and ignominies of some of the lowest of the human race at one 
 
 1 Our authorities for the description and condition of Antioch are unusually rich. 
 The chief are Josephus, B. J. vii. 3, 3 ; Antt. xii. 3, 1 ; xvi. 5, 3 ; c. Ap. ii. 4 ; 
 1 Mace. iii. 37 ; xi. 13 ; 2 Mace. iv. 79, 33 ; v. 21 ; xi. 36 ; Philostr. Vit. Apollon. iii. 58 ; 
 Libaniiis, Antioch. pp. 355, 356 ; Chrysost. Hvm.il. ad Pop. Antioch. vii., in Matth., et 
 passim ; Julian, Misopogon ; Pliny, H. N. v. 18 ; and, above all, the Chronographia, of 
 John of Antiocn, better known by his Syriac surname of Malala, or the Orator. C. O. 
 Muller, in his Antiquitates Antiockenae (Gott. 1830), has diligently examined all these 
 and other authorities. Some accounts of modern Antioch, by travellers who have visited 
 it, may be found in Pocock's Descript. of the East, ii. 192; Chesney, Euphrates Expedition, 
 i. 425, seqq. ; Bitter, Palast. u. Syria, iv. 2. Its hopeless decline dates from 1268, when 
 it was reconquered by the Mohammedans. 
 
 2 The state of the city has been described by a master-hand. "It was," says M. Kenan 
 rendered still more graphic in his description by familiarity with modern Paris "an 
 unheard-of collection of jugglers, charlatans, pantomimists, magicians, thaumaturgists, 
 sorcerers, and priestly impostors ; a city of races, of games, of dances, of processions, of 
 festivals, of bacchanalia, of unchecked luxury ; all the extravagances of the East, the 
 most unhealthy superstitions, the fanaticism of orgies. In turns servile and ungrateful, 
 worthless and insolent, the Antiochenes were the finished model of those crowds devoted 
 to Csesarism, without country, without nationality, without family honour, without a 
 name to preserve. The great Corso which traversed the city was like a theatre, in which 
 all day long rolled the waves of a population empty, frivolous, fickle, turbulent, some- 
 times witty, absorbed in songs, parodies, pleasantries, and impertinences of every descrip- 
 tion. It was, " he continues, after describing certain dances and swimming-races, which, 
 if we would understand the depravity of Gentile morals, we are forced to mention, "like 
 an intoxication, a dream of Sardanapalus, in which all pleasures, all debaucheries, unfolded 
 themselves in strange confusion, without excluding certain delicacies and refinements " 
 (Les Apdtres, p. 221). The Orontes never flowed with fouler mud than when there began 
 to spring up upon its banks the sweet fountain of the river of the water of life.
 
 166 THE LIFE AND WOEI OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of the lowest periods of human history l passed the eager spirit of Saul of 
 Tarsus. On his way, five miles from the city, he must have seen upon the 
 river-bank at least the fringe of laurels, cypresses, and myrtles that marked 
 
 " that sweet grove 
 
 Of Daphne by Orontes," 1 
 
 and caught sight, perhaps, of its colossal statue of Apollo, 8 reared by Seleucus 
 Nicator. But it was sweet no longer, except in its natural and ineffaceable 
 beauty, and it is certain that a faithful Jew would not willingly hare entered 
 its polluted precincts. Those precincts, being endowed with the right of 
 asylum, were, like all the asylums of ancient and modern days, far more a 
 protection to outrageous villany than to persecuted innocence;* and those 
 umbrageous groves were the dark haunts of every foulness. For their scenic 
 loveliness, their rich foliage, their fragrant herbage, their perennial fountains, 
 the fiery -hearted convert had little taste. He could only have recalled with a 
 sense of disgust how that grove had given its title to a proverb which expressed 
 the superfluity of naughtiness, 6 and how its evil haunts had flung away the one 
 rare chance of sheltering virtue from persecution, when the good Onias was 
 tempted from it to be murdered by the governor of its protecting city. 6 
 
 Such was the place where, in the street Singon, Saul began to preach. He 
 may have entered it by the gate which was afterwards called the Gate of the 
 Cherubim, because twenty-seven years later 7 it was surmounted by those 
 colossal gilded ornaments which Titus had taken from the Temple of 
 Jerusalem. It was a populous quarter, in close proximity to the Senate 
 House, the Forum, and the Amphitheatre ; and every time that during his 
 sermon he raised his eyes to the lower crags of Mount Silpius, he would be 
 confronted by the stern visage and rocky crown of the choleric ferryman of 
 Hades. But the soil was prepared for his teaching. It is darkest just before 
 the dawn. When mankind has sunk into hopeless scepticism, the help of God 
 is often very nigh at hand. " Bitter with weariness, and sick with sin," there 
 were many at any rate, even among the giddy and voluptuous Antiochenes, 
 who, in despair of all sweetness and nobleness, were ready to hail with 
 rapture the preaching of a new faith which promised forgiveness for the past, 
 and brought ennoblement to the present. The work grew and prospered, and 
 for a whole year the Apostles laboured in brotherly union and amid constant 
 encouragement. The success of their labours was most decisively marked by 
 
 1 Ausonius saya of Antioch and Alexandria, 
 
 "Turbida vulgo 
 
 Utraque et amentia populi malesana tumultu " (Ordo Nob. Urb. ill.). 
 3 See the celebrated passage in Gibbon's Decline and Fatt, ch. xxiii. 
 
 3 Now Beit-al-Ma?a a secluded glen. A few dilapidated mills mark a spot where thu 
 shrine of Apollo once gleamed with gold and gems. When Julian the Apostate paid it a 
 solemn visit, he found there a solitary goose ! The Bab Boles, cr " Gate of Paul," is on 
 the Aleppo road. The town still bears a bad name for licentiousness, and only contains a 
 few hundred Christians. (See Carne's Syria, i. 5, &c.) 
 
 4 2 Maco. iv. 83. * "Daphnici more*." Joa. Antt. xii. 5, V 
 * A.D. 70,
 
 THB SECOND CAPITAL OF CHRISTIANITY. 167 
 
 the coinage of a, new word, destined to a glorious immortality ; the disciplea 
 were first called CHRISTIANS at Antioch. 
 
 It is always interesting to notice the rise of a new and memorable word, 
 but not a few of those which have met with universal acceptance have started 
 into accidental life. It is not so with the word " Christian." It indicates a 
 deeisive epoch, and was the coinage rather of a society than of any single 
 man. More, perhaps, than any word which was ever invented, it marks, if I 
 may use the expression, the watershed of all human history. It signalises the 
 emergence of a true faith among the Gentiles, and the separation of that faith 
 from the tenets of the Jews. All former ages, nations, and religious 
 contribute to it. The conception which lies at the base of it is Semitic, and 
 sums up centuries of expectation and of prophecy in the historic person of 
 One who was anointed to be for all mankind a Prophet, Priest, and King. 
 But this Hebrew conception is translated by a Greek word, showing that the 
 great religious thoughts of which hitherto the Jewish race had been the 
 appointed guardians, were henceforth to be the common glory of mankind, 
 and were, therefore, to be expressed in a language which enshrined the world's 
 most peiiect literature, and which had been imposed on all civilised countries 
 by the nation which had played by far the most splendid part in the secular 
 annals of the past. And this Greek rendering of a Hebrew idea was stamped 
 with a Roman form by receiving a Latin termination, 1 as though to fore- 
 shadow that the new name should be co-extensive with the vast dominion 
 which swayed the present destinies of the world. And if the word was thus 
 pregnant with all the deepest and mightiest associations of the past and of the 
 present, how divine was to be its future history ! Henceforth it was needed 
 to describe the peculiarity, to indicate the essence, of all that was morally the 
 greatest and ideally the most lovely in the condition of mankind. From the 
 day when the roar of the wild beast in the Amphitheatre was interrupted by 
 the proud utterance, Christianua sum from the days when the martyrs, like 
 " a host of Scsevolas," upheld their courage by this name as they bathed their 
 hands without a shudder in the bickering fire the idea of all patience, of all 
 heroic constancy, of all missionary enterprise, of all philanthropic effort, of all 
 cheerful self -sacrifice for the common benefit of mankind is in that name. 
 How little thought the canaille at Antioch, who first hit on what was to them 
 a convenient nickname, that thenceforward their whole city should be chiefly 
 famous for its " Christian " associations ; that the fame of Seleucus Nicator 
 and Antiochus Epiphanes should be lost in that of Ignatius and Chrysostom ; 
 and that long after the power of the imperial legates had been as utterly 
 
 1 The Greek adjective from Xpion-b? would have been Xpi<mios. It is true that 
 IVOT and ivbs are Greek terminations, but anus is mainly Roman, and there can be little 
 doubt that it is due not to the Doric dialect ! but to tho prevalence of Roman termi- 
 nology at Antioch, even if it be admitted that the spread of the Empire had by this time 
 made anus a familiar termination throughout the East (cf. Mariani, Pompeiani, &c.). 
 " Christianity " (xpumar lo^bs) first occurs in Ignatius (ad Philad. 6), as was natural in a 
 Bishop of Antioch; and probably " Catholic " (Ignat. ad Smyrn. 8) was invented in ths 
 Same city (id. 78). See Bingham, Antt. II. i. 4.
 
 168 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 crumbled into the dust of oblivion as the glittering palace of the Seleucidae in 
 which they dwelt, the world would linger with unwearied interest on every 
 (detail of the life of the obscure Cypriot, and the afflicted Tarsian, whose 
 preaching only evoked their wit and laughter ! How much less could they 
 have conceived it possible that thenceforward all the greatest art, all the 
 greatest literature, all the greatest government, all the greatest philosophy, 
 all the greatest eloquence, all the greatest science, all the greatest colonisation 
 and more even than this all of what is best, truest, purest, and loveliest in 
 Ithe possible achievements of man, should be capable of no designation so 
 distinctive as that furnished by the connotation of what was intended for an 
 impertinent sobriquet ! The secret of the wisdom of the Greek, and the 
 fervour of the Latin, fathers, and the eloquence of both, is in that word ; and 
 the isolation of the hermits, and the devotion of the monks, and the self- 
 denial of the missionaries, and the learning of the schoolmen, and the 
 grand designs of the Catholic statesmen, and the chivalry of the knights, 
 and the courage of the reformers, and the love of the philanthropists, and 
 the sweetness and purity of northern homes, and everything of divine and 
 noble which marks from the squalor of its catacombs to the splendour 
 of its cathedrals the story of the Christian Church. And why does all 
 this lie involved in this one word P Because it is the standing witness that 
 the world's Faith is centred not in f ormulse, but in historic realities not in 
 a dead system, but in the living Person of its Lord. An ironic inscription 
 on the Cross of Christ had been written in letters of Greek, of Latin, and 
 of Hebrew; and that Cross, implement as it was of shame and torture, 
 became the symbol of the national ruin of the Jew, of the willing allegiance 
 of the Greeks and Romans, of the dearest hopes and intensest gratitude 
 of the world of civilisation. An hybrid and insulting designation was 
 invented in the frivolous streets of Antioch, and around it clustered for ever 
 the deepest faith and the purest glory of mankind. 
 
 I have assumed that the name was given by Gentiles, and given more or 
 less in sport. It could not have been given by the Jews, who preferred the 
 scornful name of " Galilaean," l and who would not in any case have dragged 
 through the mire of apostasy for so it would have^seemed to them the word 
 in which centred their most cherished hopes. Nor was it iu all probability a 
 term invented by the Christians themselves. In the New Testament, as is 
 well known, it occurs but thrice ; once in the historical notice of its origin, 
 and only in two other places as a name used by enemies. It was employed 
 by Agrippa the Second in his half -sneering, half -complimentary interpellation 
 to St. Paul; 2 and it is used by St. Peter as the name of a charge under which 
 the brethren were likely to be persecuted and impeached. 3 But during the 
 
 1 Or, Nazarine. Acts xxiv. 5 (cf. John i. 46 ; Luke xiii. 2). Cyril, Catcch. x. 
 
 * Acts xxvi. 28. This (which was twenty years later) is the first subsequent allusion 
 to the name. Epiphanius (Nacr. 29, n. 4) says that an earlier name for Christian was 
 I(r<Tat<H. 
 
 8 1 Pet. iv. 16.
 
 THE 8ECOND CAPITAL OF CHBISTIANKre. 169 
 
 life-time of the Apostles it does not seem to hare acquired any currency 
 among the Christians themselves, 1 and they preferred those vague and loving 
 appellations of "the brethren," 2 "the disciples," 3 "the believers,"* "the 
 saints," 6 "the Church of Christ," 6 "those of the way," 7 "the elect," 8 
 " tho faithf ul," 9 which had been sweetened to them by so much tender and 
 hallowed intercourse during so many heavy trials and persecutions. After- 
 wards, indeed, when the name Christian had acquired a charm so potent that 
 the very sound of it was formidable, Julian tried to forbid its use by edict, 10 
 and to substitute for it the more ignominious term of " Nazarene," which is 
 still universal in the East. A tradition naturally sprang up that the name 
 had been invented by Evodius, the first Bishop of Autioch, and even adopted 
 at a general synod. 11 But what makes it nearly certain that this is an error, 
 is that up to this time " Christ " was not used, or at any rate was barely 
 beginning to be used, as a proper name ; and tho currency of a designation 
 which marked adherence to Jesus as though Christ were His name and not 
 His title, seems to be due only to the ignorance and carelessness of Gentiles, 
 who without further inquiry caught up the first prominent word with which 
 Christian preaching had made them familiar. 12 And even this word, in tho 
 prevalent itacism, was often corrupted into the shape Chrestiani, as though 
 it came from the Greek Chrestos, "excellent," and not from Christos, 
 " anointed." 13 The latter term arising from customs and conceptions 
 which up to this time were almost exclusively Judaic would convey little 
 or no meaning to Greek or Boman ears. We may therefore regard it as 
 i certain that the most famous of all noble words was invented by the wit 
 'for which the Antiochenes were famous in antiquity, and which often dis- 
 played itself in happy appellations. 14 But wliatever may have been the 
 spirit in which the name was given, the disciples would not be long in 
 welcoming so convenient a term. Bestowed as a stigma, they accepted it 
 as a distinction. They who afterwards gloried in the contemptuous re- 
 
 1 The allusion to it in Jas. ii. 7 is, to say the least, dubious. 
 
 2 Acts xv. 1 ; 1 Cor. vii. 12. Acts ix. 26 ; xL 29. 
 4 Acts v. 14. s Rom. viii. 27 ; xv. 25. Eph. v. 25. 
 
 1 Acts xix. 9, 23. Compare the name Methodist, 8 2 Tim. ii. 10, &c. 
 
 9 Eph. i. 1, &c. Later names ]ike pisciculi, &c., had some vogue also. 
 
 10 Greg. Naz. Oral. iii. 81; Julian, Epp. vii., be.; Gibbon, v. 312, ed. Milman; 
 Kenan, Lcs Apdtres, 235. 
 
 11 Suid. ii. 3930 o, ed. Gaisford ; Malala, Ckronpgr. 10, p. 318, ed. Mill. Dr. 
 riumptre (Paul in Asia, 74) conjectures that Evodius and Ignatius may have been 
 contemporary presbyter-episcopi of the Judaic and Hellenist communities at Antioch. 
 Babylas the martyr and Paul of Samosata, the heresiarchs, were both Bishops of 
 Antioch, as was Meletius, who baptised St. Chrysostom. 
 
 12 " Christus non proprium nomen est, sed nuncupatio potestatis et regni " (Lact. Div. 
 I'nstt. iv. 7 ; see Life of Christ, i. 287, n.). The name "Christian" expressed contemp- 
 tuous indifference, not definite hatred. Tacitus uses it with dislike "quos vvlgus 
 Christianos appellabat " (Ann. xv. 44). 
 
 u In 1 Pet. ii. 3, some have seen a sort of allusion to "the Lord" being both XPTTO 
 and xpt]<TT&, just as there seems to be a play on larot and 'hja-oOs in Acts ix. 34 ; x. 88. 
 
 14 See Julian, Afis&pogon (an answer to their insults about his beard) ; Zotim, iii. 11 ; 
 Procop. B. P. ii. 8, yeWott n K\ aro{i> MAW XOVTI. Fhilostr. Vit, Apotton. iii. 16 ; 
 Conyb. and Hows. 1. 190.
 
 170 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 proaehes which branded them as sarmenticii and semaxii, 1 from the fagots 
 to which they were tied and the stakes to which they were bound, would 
 not be likely to blush at a name which was indeed their robe of victory, 
 their triumphal chariot. 8 They gloried in it all the more because even the 
 ignorant mispronunciations of it which I have just mentioned were a happy 
 women et omen. If the Greeks and Romans spoke correctly of Christus, 
 they gave unwilling testimony to the Universal King ; if they ignorantly 
 said Chrest^ts, they bore witness to the Sinless One. If they said Chris- 
 Hani, they showed that the new Faith centred not in a dogma, but in a 
 Person ; if they said Chrestiani, they used a word which spoke of sweetness 
 and kindliness. 8 And beyond all this, to the Christians themselves the name 
 was all the dearer because it constantly reminded them that they too were 
 God's anointed ones a holy generation, a royal priesthood; that they had an 
 unction from the Holy One which brought all truth to their remembrance. 4 
 
 The name marks a most important advance in the progress of the Faith. 
 Hitherto, the Christians had been solely looked upon as the obscure sectarians 
 of Judaism. The Greeks in their frivolity, the Romans in their superficial 
 disdain for all " execrable " and " foreign superstitions," never troubled 
 themselves to learn the difference which divided the Jew from the Christian, 
 but idly attributed the internal disturbances which seemed to be agitating 
 the peace of these detested fanaticisms to the instigations of some un- 
 known person named Chre'stus. 6 But meanwhile, here at Antioch, the 
 inhabitants of the third city in the Empire had seen that there was 
 between the two systems an irreconcilable divergence, and had brought that 
 fact prominently home to the minds of the Christians themselves by im- 
 posing on them a designation which seized upon, and stereotyped for ever, 
 the very central belief which separated them from the religion in which they 
 had been born and bred. 
 
 i Tert. Apol. 50. 
 
 3 1 Pet. iv. 16, el 8c <os XpuTTiaj-d?, JXTJ td<Txwi<r9<a, SoaT<o Se roc 6tov eirl TW oydfian (A, B, 
 &c., not /xe'pci as in E. V.) TOVTU. The mere name became a crime. Atuxovo-t roiW ^.5? 
 
 OVK aSixovs etitu KaraAa/Sdiref aAX" avT<jj fxovw r<f Xpioriayou? etvai TOV fiiov a&uctiv viroXafi./3avoiTc? t 
 
 K. T. X. (Clem. Alex. Strom. iv. 11, 81). 
 
 8 " Bed quum et perperam Chrestiani nuncupamur a vobis (nam nee nominis certa 
 eat notitia penes vos) de suavitate et beniynitate compositum est " (Tert. Apol. 3). oi !$ 
 XpierTw irri<rrvit(5T xp > ) <rro ' T *"* *^ Myoirai (Clem. Alex. Strom, ii. 4, 18). See Just, 
 Mart. Apol. 2. 
 
 * This was & beautiful after-thought, ravrav tvtMV KoAovjxcda Xpicrncum ore vpidfieda 
 
 iXoiov eov. (Theoph. ad Autol. 1. 12; Tert. Apol. 3.) Compare the German Christen 
 {Jer. Taylor, Disc, of Corfirm., 3). There are similar allusions in Ambr. De Obit. 
 Valent., and Jerome on Ps. cv. 15 (" Nolite tangere Chrisfws meos '0. See Pfearson, On 
 the Creed, Art. ii. 
 
 5 Even in Epioiwtus (Dissert, iv. 7, 6) and Marcus Aureliua (xi. 3), Keuan (Les Apotren, 
 232) thinks that "Christians" means sicwrii. This seems to me very doubtful. 
 Sulpicius Severus (ii. 30) preserves a phrase in which Tacitus says of Christianity and 
 Judaism, "Has superstitiones, licet contrarias sibi, ' iisdem tamen auctoribus profectas.' 
 Chriatianos a Judaeis exstitisse" (Bernays, Ueber die Ckronik Snip. Sev., p. 57). See 
 Spartianus, Sept. Sever. 16 ; Caracalla, 1 ; Lampridius, Alex. Sev. 22 45, 51. Vopiaciu, 
 Saturn. 8. The confusion was most unfortunate, and peaceful Christians were con- 
 stantly persecuted while turbulent Jews were protected. {Tert. Apol. 2, 3 ; Ad Nat. [, 
 3 ; Justin, Apol. 1. 4 7, n.)
 
 A MABTYBDOM AND A BETBIBUTION. 171 
 
 The necessity for such a name marks clearly the success which attended 
 the mission work of these early Evangelists. They could not have tilled a 
 soil which was more likely to be fruitful. "With what a burst of joy must 
 the more large-hearted even of the Jews have hailed the proclamation of a 
 Gospel which made them no longer a hated colony living at drawn daggers 
 with the heathen life that surrounded them ! How ardently must the Gentile 
 whose heart had once been touched, whose eyes had once been enlightened; 
 have exulted in the divine illumination, the illimitable hope ! How must his 
 heart have been stirred by the emotions which marked the outpouring of 
 the Spirit and accompanied the grace of baptism ! How with the new life 
 tingling through the dry bones of the valley of vision must he have turned 
 away with abhorrence for his former self, and a divine pity for his former 
 companions from the poisoned grapes of Heathendom, to pluck the fair 
 fruits which grow upon the Tree of Life in the Paradise of God ! How, in 
 one word, must his heart have thrilled, his soul have dilated, at high words 
 like these : " Such things were some of you ; but ye washed yourselves, but 
 ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, by the name of the Lord Jesus, and by 
 the Spirit of our God." l 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 A MABTTBDOM AND A BETBIBTJTION. 
 
 " great Apostle ! rightly now 
 
 Thou readest all thy Saviour meant, 
 What time His grave yet gentle brow 
 In sweet reproof on th.ee was bent." KEBLB. 
 
 THUS it was that at Antioch the Church of Christ was enlarged, and the 
 views of its members indefinitely widened. For a whole year and it may 
 well have been the happiest year in the life of Saul he worked here with his 
 beloved companion. The calm and conciliatory tact of Barnabas tempered 
 and was inspirited by the fervour of Saul. Each contributed his own high 
 gifts to clear away the myriad obstacles which still impeded the free flow of 
 the river of God's grace. In the glory and delight of a ministry so richly 
 successful, it is far from impossible that Saul may have enjoyed that 
 rapturous revelation which he describes in the Epistle to the Corinthians, 
 during which he was caught up into Paradise as far as the third heaven, 2 and 
 heard unspeakable words which man neither could nor ought to utter. It 
 was one of those ecstasies which the Jews themselves regarded as the 
 
 1 1 Cor. VI. 11. Taura riftt J/re oAX' anskovyaurdt, K.r.A. 
 
 2 The "third heaven" is called "Zevul" by Bashi (cf. Ckagiffah, f. 12, 2). In such 
 visions the soul " hath no eyea to see, nor ears to hear, yet sees and hears, and is all eye, 
 all ear." St. Teresa, in deseribing.her visions as indescribable, says, "The restless little 
 butterfly of the memory has its wings burnt now, and it cannot fly." { Vi/da, xvili. 18.)
 
 ;172 HR MFB AND WOEK OF ST. FATrt* 
 
 'highest form of revelation one of those moments of inspiration in which the 
 soul, like Moses on Sinai, sees God face to face and does not die. St. Paul, it 
 must be remembered, had a work to perform which required more absolute 
 self-sacrifice, more unwavering faith, more undaunted courage, more un- 
 clouded insight, more glorious superiority to immemorial prejudices, than any 
 man who ever lived. It needed moments like this to sustain the nameless 
 agonies, to kindle the inspiring flame of such a life. The light upon the 
 countenance of Moses might die away, like the radiance of a mountain peak 
 which has caught the colour of the dawn, but the glow in the heart of Paul 
 could never fade. The utterance of the unspeakable words might cease to 
 vibrate in the soul, but no after-influence could obliterate the impression of 
 the eternal message. Amid seas and storms, amid agonies and energies, even 
 when all earthly hopes had ceased, we may bo sure that the voice of God still 
 rang in his heart, the vision of God was still bright before his spiritual eye. ; 
 
 The only recorded incident of this year of service is the visit of certain 
 brethren from Jerusalem, of whom one, named Agabus, prophesied the near 
 -occurrence of a general famine. The warning note which he sounded was 
 not in vain. It quickened the sympathies of the Christians at Antioch, and 
 enabled the earliest of the Gentile Churches to give expression to their 
 reverence for those venerable sufferers in the Mother Church of Jerusalem 
 who " had seen and heard, and whose hands had handled the Word of Life." 1 
 A contribution was made for the brethren of Judaea. The inhabitants of that 
 country, and more especially of the Holy City, have been accustomed in all 
 ages, as they are in this, to rely largely on the chaluka? or alms, which are 
 willingly contributed to their poverty by Jews living in other countries. The 
 vast sums collected for the Temple tribute flowed into the bursting coffers of 
 the Bent Haitian much as they now do, though in dwindled rills, into those 
 of a few of the leading AsJikenaeim and Ansche hod. But there would be 
 little chance that any of these treasures would help to alleviate the hunger of 
 the struggling disciples. Priests who starved their own coadjutor* 3 would 
 hardly be inclined to subsidise their impoverished opponents. The Gentiles, 
 who had been blessed by the spiritual wealth of Jewish Christians, cheerfully 
 returned the benefit by subscribing to the supply of their temporal i\?eds. 4 
 The sums thus gathered were entrusted by the Church to Barnabas and SauJ.- 
 The exact month in which these two messengers of mercy arrived to assist 
 their famine-stricken brethren cannot be ascertained, but there can be but 
 little doubt that it was in the year 44. On their arrival they found the 
 Church in strange distress from a new persecution. It is not impossible tb#t 
 the fury of the onslaught may once more have scattered the chief Apostles., 
 for we hear nothing of any, intercourse between them and the two great 
 
 lJohni.1. : V :: 
 
 ^ rankl ( Jcws * tte East, ii. 31) a sum of 818,000 piastres finds ite 
 
 It is distributed
 
 A HAETYSDOM AND A RETEIBUTION. 173 
 
 leaders of the Church of Antioch. Indeed, it is said that the alms were 
 handed over, not to the Apostles, but to the Elders. It is true that Elders 
 may include Apostles, but the rapid and purely monetary character of the 
 visit, and the complete silence as to further details, seem to imply that this 
 was not the case. 
 
 The Church of Antioch was not the sole contributor to the distresses of 
 Jerusalem. If they helped their Christian brethren, the Jews found benefac- 
 tors in the members of an interesting household, the royal family of Adiabene, 
 whose history is much mingled at this time with that of Judaea, and sheds 
 instructive light on the annals of early Christianity. 
 
 Adiabene, once a province of Assyria, now forms part of the modern Kurdis- 
 tan. Monobazus, the king of this district, had married his sister Helena, and 
 by that marriage had two .sons, of whom the younger, Izates, was the favourite of 
 his parents. 1 To save him from the jealousy of his other brothers, the king and 
 queen sent him to the court of Abennerig, king of the Charax-Spasini, who gave 
 him his daughter in marriage. While he was living in this sort of honourable 
 exile, a Jewish merchant, named Hananiah, managed to find admission into 
 the harem of Abennerig, and to convert some of his wives to the Jewish faith. 
 In this way he was introduced to Izates, of whom he also made a proselyte. 
 Izates was recalled by his father before his death, and endowed with the 
 princedom of Charrae; and when Monobazus died, Helena summoned the 
 leading men of Adiabene, and informed them that Izates had been appointed 
 successor to the crown. These satraps accepted the decision, but advised 
 Helena to make her elder son, Monobazus, a temporary sovereign until the 
 arrival of his brother, and to put the other brothers in bonds preparatory 
 to their assassination in accordance with the common fashion of Oriental 
 despotism. 2 Izates, however, on his arrival, was cheerfully acknowledged by 
 his elder brother, and set all his other brothers free, though he sent them as 
 hostages to Rome and various neighbouring courts. I shall subsequently 
 relate the very remarkable circumstances which led to his circumcision. 3 At 
 present I need only mention that his reign was long and prosperous, and that 
 he was able to render such important services to Artabanus, the nineteenth 
 Arsacid, that he received from him the kingdom of Nisibig, as well as the 
 right to wear the peak of his tiara upright, and to sleep in a golden bed 
 privileges usually reserved for the kings of Persia. Even before these events, 
 Helena had been so much struck with the prosperity and piety of her sou, 
 that she too had embraced Judaism, and at this very period was living 
 in Jerusalem. Being extremely wealthy, and a profound admirer of Jewish 
 iustitutious, she took energetic measures to alleviato the severity of tho 
 famine ; and by importing large quantities of corn from Alexandria, and 
 of dried figs from Cyprus, she was happily able to save many lives. Her 
 
 1 Josephus (Antt. xx. 2, 1) attributes this partiality to a prophetic dream. 
 3 Hence we are told that " ' King ' Mumbaz made golden handles for the vessels used 
 In the Temple on the Day of Atonement " ( Yoma, 37 a). 
 3 Infra, p. 429.
 
 174 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 royal bounty was largely aided by the liberality of Izates, 1 whose contributions 
 continued to be of service to the Jews long after the arrival of Saul and 
 Barnabas with the alms which they had brought from Antioch for their 
 suffering brethren. 
 
 It is clear that they arrived shortly before the Passover, or towards the 
 end of March ; for St. Luke fixes their visit about the time of Herod's perse- 
 cution, which began just before, and would, but for God's Providence, have 
 been consummated just after, that great feast. Indeed, it was apriori probable 
 that the Apostles would time their visit by the feast, both from a natural 
 desire to be present at these great annual celebrations, and also because that 
 was the very time at which the vast concourse of visitors would render their 
 aid most timely and indispensable. 
 
 They arrived, therefore, at a period of extreme peril to the little Church at 
 Jerusalem, which had now enjoyed some five years of unbroken peace. 2 
 
 Herod Agrippa I., of whom we have already had some glimpses, was one 
 of those singular characters who combine external devotion with moral laxity. 
 I have elsewhere told the strange story of the part which on one memorable day 
 he played in Roman history, 3 and how his supple address and determination 
 saved Rome from a revolution, and placed the uncouth Claudius on his 
 nephew's throne. Claudius, who with all his pedantic and uxorious eccentricity 
 was not devoid either of kindness or rectitude, was not slow to recognise that 
 he owed to the Jewish prince both his life and his empire. It was probably 
 due, in part at least, to the influence of Agrippa that shortly after his accession 
 he abolished the law of "Impiety" on which Gaius had so vehemently 
 insisted, 4 and which attached the severest penalties to any neglect of the 
 imperial cult. But the further extension of the power of Agrippa was 
 fraught with disastrous consequences to the Church of Christ. For the Jews 
 were restored to the fullest privileges which they had ever enjoyed, and 
 Agrippa set sail for Palestine in the flood-tide of imperial favour and with 
 'the splendid additions of Judaea and Samaria, Abilene, and the district 
 of Lebanon 6 to Herod Philip's tetrarchy of Trachonitis, which he had 
 received at the accession of Gains. 6 
 
 It is natural that a prince of Asmonaean blood, 7 who thus found himself in 
 
 1 Oros. vii. 6 ; Jos. Antt. xx. 2, 5. Helena is also said to have given to the Temple 
 a golden candlestick, and a golden tablet inscribed with the " trial of jealousy " { Yoma, 
 37 a). 
 
 2 Caligula's order to place his statue in the Temple was given in A.D. 39. Herod 
 Agrippa died in A.D. 44. 
 
 3 Se6kers after God, p. 76. * Dion. be. 3, 5, 
 
 * Jos. Antt. xix. 5, 2, 3. Id. xviii. 5, 4. 
 
 7 Agrippa I. was the grandson of Herod the Great and Mariamne. Mariamne was the 
 granddaughter of Hyrcanus II., who was a grandson of Hyrcanus I., who was a son of 
 Simon, the elder brother of Judas Maccabseus. Some of the Rabbis were, however, 
 anxious to deny any drop of Asmonaean blood to the Herodian family. They relate that 
 Herod the Great had been a slave to one of the Asmonseans, and one day heard a Bath 
 Kol saying, " Every slave that now rebels will succeed." Accordingly, he murdered all 
 the family, except one young maiden, whom he reserved for marriage. But she mounted 
 to the root, cried out that " anyjme who asserted himself to be of the Asmonsean Louso
 
 A MAETYEDOH AND A EETfilBUTION. 175 
 
 possession of a dominion as extensive as that of his grandfather Herod tho 
 Great, should try to win the favour of the people whom he was sent 
 to govern. Apart from the subtle policy of facing both ways so as to please 
 the Jews while he dazzled the Romans, and to enjoy his life in the midst 
 of Gentile luxuries while he affected the reputation of a devoted Pharisee, 
 Agrippa seems to have been sincere in hie desire to be at any rate at Jeru- 
 salem an observer of the Mosaic Law. St. Luke, though his allusions to him 
 are so brief and incidental, shows remarkable fidelity to historic facts in 
 presenting him to us in both these aspects. In carrying out his policy, 
 Agrippa paid studious court to the Jews, and especially to the Pharisees. He 
 omitted nothing which could win their confidence or flatter their pride, and 
 his wife, Cyprus, 1 seems also to have been as much attached to the party a* 
 her kinswoman, Salome, sister of Herod the Great. 2 
 
 It is clear that such a king a king who wished to foster the sense of 
 Jewish nationality, 3 to satisfy the Sadducees, to be supported by the Pharisees, 
 and to be popular with the multitude could not have lived long in Jerusalem, 
 which was his usual place of residence, 4 without hearing many complaints 
 about the Christians. At this time they had become equally distasteful to 
 every section of the Jews, being regarded not only as fanatics, but as apostates, 
 some of whom sat loosely to the covenant which God had made with their 
 fathers. To extirpate the Christians would, as Agrippa was well aware, be the 
 cheapest possible way to win general popularity. It was accordingly about the 
 very time of the visit of the two Apostles to the Passover, as delegates from 
 Antioch, that " he laid hands on certain of the Church to injure them ; and he 
 slew James, the brother of John, with the sword; and seeing that it was 
 pleasing to the Jews, proceeded to arrest Peter also." 1 Thus in a single 
 touch does St. Luke strike the keynote of Agrippa's policy, which was an un- 
 scrupulous desire for such popularity as could be earned by identifying himself 
 with Jewish prejudices. In the High Priests of the day he would find willing 
 coadjutors. The priest for the time being was probably Elionaeus, whom 
 Josephns calls a sou of Kanthera, but whom the Talmud calls a son of 
 Caiaphas. 8 If so, he would have been animated with an hereditary fury 
 
 henceforth would be a slave, for that she alone of that house was left ;" and flinging 
 herself down was killed. Some say that for seven years Herod preserved her hody in 
 honey, to make people believe that he was married to an Asmonsean princess. Angry 
 with the Rabbis, who insisted on Deut. xvii. 15, he killed them all, except the Babha Ben 
 Buta (whom he blinded by binding up his eyes with the skin of a hedgehog), that he 
 might hare one counsellor left. Staving disguised himself, and tried in vain to tempt 
 Babha Ben Buta to say something evil of him, he revealed himself, and asked what he 
 ought to do by way of expiation. The blind man answered, "Thou hast extinguished tho 
 light of the world (see Matt. v. 14) ; rekindle it by building the Temple " (Babha atkra, 
 f. 3, 2, seqq.). 
 
 1 Cypros was the name of the wife of Antipater and mother of Herod the Great. She 
 was descended from a Nabathean family ; her name, which is probably connected with 
 -C3 (Kepher), was borne by several Herodian Princesses (Dereabourg, Palest., p. 210). 
 
 See Excursus XXIV., "The Herods in the Acts." 
 Jos. Antt. xx. 1, 1. 
 
 Id. xix. 7, 3. * Acts xil. 1-8. 
 
 Jos. B, J, rix. 8, 1 ; Para, ill. 5 j P,t?i ffatfcaiph; Dereabourg, p. 215.
 
 176 THB LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAT/I*. 
 
 against the followers of Christ, and would have been an eager instrument in 
 the hands of Herod. When such allies were in unison, and Agrippa in the 
 very plenitude of his power, it was easy to strike a deadly blow at the Naza- 
 renes. It was no bold Hellenist who was now singled out as a victim, no 
 spirited opponent of Jewish exclusiveness. James, as the elder brother of the 
 beloved disciple, perhaps as a kinsman of Christ Himself, as one of the earliest 
 and one of the most favoured Apostles, as one not only of the Twelve, but of 
 the Three, as the son of a father apparently of higher social position than the 
 rest of the little band, seems to have had a sort of precedence at Jerusalem ; 
 and for this reason alone not, so far as we are aware, from being personally 
 obnoxious he was so suddenly seized and martyred that no single detail or 
 circumstance of his martyrdom has been preserved. Two words 1 are all the 
 space devoted to recount the death of the first Apostle by the historian who 
 had narrated at such length the martyrdom of Stephen. It may be merely due 
 to a sense of inadequacy in this brief record that Christian tradition told how 
 the constancy and the harangues of James converted his accuser, and caused 
 him to become a voluntary sharer of his death. 8 But perhaps we are meant to 
 see a spiritual fitness in this lonely and unrecorded end of the son of Thunder. 
 He had stood by Jesus at the bedside of the daughter of Jairus, and on the 
 holy mount, and in the agony of the garden ; had once wished to call down fire 
 from heaven on those who treated his Lord with incivility ; had helped to urge 
 the claim that he might sit in closest proximity to His throne of judgment. 
 There is a deep lesson in the circumstance that he should, meekly and silently, 
 in utter self-renouncement, with no visible consolation, with no elaborate 
 eulogy, amid no pomp of circumstance, with not even a recorded burial, perish 
 first of the faithful few who had forsaken all to follow Christ, and so be the 
 first to fulfil the warning prophecy that he should drink of His bitter cup, and 
 be baptised with His fiery baptism. 
 
 It was before the Passover that James had been doomed to feel the tyrant's 
 sword. The universal approbation of the fact by the Jews an approbation 
 which would be all the more conspicuous from the presence of the vast throngs 
 who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover stimulated the king, to 
 whom no incense was so sweet as the voice of popular applause, to inflict a 
 blow yet more terrible by seizing the most prominent of all the Apostles. 
 Pet'er was accordingly arrested, and since there was no time to finish his trial 
 before the Passover, and the Jews were not inclined to inflict death by their 
 own act during the Feast, he was kept in prison till the seven sacred days had 
 elapsed that ho might then be put to death with the most ostentations pub- 
 licity. 8 Day after day the Apostle remained in close custody, bound by either 
 arm to two soldiers, and guarded by two others. Aware how irreparable would 
 be the loss of one so brave, so true, so gifted with spiritual fervour and wisdom, 
 
 1 Acts xil. 2, di/iX . . . paxcupf. 
 
 9 Clem. Alex. ap. Euseb. H. E. ii 9. The Apostle, it to said, looked at him for ft 
 little time, and then kissed him, with the words, "Peace be with you," just before they 
 both were killed. 
 
 Acts xii. 4,
 
 A MABTYBDOM AND A BETEIBtJTIOtf. 177 
 
 the Christians of Jerusalem poured out their hearts and souls in prayer for his 
 deliverance. But it seemed as if all would be in vain. The last night of the 
 Feast had come ; the dawn of the morning would see Peter brought forth to 
 the mockery of trial, and the certainty of death. It seemed as if the day had 
 already come when, as his Lord had told him, another should gird him, and 
 carry him whither he would not. But in that hist extremity God had not for- 
 saken His Apostle or His Church. On that last night, by a divine deliverance, 
 so sudden, mysterious, and bewildering, that to Peter, until he woke to the 
 sober certainty of his rescue, it seemed like a vision, 1 the great Apostle was 
 snatched from his persecutors. After briefly narrating the circumstances of 
 his deliverance to the brethren assembled in the house of Mary, the mother of 
 John Mark the Evangelist, he entrusted them with the duty of bearing the 
 same message to James, the Lord's brother, and to the other Christians who 
 were not present, and withdrew for a time to safe retirement, while Herod was 
 left to wreak his impotent vengeonce on the unconscious quaternion of soldiers. 
 
 It might well seem as though the blood of martyrdom brought its own 
 retribution on the heads of those who cause it to be spilt. We have seen 
 Agrippa in the insolent plenitude of his tyranny ; the next scene exhibits him 
 in the horrible anguish of his end. It was at the beginning of April, A.D. 44, 
 that he had slain James and arrested Peter ; it was probably the very same 
 month which ended his brief and guilty splendour, and cut him off in the 
 flower of his life. 
 
 Versatile and cosmopolitan as was natural in an adventurer whose youth 
 and manhood had experienced every variety of fortune, Agrippa could play the 
 heathen at Csesarea with as much zeal as he could play the Pharisee at Jerusa- 
 lem. The ordinary herd of Eabbis and hierarchs had winked at this phase 
 of his royalty, and had managed to disintegrate in their imaginations the 
 Herod who offered holocausts in the ^Temple from the Herod who presided 
 in amphitheatres at Berytus ; the Herod who wept, because he was only half 
 a Jew, in the Temple at the Passover, and the Herod who presided at 
 Pagaa spectacles at Caesarean jubilees. 2 One bold Pharisee Simon by 
 name did indeed venture for a time to display the courage of his opinions. 
 During an absence of Agrippa from Jerusalem, he summoned an assembly, and 
 declared the king's actions to be so illegal that, on this ground, as well as on 
 the ground of his Idumaean origin, he ought to be excluded from the Temple. 
 As it was not Agrippa's object to break with the Pharisees, he merely sent for 
 Simon to Csesarea, made him sit by his side in the theatre, and then asked him, 
 gently, " whether he saw anything there which contradicted the law of Moses P" 
 Simon either was or pretended to be convinced that there was no overt infrac- 
 tion of Mosaic regulations, and after begging the king's pardon was dismissed 
 with a small present. 
 
 It was in that same theatre that Agrippa met his end. Severe troubles 
 had arisen in the relations between Judaea and the Phoenician cities of Tyre 
 
 ' Acts xii 9. 2 Jos. Antt. xix. 7, 4.
 
 178 THE LIFE AJTD WOEK OF ST. PAUI,. 
 
 and Sidon, and since that maritime strip of coast depends entirely for its 
 subsistence on the harvests of Palestine, it was of the extremest importance 
 to the inhabitants of the merchant cities that they should keep on good terms 
 with the little autocrat. 1 The pressure of the famine, which would fall on 
 them with peculiar severity, made them still more anxious to bring about a 
 reconciliation, and the visit of Agrippa to Csesarea on a joyful occasion 
 furnished them with the requisite opportunity. 
 
 That occasion was the news that Claudius had returned in safety from his 
 expedition to Britain, and had been welcomed at Borne with an outburst of 
 flattery, in which the interested princelings of the provinces thought it politic 
 to bear their part. 2 Agrippa was always glad of any excuse which enabled 
 him to indulge his passion for gladiatorial exhibitions and the cruel vanities of 
 Boman dissipation. Accordingly he hurried to Caesarea, which was the 
 Roman capital of Palestine, and ordered every preparation to be made for a 
 splendid festival. To this town came the deputies of Tyre and Sidon, taking 
 care to secure a friend at court in the person of Blastus, the king's groom of 
 the bedchamber. 8 
 
 It was on the second morning of the festival, at the early dawn of a 
 burning day in the Syrian spring, that Agrippa gave audience to the 
 Phoanician embassy. It was exactly the time and place and occasion in which 
 he would be glad to display his magnificence and wealth. Accordingly he 
 entered the theatre with his royal retinue in an entire robe of tissued silver, 
 and taking his seat on the bema, made to the Tyrians and Sidonians a set 
 harangue. As he sat there the sun blazed on his glittering robe, and seemed 
 to wrap him in a sheet of splendour. The theatre was thronged with his 
 creatures, his subjects, the idle mob whose amusement he was supplying with 
 profuse liberality, and the people whose prosperity depended on his royal 
 favour. Here and there among the crowd a voice began to be heard shouting 
 that it was a god who was speaking to them, 4 a god whose radiant epiphany 
 was manifested before their eyes. In the prime of life, and of the manly 
 beauty for which his race was remarkable, at the zenith of his power, in the 
 seventh year of his reign, in the plenitude of his wealth, 5 an autocrat by his 
 own position, and an autocrat rendered all but irresistible by the support of 
 the strange being whom his supple address had saved from the dagger to seat 
 him on the imperial throne surrounded, too, at this moment by flatterers and 
 parasites, and seated in the very midst of the stately buildings which Jews and 
 Gentiles alike knew to have been conferred upon the city by the architectural 
 extravagance of his race the feeble intellect of Agrippa was turned by this 
 intoxicating incense. He thought himself to be the god whom they declared. 
 
 1 Of. 1 Kings v. 9 ; Ezek. xxvii. 17 ; Ezra ill. 7. 
 
 2 Dion Cass. Lc. 23 ; Suet. Claud. 17 ; Philo, Leg. 45. See Lewin, Fasti Sacri* 
 1668, 1674 ; and contra Wieseler, Chron. d. Apost. Zeit. 130. 
 
 8 tiri TOU /toirciws, cubicularius, praefectus cubicnlL 
 
 4 See JOB. Antt. xix. 8, 2, which closely confirms the narrative of Acts xii. 
 * His revenue in stated to have been 12,000,000 of drachma, or more than 425,000 
 ft year,
 
 A MARTYRDOM AND A BETKIBUTION. 179 
 
 Why should not he accept the apotheosis BO abjectly obtruded on a Caligula 
 or a Claudius P He accepted the blasphemous adulation, which, as a King of 
 the Jews, he ought to have rejected with indignant horror. At that very 
 moment his doom was sealed. It was a fresh instance of that irony of 
 heaven which often seems to place men in positions of superlative gorgeous- 
 ness at the very moment when the fiat is uttered which consigns them to the 
 most pitiable and irrecoverable fall. 1 
 
 There was no visible intervention. No awful voice sounded in the ears 
 of the trembling listeners. No awful hand wrote fiery letters upon the wall. 
 St. Luke says merely that the angel of God smote him. Josephus introduces 
 the grotesque incident of an owl seated above him on one of the cords which 
 ran across the theatre, which Agrippa saw, and recognised in it the predicted 
 omen of impending death. 2 Whether he saw an owl or not, he was carried 
 from the theatre to his palace a stricken man stricken by the hand of God. 
 In five days from that time five days of internal anguish and vain despair, 8 
 in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and the fourth of his reign over the entire 
 dominion of his grandfather Agrippa died. And whatever may be the 
 extent to which he had won the goodwill of the Jews by his lavish benefac- 
 tions, the Gentiles hated him all the more because he was not only a Jew but 
 an apostate. A consistent Jew they could in some measure tolerate, even 
 while they hated him ; but for these hybrid renegades they always express an 
 unmitigated contempt. The news of Agrippa's death was received by the 
 population, and especially by the soldiers, both at Csesarea and Sebaste with 
 feastings, carousals, and every indication of indecent joy. Not content with 
 crowning themselves with garlands, and pouring libations to the ferryman of 
 the Styx, they tore down from the palace the statues of Agrippa's daughters, 
 and subjected them to the most infamous indignities. The foolish inertness 
 of Claudius left the insult unpunished, and these violent and dissolute soldiers 
 contributed in no small degree to the evils which not many years afterwards 
 burst over Judaea with a storm of fire and sword.* 
 
 1 See Bishop Thirl wall's Essay on the Irony of Sophocles. 
 
 2 He says that an owl was sitting on a tree on the day of Agrippa's arrest at Capreae, 
 and that a German soothsayer had foretold that he should become a king, hut should bo 
 near his death when he saw that owl again. See also Euseb. H.E. ii. 10, who substitutes 
 the angel for the owl. 
 
 8 JOS. Antt. xix. 8, $ 2, ynorpoj oAyiJ/otao-i 8i*pya<r9s.' Acts xii. 23, o-/ca>AijK<$|3p<oTO? amdavi-v. 
 Whether there be any disease which can strictly be described as the phthiriasis, morbiis 
 pedicularis, is, as I hare mentioned in my Life of Christ, i. 47, more than doubtful. The 
 death of Herod Agrippa, like that of his grandfather, has been so called, but not by the 
 sacred historians. It is, however, an historic fact that many cruel tyrants have died of 
 ulcerous maladies, which the popular rumour described much as Laotantius describes them 
 in his tract De MortQws pcrsecutorum. Instances are Pheretima (Herod, iv. 205, eirAeW 
 !'0<7ev, where the retributive appropriateness of the disease is first pointed out) ; 
 Antiochus Epiphanes (2 Mace. v. 9) ; Herod the Great (Jos. Antt. xvii. 6, 5, B. J. i. 33, 
 8, 9) ; Maximius Galerius (Euseb. H. E. viii. 16) ; Maximin (id. ix. 10, 11 ; Lack De. 
 Mort. persec. xxxiii.); Claudius Lucius Herminianus (Tertull. ad Scap. iii. cum vivus 
 vermibus ebulliisset "Nemo uciat" dicebat, "ne gaudeant Ohriatiani ") ; Duke of 
 Alva ; &c. 
 
 * Jos. Antt, xix. 9, 1.
 
 180 ?BE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Of these scenes Saul and Barnabas may have been eye-witnesses OB their 
 return journey from Jerusalem to Antioch. The order of events in St. Luke 
 may indeed be guided by the convenience of narrating consecutively all that 
 he had to say about Herod Agrippa, and above all of showing how the sudden 
 onslaught on the Church, which seemed to threaten it with nothing short of 
 extermination, was checked by the deliverance of Peter, and arrested by the 
 retribution of God. This would be the more natural if, as there seems to be 
 good reason to believe, the ghastly death of Herod took place in the very same 
 month in which, by shedding the blood of the innocent in mere pursuit of 
 popularity, he had consummated his crimes. 1 If Saul and Barnabas were at 
 Jerusalem during Peter's imprisonment, they may have been present at the 
 prayer meeting at the house of Mary, the mother of Mark, and the kinswoman 
 of Barnabas. If so we can at once account for the vivid minuteness of the 
 details furnished to St. Luke respecting the events of that memorable time. 2 
 
 In any case, they must have heard the death of Agrippa discussed a 
 thousand times, and must have recognised in it a fresh proof of the immediate 
 governance of God. But this was to them a truth of the most elementary 
 character. Their alleged indifference to public questions simply arose from 
 their absorption in other interests. Their minds were full of deeper concerns 
 than the pride and fall of kings ; and their visit to Jerusalem was so purely 
 an episode in the work of St. Paul that in the Epistle to the Galatians he 
 passes it over without a single allusion. 3 There is nothing surprising in the 
 omission. It is the object of the Apostle to show his absolute independence 
 of the Twelve. This second visit to Jerusalem had, therefore, no bearing on 
 the subject with which he was dealing. More than eleven years had already 
 elapsed since the Crucifixion, and a very ancient tradition says that twelve 
 years (which to the Jews would mean anything above eleven years) was the 
 period fixed by our Lord for the stay of the Apostles in the Holy City.* 
 Even if we attach no importance to the tradition, it is certain that it approxi- 
 mates to known facts, and we may therefore assume that, about this time, the 
 Apostles began to be scattered in various directions. St. Paul passes over 
 this eleemosynary visit, either because in this connexion it did not occur to 
 his memory, or because the mention of it was wholly unimportant for his 
 purpose. 
 
 Yet there was one circumstance of this visit which was fraught with 
 
 1 Saul and Barnabas seem to have started from Antioch with the intention of 
 arriving at Jerusalem for the Passover of April 1, A.D. 44. The martyrdom of James 
 immetliately preceded the Passover, and the imprisonment of Peter took place during 
 the Paschal week (Acts xii. 3 6). It was immediately afterwards that Herod started 
 for Csesarea ; and if the object of his visit was to celebrate the return of Claudius from 
 Britain, it must have been in this very month. For Claudius returned early in A.D. 44, 
 and it would take some little time for the news to reach Jerusalem. Further, Josephus 
 says that Agrippa reigned seven years (Antt. xix. 8, 2), and as he was appointed in 
 April, A.D. 37, these seven years would end in April, A.D. 44. See the question fully 
 examined in Lewin, Fasti Sacri, p. 280. 
 
 2 In D is mentioned even the number of steps from Peter's prison to the street. 
 Gal. ii. 1. 
 
 See Apollon. ap. Euseb. H. E. v. 18; Clem. Alex. Strom, vL p. 762, ed. Potter.
 
 JOT>AISM AND HEATHENISM. 181 
 
 future consequences full of sadness to both the Apostles. Barnabas, as we 
 have seen, was nearly related to John Mark, son 1 of that Mary in whose 
 house was the upper room. It would be most natural that he, and therefore 
 that Saul, should, during their short visit, be guests in Mary's house, and the 
 enthusiasm of her son may well have been kindled by the glowing spirit 
 of his cousin and the yet more fiery ardour of his great companion. The 
 danger of further persecution seemed to be over, but Peter, Mark's close 
 friend and teacher, was no longer in Jerusalem, and, in spite of any natural 
 anxieties which the prevalent famine may have caused, the Christian mother 
 consented to part with her son, and he left Jerusalem in the company of the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles. 
 
 CHAPTER XYIH. 
 
 JUDAISM AND HEATHENISM. 
 
 " Whoso breaketh a hedge [applied by the Eabbis to their Seyyag la Thorah, or 
 'hedge for the Law '], a serpent shall bite him." ECCLES. x. 8 
 
 ' Gods of Hellas ! Gods of Hellas ! 
 Said the old Hellenic tongue ; 
 Said the hero-oaths, as well as 
 
 Poets' songs the sweetest sung ! 
 1 Have ye grown deaf in a day ? 
 Can ye speak not yea or nay 
 Since Pan is dead ? ' " B. BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 u Die Gfitter sanken vom Himmelsthron 
 Es stiirtzten die herrlichen Saiilen, 
 Und geboren wiirde der Jungfrau Sohn 
 
 Die Gebrechen der Erde zu heilen; 
 Verbannt ward er Sinne fliichtige Lust 
 Und der Mensch griff denkend in seine Brust." 
 
 SCHILLER. 
 
 WHEN Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch they found the Church still 
 animated by the spirit of happy activity. It was evidently destined to 
 eclipse the importance of the Holy City as a centre and stronghold of the 
 Faith. In the Church of Jerusalem there were many sources of weakness 
 which were wanting at Antioch. It was hampered by depressing poverty. 
 It had to bear the brunt of the earliest persecutions. Its lot was cast in the 
 very furnace of Jewish hatred; and yet the views of its most influential 
 elders were so much identified with their old Judaic training that they would 
 naturally feel less interest in any attempt to proselytise the Gentiles. 
 
 At Antioch all was different. There the prejudices of the Jews wore an 
 aspect more extravagant, and the claims of the Gentiles assumed a more 
 overwhelming importance. At Jerusalem the Christians had been at the 
 
 1 Col. IT. 10, i axtytof means "cousin," not "slater's son." which would
 
 182 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 mercy of a petty Jewish despot. At Antioch the Jews were forced to meet 
 the Christians on terms of perfect equality, under the impartial rule of 
 Roman law. 1 
 
 Of the constitution of the early Church at Antioch nothing is said, but we 
 are told of a little group of prophets and teachers 2 who occupied a prominent 
 position in their religious services. These were Barnabas, Simeon (surnamed, 
 for distinction's sake, Niger, and possibly, therefore, like Lucius, a native of 
 Cyrene), Manaen, and Saul. Of Simeon and Lucius nothing whatever is 
 known, since the suggestion that Lucius may be the same person as Luke the 
 Evangelist is too foundationless to deserve a refutation. Of Manaeu, or, to 
 give him his proper Jewish name, Meuahem, we are told the interesting cir- 
 cumstance that ho was the foster-brother of Herod Antipas. It has, therefore, 
 been conjectured that he may have been a son of the Essene who lent to 
 Herod the Great the influence of his high authority, 3 and who, when Herod 
 was a boy at school, had patted him on the back and told him he should one 
 day be king. 4 If so, Menahem must have been one of the few early converts 
 who came from wealthy positions ; but there is nothing to prove that he was 
 thus connected with the celebrated Essene, and in any case he can hardly have 
 been his son. 5 
 
 It was during a period of special service, accompanied by fasting, that the 
 Holy Spirit brought home to their souls the strong conviction of the new work 
 which lay before the Church, and of the special commission of Barnabas and 
 Saul. 6 The language in which this Divine intimation is expressed seems to 
 imply a sudden conviction following upon anxious deliberation ; and that 
 special prayer and fasting 7 had been undertaken by these prophets and teachers 
 in order that they might receive guidance to decide about a course which had 
 been already indicated to the two Apcetles. 
 
 1 " Eruditissimis hominibus liberalissimisque studiis affluens" (Cic. pro Archid, iii.). 
 
 2 The accurate distinction between "prophets" and "teachers" is nowhere laid down, 
 but it is clear that in the Apostolic age it was well understood (1 Cor. xii. 28 ; Eph. iv. 
 11). But the question naturally arises whether it is meant that Barnabas and Saul were 
 "prophets" or "teachers" or whether they were both. The latter, perhaps, is the 
 correct view. The prophet stood higher than the teacher, was more immediately inspired, 
 spoke with a loftier authority ; but the teacher, whose functions were of a gentler and 
 humbler nature, might, at great moments, and under strong influences, rise to the power 
 of prophecy, while the prophet also might on ordinary occasions fulfil the functions of a 
 teacher. (See Neander, Planting, p. 133, seqq.) 
 
 3 Jos. Antt. xv. 10, 5. 
 
 4 Incidents of this kind are also told of Galba (Tac. Ann. vi. 20 ; Suet. Galb. 4 ; Jos. 
 Antt. xviii. 6, 9), of Henry VII., and of Louis Philippe. 
 
 5 Because Manaen the Essene must have attained middle age when Herod the Great 
 was a boy, and since we have now reached A.D. 45, this Manaen could only have been 
 born when the other was in extreme old age. 
 
 6 Acts xiii. 2, 'A^opiVar* &j, "Come, set apart at once." The meaning of the 
 bciTovpyovvriav (hence our word "liturgy") is probably general. Chrysostom explains it by 
 KripvTTovTw. For other instances of the word, see Luke i. 23 ; Rom. xv. 16 ; 2 Cor. ix. 12 ; 
 Phil. ii. 30. The & 7rpoo-(cAij^ai aurou? implies, of course, that Barnabas and Saul had 
 already received a summons to the work (cf. Acts ix. 15 ; xxii. 21 ; Rom. i. 1 ; Gal. i. 1). 
 Hooker thinks that Paul was made an Apostle because James could not leave Jerusalem ; 
 and Barnabas to supply the place of James the brother of John (Eccl. Pol. VII. iv. 2). 
 
 7 On fasting in Ember weeks see Bingham xxi. ch. 2.
 
 JUDAISM AND HEATHENISM. 183 
 
 Si Paul, indeed, must long have yearned for the day in which the Lord 
 should Bee fit to carry out His own promise " to send him far hence to the 
 Gentiles." 1 The more deeply he thought over his predicted mission, the more 
 would he realise that it had been predestined in the councils of God. Gentiles 
 worshipped idols, but so had their own fathers done when they dwelt beyond 
 Euphrates. Jewish Rabbis had admitted that, after all, Abraham himself 
 was but the earliest of the proselytes. 2 If, as legend told, Terah had been a 
 maker of idols, and if Abraham had received his first call, as Stephen had 
 said, while yet living in Ur of the Chaldees, why should not thousands of the 
 heathen be yet numbered among the elect of God ? Had not God made of 
 one blood all the nations upon earth ? Had not the aged Simeon prophesied 
 that the infant Jesus should be a light to lighten the Gentiles, no less than the 
 glory of His people Israel ? And were there not to be reckoned among His 
 human ancestors Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, and Ruth, the loving woman of 
 the accursed race of Hoab ? Had not Hadassah been a sultana in the seraglio 
 of Xerxes P Had not Moses himself married a woman of Ethiopia ? 3 And 
 among the great doctors of recent days was it not asserted that Shammai was 
 descended from Hainan the Amalekite ? 4 And, however necessary had been 
 the active hostility to mixed marriages, and all other close intercourse with the 
 heathen in the reforming period of Ezra and Nehemiah, had not Zephaniah 
 declared in the voice of prophecy that " men should worship Jehovah every 
 one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen?" 6 Nay, did no deeper 
 significance than was suggested in the vulgar exegesis lie in the ancient 
 promise to Abraham, that "in him all families of the earth should be blessed P " 8 
 Did the prophecy that all the ends of the earth should see the salvation of our 
 God J merely mean that they should see it as excluded aliens, or as wanderers 
 doomed to perish P If the Gentiles were to come to the light of Zion, and 
 kings to the brightness of her dawn if the isles were to wait for God, and the 
 ships of Tarshish 8 did this merely mean that the nations were but to be 
 distant admirers and tolerated servants, admitted only to the exoteric doctrines 
 and the less peculiar blessings, and tolerated only as dubious worshippers in 
 the Temple's outmost courts ? Would not this be to them a blessing like the 
 blessing of Esau, which was almost like a curse, that their dwelling should be 
 away from the fatness of the earth, and away from the dew of blessing from 
 above P 9 Or, after all, if such reasonings were inconclusive if, however con- 
 
 i Acts ix. 15, 16. 
 
 3 Josh. xxiv. 2. The apologue of the gazelle feeding among a flock of sheep, found 
 in the Talmud, and attributed to Hillel, beautifully expresses the toleration of the wiser 
 and more enlightened Rabbis ; but the proselytism contemplated is, of course, that 
 purchased by absolute conformity to Jewish precepts. 
 
 3 The Eabbis, to get over this startling fact, interpreted koosith ("Ethiopian 
 woman") by Gematria, and made it mean fair of face;" since ikooitth = 736 = the 
 Hebrew words for "fair of eyes." 
 
 4 Similarly it was said that Akibha descended from Sisera. 
 
 s Zeph. ii. 11. Gen. xii. 3 ; Gal. iii. 14. 
 
 Isa. Iii. 10. 3 i sa . k. 3 } 9. 
 
 7 Gen. xxvii. 39, "Behold, toithout the fatness of the earth shall be thy dwelling, 
 and without the dew of heaven from above" (v. Kalisoh, in loc.).
 
 184 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 elusive, they wore still inadequate to break down that barrier of prejudice 
 which was au obstacle more difficult to surmount than the middle wall of par- 
 tition was any argument needful, when they had heard so recently the 
 command of their Lord that they were to go into all the world and preach the 
 Gospel to every creature, 1 and the prophecy that they should be witnesses unto 
 the uttermost parts of the earth ? 2 
 
 Such convictions may have been in the heart of Paul long before he could 
 persuade others to join in giving effect to them. It is matter of daily ex- 
 perience that the amount of reasoning which ought to be sufficient to produce* 
 immediate action is often insufficient to procure even a languid assent. But 
 the purpose of the Apostle was happily aided by the open-hearted candour of 
 Barnabas, the intellectual freshness of the Church of Antioch, and the 
 immense effect produced by the example of Peter, who had won even from the 
 Church of Jerusalem a reluctant acquiescence in the baptism of Cornelius. 
 
 And apart from the all but ineradicable dislike towards the heathen which 
 must have existed in the minds of Jews and Jewish Christians, as a legacy of 
 six centuries of intolerance even supposing this dislike to be removed from 
 within yet the attempt to win over to the new faith the vast opposing forces 
 of Judaism and heathenism without the fold might well have seemed fantastic 
 and impossible. Could any but those whose hearts were lit with a zeal which 
 consumed every difficulty, and dilated with a faith to which it seemed easy to 
 remove mountains, listen without a smile to the proposal of evangelising the 
 world which was then being advanced by two poor Jews Jews who, as Jews 
 by birth, were objects of scorn to the Gentiles, and as Jews who sat loose to 
 what had come to be regarded as the essence of Judaism, were objects of 
 detestation to Jews themselves ? Is it possible to imagine two emissaries less 
 likely to preach with acceptance " to the Jew first, and afterwards to the 
 Greek ?" And if the acceptance of such a mission required nothing short of 
 the religious genius and ardent faith of Paul, surely nothing short of the im- 
 mediate aid of the Holy Spirit of God could have given to that mission so 
 grand and eternal a success. 
 
 For even had the mission been to the Jews exclusively, the difficulties which 
 it presented might well have seemed insuperable. It must utterly fail unless 
 the Jew could be persuaded of two things, of which one would be most abhor- 
 *"nt to his pride, the other most opposed to his convictions, and both most alien 
 to his deepest prejudices. To become a Christian he would be forced to admit 
 that all his cherished conceptions of the Messiah had been carnal and erroneous, 
 and that when, after awaiting His advent for twenty centuries, that Lord had 
 <:ome suddenly to His Temple, the Jews had not only rejected but actually 
 crucified Him, and thereby filled up the guilt which their fathers had incurred 
 by shedding the blood of the Prophets. Further, he would have to acknow- 
 ledge that not only his " hereditary customs," but even the Law the awful 
 fiery Law which he believed to have been delivered by God Himself from the 
 
 i Mark xvi. 15. * Acts 1. 8,
 
 JUDAISM AND HEATHENISM. 185 
 
 shrouded summit of Sinai was destined, in all the facts which he regarded as 
 most distinctive, to be superseded by the loftier and more spiritual revelation 
 of this crucified Messiah. Lastly, he would have to resign without a murmur 
 those exclusive privileges, that religious haughtiness by which he avenged 
 himself on the insults of his adversaries, while he regarded God as being " a 
 respecter of persons," and himself as the special favourite of Heaven. 
 
 And fear would be mingled with hatred. Under certain conditions, in the 
 secrecy of Oriental seraglios, in the back-stairs intercourse of courts and 
 gyncecea, in safe places like the harem of Abennerig and the audience-room of 
 Helen of Adiabene, with Mary of Palmyra, or Fulvia, the wife of Saturninus, 
 or Poppsea in the Golden House, 1 a Jew was glad enough to gain the ear of an 
 influential proselyte, and the more moderate Jews were fully content in such 
 cases with general conformity. They found it easy to devour widows' houses 
 and make long prayers. But they were well aware that every widely success- 
 ful attempt to induce Gentile proselytes to practise the outward ceremonies of 
 their religion would be fraught with the extremest peril to their communities, 2 
 and would lead in every city of the Empire to a renewal of such scenes as 
 those of which Alexandria had lately been the witness. It is probable that 
 they would have checked any impolitic zeal on the part of even an orthodox 
 Rabbi ; but it filled them with fury to see it displayed by one who, as a 
 schismatic, incurred a deadlier odium than the most corrupted of the heathen. 
 To them a Paul was oven more hateful than a Flaccus, and Paul was all the 
 more hateful because he had once been Saul. And that this audacious pervert 
 should not only preach, but preach to the heathen ; and preach to the heathen 
 a doctrine which proposed to place him on a level with the Jew ; and, worse 
 still, to place him on this level without any acceptance on his part of the 
 customs without which a Jew could hardly be regarded as a Jew at all this 
 thought filled them with a rage which year after year was all but fatal to the 
 life of Paul, as for long years together it was entirely fatal to his happiness 
 and peace. 3 
 
 Yet even supposing these obstacles to be surmounted, supposing that the 
 missionaries were successful in converting their own countrymen, and so were 
 enabled, by means of the " Proselytes of the Gate," to obtain their first point 
 of contact through the synagogue with the heathen world, might it not seem 
 after all as if their difficulties had then first begun ? What hopes could they 
 possibly entertain of making even the slightest impression on that vast welter- 
 ing mass of idolatry and corruption ? Now and then, perhaps, they might win 
 the heart of some gentle woman, sick to death of the cruelty and depravity of 
 
 JOB. Antt. xiii. 9, 1 ; 11, 3; 15, 4; xviiL 3, 5; xx. 2, 4; B. J. ii. 17, 10 ; 
 C. Ap. ii. 39 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 85 ; H. v. 5 ; Hor. Sat. I. iv. 142 ; Dion Cass. xxxviL 17, &c. ; 
 Juv. Sat. vi. 546. See too Derenbourg, Palestine, p. 223, seq. 
 
 - As early as B.C. 139 Jews had been expelled from Rome for admitting proselytes to 
 the Sabbath (Mommsen, Rom. Gesch. ii. 429). On the wider spread of Sabbatism even 
 among heathens, see Jos. c. Ap. ii. 11, 29. There appear to be some traces of tho Jews 
 taking pains annually to secure one proselyte (fva vpo<rr,\urov, Matt. *x"i, 15), to typify the 
 stability of the Gentiles (Taylor, Pirke AbMth, p. 36). 
 
 * See Excursus XIII., " Burden* laid on Proselyte*,"
 
 186 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST; PAUL, 
 
 which she was forced to be"a daily witness ; here^and there, perhaps, of some 
 slave, oppressed and ignorant, and eager to find a refuge from the intolerable 
 indignities of ancient servitude ; but even if they could hope for this, how 
 far had they then advanced in the conversion of Heathendom, with all its 
 splendid worldliness and glittering fascination P 
 
 For to the mass of the heathen, as I have said, their very persons were 
 hateful from the mere fact that they were Jews. 1 And so far from escaping 
 this hatred, the missionaries were certain to be doubly hated as Christian Jews. 
 For during the first century of Christianity, the ancients never condescended 
 to inquire what was the distinction between a Jew and a Christian. 2 To them 
 a Christian was only a more dangerous, a more superstitious, a more outrage- 
 ously intolerable Jew, who added to the follies of the Jew the yet more inex- 
 plicable folly of adoring a crucified malefactor. It is to the supposed turbulence 
 of One whom he ignorantly calls Chrestus, and imagines to have been still 
 living, that Suetonius attributes the riots which cost the Jews their expulsion 
 from Rome. The stolid endurance of agony by the Christians under persecu- 
 tion woke a sort of astonished admiration ; 3 but even Pliny, though his candid 
 account of the Christians in Bithynia refutes his own epithets, could only call 
 Christianity " a distorted and outrageous superstition ;" and Tacitus and 
 Suetonius, using the substantive, only qualify it by the severer epithets of 
 " deadly," " pernicious," and " new." 4 
 
 The heathen world into which, " as lambs among wolves," the Apostles 
 were going forth, was at that moment in its worse condition. The western 
 regions, towards which the course of missions took its way, were prevalently 
 Greek and Roman ; but it was a conquered Greece and a corrupted Rome. 
 It was a Greece which had lost its genius and retained its falsity, a Rome 
 which had lost its simplicity and retained its coarseness. It was Greece in 
 her lowest stage of seducer and parasite ; it was Rome at the epoch of her 
 most gorgeous gluttonies and her most gilded rottenness. The heart of the 
 Roman Empire under the Caesars was " a fen of stagnant waters." Csesarism 
 has found its modern defenders, and even a Tiberius has had his eulogists 
 among the admirers of despotic power; but no defence can silence the 
 damning evidence of patent facts. No advocacy can silence the awful 
 indictment which St. Paul writes to the inhabitants of the imperial city. 5 If 
 such things were done in the green tree, what was done in the dry ? What 
 was the condition of the thistles, if this was the code of the forest-trees ? If 
 St. John in the Apocalypse describes Rome as the harlot city which had made 
 the nations drunk with the cup of the wine of her fornications, he uses 
 
 1 See Excursus XTV., "Hatred of the Jews in Classical Antiquity." 
 
 3 In Dio (Irvii. 1214) the Christian (?) martyr Aottius Glabrio is called a Jew, 
 
 3 Marc. Aurel. xi. 3 ; Mart. x. 25 ; Epict. Dissert, iv. 8. 
 
 4 Plin. Ep. x. 97, " superstitionem pravam efc immodicam ; " Tac. Ann. xv. 44, "exitia- 
 bilis superstitio ;" Suet. Nero. 16, "novae et maleficae superstitionis." See Excursus XV., 
 "Judgments of Early Pagan "Writers on Christianity." 
 
 6 See Friedliinder, Sittengcech. Horns. B. v. Denis, Icttt* Morale* data 
 ii. 218-236t
 
 JUDAISM AXD HEATHENISM. 187 
 
 language no whit severer than that of Seneca, who speaks of Rome as a 
 cesspool of iniquity; 1 or than that of Juvenal, who pictures her as a filthy 
 sewer, into which have flowed the abominable dregs of every Achaean and 
 Syrian stream. 8 Crushed under the ignominies inflicted on her by the 
 despotism of madmen and monsters ; 3 corrupted by the pollutions of the 
 stage, and hardened by the cruelties of the amphitheatre; swarming with 
 parasites, impostors, prisoners, and the vilest slaves; without any serious 
 religion; without any public education; terrorised by insolent soldiers and 
 paiiperised mobs, the world's capital presents at this period a picture un- 
 paralleled for shame and misery in the annals of the world. But, reduced as 
 it was to torpor under the night-mare of an absolutism which it neither could 
 nor would shake off, the Roman world had sought its solace in superstition, 
 in sensuality, or in Stoicism. The superstition mainly consisted in the 
 adoption of cunning systems of priestcraft, impassioned rituals, horrible 
 expiations borrowed from the degrading mythologies of Egypt or from the 
 sensual religions of Galatia and Phrygia. 4 So rife were these, and so 
 dangerous to morality and order, that long before this age the Senate had 
 vainly attempted the suppression of the rites offered to Sabazius, to Isis, and 
 to Serapis. 5 The jingling of sistra, and the cracked voices of beardless Galli, 
 were familiar in every Roman town. 8 The sensuality was probably more 
 shameful, and more shameless, than has ever been heard of in history. And 
 amid this seething corruption, it was the few alone who retained the virtue 
 and simplicity of the old family life and worship. The Stoicism in which the 
 greater and more suffering spirits of the epoch a Cremutius Cordus, a 
 Thrasea Paetus, an Helvidius Prisons, an Annaeus Cornutus, a Musonins 
 Rufus, a Barea Soranus found refuge, was noble and heroic, but hard and 
 unnatural. He who would estimate the reaction of man's nobler instincts 
 against the profligacy of Pagan life he who would judge to what heights the 
 Spirit of God can aid those who unconsciously seek Him, and to what depths 
 the powers of evil can degrade their willing votaries must bridge over the 
 gulf which separates a Petronius and an Appuleins from the sweetness 
 and dignity of " minds naturally Christian," like those of an Epictetus and an 
 Aurelius. He who would further estimate the priceless services which 
 Christianity can still render even to souls the most naturally exalted, must 
 once more compare the chill, the sadness, the painful tension, the haughty 
 
 1 Cf. Sail. Cat. xxxvii. 5, "Hi Eomam sicut in sentinam confluxerunt." 
 
 3 Juv. iii. 62 ; Tac. Ann. xv. 44. 
 
 8 Cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 85; iv. 55, 56 ; Suet. Tib. 35; Ov. Fast. ii. 497, teq, 
 
 4 Such were the taurobolies and kriobolies hideous blood baths. 
 
 ' Valerius Maximus (I. iii. 3) relates that when the Senate had ordered the demolition 
 of a Serapeum at Home (A.U.C. 535), no workman could be induced to obey the order, 
 and the Consul had himself to burst open the door with an axe (see, too, Liv. TTTJT, 
 818 ; Cic. De Legg. ii. 8 ; Dion. Halic. ii. 20 ; Dion Cass. xL 47 ; Tert. Apol. 6 ; Adv. 
 Nat. L 10, quoted by Kenan, Lea Apdtrea, p. 316, and for Isis worship, AppuL Metam. 
 xi.). 
 
 6 Firmicius Maternus, in the days of Constantino, did not think it worth while to 
 refute Greek and Eoman mythology (De Errore Profanae Rtlig.), but only the rites of 
 Isis, Mithras, Cybele, &o.
 
 188 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 exclusiveness, the despairing pride of Stoicism with the warmth, the glow, the 
 radiant hope, the unbounded tenderness, the free natural emotion, the active 
 charities, the peaceful, infinite contentment of Christianity as it shines forth 
 with all its living and breathing sympathies in the Epistles of St. Paul. 
 
 And this difference between Stoicism and Christianity is reflected in the 
 lives of their disciples. While the last genuine representatives of Roman 
 statesmanship and Roman virtue were thinking it a grand thing to hold 
 aloof from the flatteries into which the other senators plunged with such 
 headlong baseness while they were being regarded as models of heroism for 
 such acts as rising and walking out of the senate when some more than 
 usually contemptible flattery was being proposed while they were thus 
 eating away their own hearts in the consciousness of an ineffectual protest, 
 and finding it difficult to keep even their own souls from " the contagion of 
 the world's slow stain " two Jews of obscure name, of no position, without 
 rank, without wealth, without influence, without either literary, political, or 
 military genius, without any culture but such as a Roman noble would have 
 despised as useless and grotesque but mighty in the strength of a sacred 
 cause, and irresistible in the zeal of a conscious inspiration set forth 
 unnoticed on the first of those journeys which were destined to convert the 
 world. For He who made and loved the world, and knew the needs of the 
 world which He died to save, had sent them forth ; and if He had sent them 
 forth without any apparent means for the fulfilment of His great design, it 
 was because He willed to choose " the foolish things of the world to confound 
 the wise, and the weak things to confound the mighty, and things which are 
 not to bring to nought things which are, that no flesh should glory in His 
 presence." 1 
 
 Vast, then, as was the task before them, and hedged around by apparently 
 insuperable difficulties, the elders of the Church of Antioch were convinced 
 that Barnabas and Saul had indeed been summoned on a Divine mission, and 
 that they dared no longer delay the distinct manifestation of the will of the 
 Spirit. They held one more special prayer and fast, 2 laid on the heads of 
 their two great brethren the hands of consecration, and sent them on their 
 way. Already, in his vision, Paul had been predestined to be an Apostle of 
 the Gentiles ; 3 henceforth, after this solemn ordination, he receives the title 
 of an Apostle in its more special significance.* For a time, as in his Epistles 
 to the Thessalonians, he modestly abstains from himself adopting it; but 
 when his name was vilified, when his teaching was thwarted, when his 
 authority was impugned, he not only adopted it, 5 but maintained his indepen- 
 dent position as a teacher, and his right to be regarded as in nowise inferior 
 to the very chief est of the Twelve. 
 
 > 1 Cor. i. 27, 28. 
 
 8 Acts xiii. 3, njorrevo-airef . . rpo<revfafievot. 
 
 * Acts xxvi. 17, fatpou)jtv6s vt c TOU AooO icol rS>v I9v3>v et ov$ rya> rj ojroore'AA*. 
 
 * Acts xiv. 4, 14 (cf. John xvii. 18 ; Heb. iii. 1). 
 
 8 Except in the few purely private lines which he wrote to Philemon, Mid in the letter 
 to his beloved Philippisna who needed no assertion of his claim,
 
 CYPRUS. 189 
 
 tioott |. 
 
 THE FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 CYPRUS. 
 
 1l \4yeis', Kal Uavhos t<f>ofit?To KtvSvvovs ] 'E<po&ei-ro Kal <r<p6Spa tStSoixei. Ei 
 ya.p teal IlaGAos ?iv &AA.' &v6p<airos -f\v . . . Ei 7p ou*c iipo&firo iroia Kaprepla rb rovs 
 
 pfiv ; Ey> yap Ka i rovro aurv avfu n (po 
 
 aAAa cal refj.a>v TOIIS Kivtifoovs Sib tra.vr'bs 8a/u <TT$>a.vovp.fVos Kal 
 
 rai'Taxov rJ> KJjpvypa ffirelpwv. CHRYSOST. Opp. x. 44, erf. Montfaucon. 
 
 " The travelled ambassador of Christ, who snatched Christianity from the hands 
 of a local faction, and turned it to a universal faith, whose powerful word shook all 
 the gods from Cyprus to Gibraltar, who turned the tide of history and thought, 
 giving ua the organisation of Christendom for the legions of Kome, and for Zeno 
 and Epicurus, Augustine, Eckhart, and Luther." MABTINEAU, Hours of Thought, 
 p. 88. 
 
 " SENT forth by the Holy Spirit" more conscious instruments, perhaps, of 
 God's will than has ever been the case before or since, and starting on a 
 journey more memorable in its issues than any which had ever been under- 
 taken by man Saul and Barnabas, accompanied by their more youthful 
 attendant, John Mark, started on their way. What thoughts were in their 
 minds as they turned their backs on the street Sing6n, where they had 
 preached with such acceptance and success P There were myriads of heathen 
 and thousands of Jews in that gay voluptuous city who had not accepted 
 Christianity; but the two Apostles were summoned to other work. They 
 passed between the theatre and the amphitheatre, 1 crossed the main thorough- 
 fare of the city with its trees and statues and colonnades, passed the Roman 
 sentries who guarded the residence of the Legate of Syria in the old palace of 
 the Seleucidse, crossed the bridge over the Orontes, and leaving the grove of 
 Daphne on their right upon the further bank of the river, made their way, 
 through, the oleanders and other flowering shrubs which form a gorgeous 
 border to its purple rocks, along the sixteen miles which separated them from 
 the port of Seleucia. History has contemptuously obliterated from her 
 annals the names of countless kings who have set forth from their capitals 
 ! for the scourge or conquest of nations at the head of armies, and with all the 
 ipomp and circumstance of glorious war ; but centuries after those conquerors 
 are in their turn forgotten whom she still deigns to commemorate, she will 
 preserve in the grateful memory of mankind the names of these two poor 
 Jews, who started on foot, staff in hand, with little, perhaps, or nothing in 
 their scrip but the few dates that suffice to satisfy the hunger of the Eastern 
 traveller. 
 
 From Antioch they might have made their way to Tarsus. But Paul had 
 
 1 See the elaborate plans and pictures of ancient and modern Antioch in Mr. Lewin's 
 St. Paul, i., pp, 92-95.
 
 190 SHS LIFE AND WOBK OP BT. PAUL. 
 
 in all probability preached already in bis native Cilicia, 1 and as Barnabas was 
 by birth a Cypriote, they bent their voyage thitherward. It was towards the 
 west, towards Chittim and the Isles of the Gentiles, that the course of missions 
 naturally tended. All land routes were more or less dangerous and difficult. 
 Roads were, with few exceptions, bad; vehicles were cumbrous and ex- 
 pensive ; robbers were numerous and insolent. But the total suppression of 
 piracy by Pompey had rendered the Mediterranean safe, and in the growth 
 of navigation it had become "the marriage-ring of nations." 2 Along the 
 eastern coast of Asia Minor the Jews had long been scattered in numbers far 
 exceeding those to be found there at the present day ; and while the extension 
 of the Greek language furnished an easy means of communication, the power 
 of Roman law, which dominated over the remotest provinces of the Empire, 
 afforded the missionaries a free scope and a fair protection. Accordingly 
 they descended the rocky stairs which led down to the port of Seleucia, 3 and 
 from one of its two piers embarked on a vessel which was bound for Cyprus. 
 And thus began " the great Christian Odyssey." * The Apostolic barque has 
 spread her sails; the wind breathes low, and only aspires to bear upon its 
 wings the words of Jesus. If Rome has but too good reason to complain of 
 the dregs of moral contamination which the Syrian Orontes poured forth to 
 mingle with her yellow Tiber, on this occasion, at any rate, the Syrian river 
 made ample amends by speeding on their way with its seaward current these 
 messengers of peace and love. 
 
 As they sail south-westward over the hundred miles of that blue sea which 
 one of them was destined so many tunes to traverse the sea which four 
 times wrecked him with its unregardful storms, and tossed him for a night 
 and a day on its restless billows ; as they sit at the prow and cast their wistful 
 gaze towards the hills which overshadow the scene of their future labours, 
 or, resting at the stern, not without a glance of disgust at its heathen images, 
 look back on the rocky cone of Mount Casing, " on which three centuries later 
 smoked the last pagan sacrifice," 5 they must have felt a deep emotion at the 
 thought that now for the first time the Faith, on which depended the hopes of 
 the world, was starting for fresh regions from its native Syria. Little did 
 St. Paul know how trying in its apparent failures, how terrible in its real 
 hardships, was the future which lay before him ! That future the fire of 
 the furnace in which the fine gold of his heroic spirit was to be purged from 
 every speck of dross was mercifully hidden from him, though in its broad 
 
 1 Gal. i. 21 ; Acts ix. 30 ; xi. 26. That there were churches in Cilicia appears from 
 Acts xv. 41. 
 
 2 See some good remarks in Kenan, Lcs Ap6tres, p. 280, tcq. ; and for an exhaustive 
 treatment, Herzf eld, Geach. d. jvdi&chen Harwlds. 
 
 Polyb. v. 59. 
 
 4 Renan, Les Apdto'et, p. 386 ; of. St. Paul, p. 13, " Oe fut la seconde po6sie du 
 Christianisme. Le lac de Tiberiade et les barques de pedicure avaient found la premiere. 
 Maintenant un souffle plus puissant des aspirations ven lea torres plus lointaines nous 
 entralne en haute mer." 
 
 * El Djebel el Akra, "the bald mountain" (Cheaney, Euphrat. 1. 386; A mm. Marcoll, 
 xxii. 14, 8 ; Julian, Misop, 861).
 
 CYPEUS. 191 
 
 outlines he must have been but too well able to conjecture something of its 
 trials. But had he foreseen all that was before him had he foreseen the 
 scourgings, the flagellations, the stoning, the shipwrecks, 1 the incessant toil- 
 ings on foot along intolerable and dangerous roads, the dangers from swollen 
 rivers and rushing watercourses, the dangers from mountain brigands, the 
 dangers from Jews, from Gentiles, from false Christians in city and wilder- 
 ness and sea, the frantic crowds that nearly tore him to pieces, the weary 
 nights, the chill, naked, thirsty, famine-stricken days, the incessant wearing 
 responsibility, the chronic disease and weakness, all the outrages, all the 
 insults, all the agitating bursts of indignation against those who pat stumbling- 
 blocks in the paths of the weak, 2 the severe imprisonments, the incessant 
 death, and all ended by desertion, failure, loneliness, chains, condemnation, 
 the chilly dungeon, 3 the nameless martyrdom had he foreseen all this, could 
 he have borne it? His human spirit might indeed have shrunk at all the 
 efforts and the agonies which lay before him greater probably than have ever 
 fallen to the lot of man; yet even at this early phase of his missionary 
 career I doubt not that the hero's heart would have boldly uttered, " I hold 
 not my life dear unto myself," and the faith of the Christian would have 
 enabled him to say, " I can do all things through Christ that strengthened me." 
 
 Yet to all human judgment how ill qualified, physically, was the Apostle 
 for the vast and perilous work which lay before him. The strongest 
 athlete might well have quailed as he thought of the toil, the sleeplessness, 
 the manual labour, the mental anxiety. The most imposing orator might 
 have trembled at the thought of facing so many hostile potentates and 
 raging crowds. The finest moral courage might have entreated to be spared 
 the combined opposition alike of false friends and furious enemies. But 
 Paul was no Milo, no Demosthenes, no Scipio Af ricanus ; he was physi- 
 cally infirm, constitutionally nervous, painfully sensitive. His bodily pre- 
 sence was weak, his speech despised, his mind often overwhelmed with 
 with fear. But over the feeble body and shrinking soul dominated a spirit 
 so dauntless that he was ready all his life long to brave torture, to con- 
 front mobs, to harangue tribunals, to quail as little before frowning tyrants 
 as before stormy seas. He might have addressed his ailing body in the 
 words of the great hero as he rode into the thick of battle, "Aha, you 
 tremble ! but you would tremble far more if you knew whither I meant to 
 take you to-day." * 
 
 The concurrent testimony of tradition, and the oldest attempts at repre- 
 sentation, enable us to summon up before us the aspect of the man. A 
 modern writer, who cannot conceal the bitter dislike which mingles with 
 bis unwilling admiration, is probably not far wrong in characterising him 
 as a small and ugly Jew. 6 You looked on a man who was buffeted by an 
 
 1 2 Cor. li. 23 33. * 2 Cor. Jd. 29, ri o-Kav&a\ltTcu., <u ov'/c eyi> K-vpovfMU. 
 
 8 Clem. Rom. Ep. ad loc. i 5. 4 Marshal Turenne. 
 
 Even Luther described St. Paul u "em armea diirres Miiimlein trie unser Philippiu "
 
 192 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 angel of Satan. And yet when you spoke to him ; when the prejudice inspired 
 by his look and manner had been overcome ; when, at moments of inspiring 
 passion or yearning tenderness, the soul beamed out of that pale, distressful 
 countenance ; when with kindling enthusiasm the man forgot his appearance 
 and his infirmity, and revealed himself in all the grandeur of his heroic force ; 
 when triumphing over weakness he scathed his enemies with terrible invective, 
 or rose as it were upon the wings of prophecy to inspire with consolation the 
 souls of those he loved then, indeed, you saw what manner of man he was. 
 It was Paul seated, as it were, on sunlit heights, and pouring forth the 
 glorious paean in honour of Christian love ; it was Paul withstanding Peter 
 to the face because he was condemned ; it was Paul delivering to Satan the 
 insolent offender of Corinth ; it was Paul exposing with sharp yet polished 
 irony the inflated pretensions of a would-be wisdom; it was Paul rolling 
 over the subterranean plots of Judaisers the thunders of his moral indignation; 
 it was Paul blinding Elymas with the terror of his passionate reproof ; it was 
 Paul taking command, as it were, of the two hundred and seventy souls in the 
 driven dismantled hulk, and by the simple authority of natural pre-eminence 
 laving his injunctions on the centurion and the Roman soldiers whose captive 
 ho was ; it was Paul swaying the mob with the motion of his hand on the 
 steps of Antonia ; it was Paul making even a Felix tremble ; it was Paul 
 exchanging high courtesies in tones of equality with governors and kings ; it 
 was Paul " fighting with wild beasts " at Ephesus, and facing " the lion " 
 alone at Borne. When you saw him and heard him, then you forgot that the 
 treasure was hid in an earthen vessel; out of the shattered pitcher there 
 blazed upon the darkness a hidden lamp which flashed terror upon his enemies 
 and shone like a guiding star to friends. 
 
 So that, if ugliness, and fear and trembling, and ill-health, 1 and the 
 knowledge that he belonged to a hated sect, and was preaching a des- 
 pised foolishness if these were terrible drawbacks, they were yet more 
 than counterbalanced by the possession of unequalled gifts. Among his 
 slighter outward advantages were a thorough training in the culture of his 
 own nation, a good mastery of Greek, the knowledge of a trade by which 
 he could support himself, and familiarity with the habits of men of every class 
 and nation, derived from long residence both in Jewish and Gentile cities. As 
 widower and childless, he was unencumbered by any domestic ties, and could 
 only suffer an individual anguish without risking those who depended on him. 
 Lastly, the possession of the Roman citizenship, though inadequate to protect 
 him against provincial tumults, and though he probably waived the appeal to 
 it among his own countrymen, yet stood him in good stead in more than 
 one dangerous crisis. But these would have been less than nothing without 
 the possession of other and far higher gifts. Such were the astonishing 
 endurance which no trials could exhaust, and which enabled the most physi- 
 cally weak of the Apostles 2 to become the most ceaselessly active; the 
 
 1 See 2 Cor. x. 10 ; Gal. iv. 13 ; 1 Cor. ii. 3 ; 2 Cor. iv. 7 ; vii. 5 ; xi. 6 ; xii. passim. 
 * 'A.<rttvrfi is the key-note of 2 Cor. xiii. 39.
 
 CTPRUS. 196 
 
 high conrietiofl tliat God had called him to a special Apostolate " to make 
 the Gentiles obedient by word and deed ;" 1 the enthusiasm of humanity," 
 which made him ready to associate, for their souls' sake, whether with men 
 who had once been thieves and drunkards, or with sweet, innocent, and gentle 
 women ; 2 the courtesy which made him equally at home among slaves and 
 among kings ; the power of style which rose or fell with the occasion, some- 
 times condescending to the humblest colloquialism, sometimes rising to the 
 most impassioned eloquence ; the clearness of insight which always kept one 
 end in view, and sacrificed all minor points to attain it; 3 the total emancipa- 
 tion from that slavery to trifles which is the characteristic of small minds, 
 and is ever petrifying religion into formulae, or frittering it away into cere- 
 monial ; the spirit of concession ; the tact of management ; the willingness to 
 bear and forbear, descend and condescend ; the tolerance of men's prejudices ; 
 the contented acceptance of less than was his due. And there were in the 
 soul of Paul qualities more precious for his life's work than even these. 
 There was the tenderness for his converts which makes his words ever sound 
 as though he were ready to break into sobs as he thinks on the one hand of 
 their affection, on the other of their ingratitude ; 4 there was the conviction 
 which makes him anticipate the very fiat of the throne of judgment, 5 and 
 vehemently to exclaim that if an angel were to preach a different gospel it 
 would be false ; 6 there was the missionary restlessness so often found in the 
 great pioneers of salvation, which drives him from city to city and continent 
 to continent in the cause of God ; there was the ardent and imaginative im- 
 pulse which made it the very poetry of his life to found churches among the 
 Gentiles as the first messenger of the Gospel of peace ; 7 and last, but per- 
 haps most important of all, there was the perfect faith, the absolute self- 
 sacrifice, self-obliteration, self-annihilation, which rendered him willing, nay 
 glad, to pour out his whole life us a libation to be led in triumph from city 
 to city as a slave and a captive at the chariot-wheels of Christ. 
 
 The immense personal ascendency of St. Paul has almost effaced the recol- 
 lection of the fellow- workers to whose co-operation he owed so much ; but we 
 must not forget that throughout the perilous initiatives of this great work, he 
 had Barnabas ever at his side, to guide him by his calm wisdom, and support 
 him by his steady dignity. Barnabas, the friend of his youth, perhaps the 
 school-fellow of his studies, who had taken him by the hand ; who had drawn 
 him from his obscure retirement; who had laboured with him at Antioch; 
 who had been his fellow-almoner at Jerusalem was still sharing his difficul- 
 ties, and never envied or murmured when he saw himself being gradually sub- 
 jugated by the powerful individuality of a younger convert. To us Barnabas 
 must always be a less memorable figure than Paul, but let us not forget that 
 up to this time he had held a higher rank, and wielded a more authoritative 
 
 Rom. iv. 18. 1 Cor. vi. 9 11. 1 Cor. Ix. 19. 
 
 * 1 Thess. il. 7, 11 ; Gal. ir. 19 ; 1 Cor. ir. 15 ; Philem. 10. 
 
 s Bom. ii. 16. Gal. i. 8. 
 
 ' Rom. x. 18; XT. 18; Gal. i. 16; 1 Cor. L 1; lii. 10; ix. 16; 2 Cor. xt 3.
 
 194 THE: LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 influence. As a Levite, as a prophet, as one who for the needs of the com. 
 mnnity had cheerfully sacrificed his earthly goods, as one who enjoyed to a 
 very high degree the confidence of the Apostles, Barnabas, in these early days, 
 was enabled to lend to St. Paul's conceptions a weight which they could 
 hardly otherwise have won. It is only when the work has actually begun that 
 Barnabas seems naturally to sink to a subordinate position. No sooner have 
 they left Salamis than the very order of the names is altered. Sergius Paulus 
 sends for " Barnabas and Saul," but it is Saul who instantly comes to the 
 front to meet the opposition of Elymas ; it is " Paul and his company " who 
 sail from Paphos to Perga ; it is Paul who answers the appeal to speak at 
 Antioch in Pisidia ; it is Paul who is stoned at Lystra ; and thenceforth, it is 
 " Paul and Barnabas " throughout the rest of the history, except in the circular 
 missive from James and the Church at Jerusalem. 1 
 
 Nor must we altogether lose sight of the younger of the three voyagers- 
 John, whose surname was Mark, who went with them in the capacity of their 
 minister, corresponding, perhaps, in part to our notion of a deacon. 3 The pre- 
 sence of an active attendant, who could make all arrangements and inquiries, 
 would be almost necessary to a sufferer like Paul. If Barnabas shared with 
 Paul the reluctance to administer in person the rite of baptism, 8 we may sup- 
 pose that this was one of the functions in which Mark would help them. Nor 
 was it an unimportant circumstance to both of them that Mark, as the avowed 
 friend and protege of Peter, would have been unlikely to share in any mission 
 which did not command the entire approval of his illustrious leader. In this 
 and many other ways, now as at the close of his life, Paul doubtless felt that 
 Mark was, or could be, " profitable to him for ministry." His nature im- 
 periously demanded the solace of companionship ; without this he found his 
 work intolerable, and himself the victim of paralysing depression. 4 The prin- 
 ciples which he adopted, his determination that under no circumstances would 
 he be oppressive to his converts, the missionary boldness which constantly led 
 him into such scones of danger as none but a man could face, deprived him of 
 that resource of female society a sister, a wife which other Apostles 
 enjoyed, and which has been found so conducive to the usefulness of even 
 stich devoted missionaries as Adoniram Jndson or Charles Mackenzie. But 
 Paul was a missionary of the type which has been reproduced in Francis 
 Xavier or Coleridge Patteson ; and whatever he may have been in the past, he 
 was now, at any rate, a lonely man. 
 
 Such were the three humble Christian emissaries whose barque, bending its 
 prow to the south-west, sailed towards the mountains of Cyprus, and, leaving 
 
 1 Acts xv. 25 ; and Acts xiv. 14, where Barnabas is taken for the superior deity. 
 n Luke iv. 20 the wmipenj? is the Chazzan of the Synag 
 
 * Acts xiii. 5, un-qp-'nj?. In Luke iv. 20 the wmipenj? is the Chazzan of the Synagogue. 
 Mark, like Barnabas, may have been connected with the tribe of Levi; on the name 
 KoAo/3oaKTvAc* and traditions about him, see Ewald, Gesch. vi. 445. 
 
 3 1 Cor. i. 13 
 
 * 1 These, iii. 1 ; 2 Cor. ii. 13 ; Phil. ii. 19, 20 ; 2 Tim. IT. 11. It has been said thai 
 St. Paul "had a thousand friends, and loved each as his own soul, and seemed to live a 
 thousand lives in them, and to die a thousand deaths when he must quit them."
 
 OTPBUf. 195 
 
 the long promontory of Dinaretum on the right, sailed into the bay of Salainis. 
 The scene must have been very familiar to Barnabas. Before them lay the 
 flourishing commercial town, conspicuous for its temple of the Salaminian 
 Jupiter, which tradition assigned to Teucer, son of Telamon. Beyond the 
 temple there stretched away to the circle of enclosing hills a rich plain, watered 
 by the abundant streams of the Pediaeus. The site of the town, which our 
 recent acquisition of the island has rendered so familiar, is now marked by a 
 few ruins about four miles to the north of the modern Famagosta. The 
 ancient town never entirely recovered the frightful injuries which it under- 
 went, first from an insurrection of tho Jews in the roign of Trajan, and after- 
 wards from an earthquake. But when the Apostles stepped ashore, upon one 
 of tho ancient piers of which the ruins are still visible, it was a busy and 
 important place, and we cannot doubt that Barnabas would find many to greet 
 him in his old home. Doubtless, too, there would bo some to whom their visit 
 was peculiarly welcome, because, ever since the persecution of Stephen, Cyprus 
 had been connected with the spread of Christianity. 1 
 
 That Barnabas had had a considerable voice in thus repaying to his native 
 island the service which it had rendered to Antioeh, 2 may be conjectured 
 from the fact that subsequently, when he had parted from Paul, he and 
 Mark once more chose it as the scene of their missionary labours. After this 
 first visit, Paul, often as he passed in sight of it, seems never to have landed 
 there, disliking, perhaps, to build on other men's foundations; nor does he 
 allude to Cyprus or to other Cypriotes in any of his Epistles. Whether there 
 be any truth or not in the legend which says that Barnabas was martyred in 
 the reign of Nero, and buried near Salainis, it is quite fitting that the church 
 and grotto near it should be dedicated to him. 
 
 But apart from any facilities which may have been derived from his 
 connexion with the island, it was without doubt an excellent place to form a 
 starting-point for the evangelisation of the world. One of the largest islands 
 in the Mediterranean, possessed of a fertile soil, varied in physical formation, 
 and within easy reach of the three great continents, it had been marked out 
 by nature as a convenient centre for extensive traffic. The trade in natural 
 products chiefly metals and wine together with the fact that Augustus had 
 farmed the copper-mines to Herod the Great, had attracted a large Jewish 
 population. So vast, indeed, were their numbers, that in the reign of Trajau 
 (A.D. 116) they rose upon the native inhabitants, under a certain Artemio, and 
 slew 240,000 of them in one terrible massacre. The revolt was suppressed by 
 Hadrian with awful severity, and after that time no Jew might set foot upon 
 the shore of Cyprus on pain of death. 3 
 
 Of their work at Salamis we are told nothing, except that " they continued 
 
 1 Acts ixi. 16. Acts xl. 20. 
 
 * Strabo, xiv. 682 ; Tao, H. II. 2, 4; Jos. Antt. xiii. 10, 4; xvl. 4, 5 ; xvil. 12, 
 1, 2 ; B. J. ii. 7, 2 ; Philo, Leg., p. 587 ; Milman, Hist, of Jews, iii. 111. For its ancient 
 history see Meursius, Opp. iii. ; for its modern condition, now so interwkiiig to us, see 
 General Cteuola's Cyprua,
 
 196 THE LIVE AND WOSfC OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 preaching the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews." l It appears 
 from this that Salamis was one of the towns whore the Jews' quarter was 
 sufficiently populous to maintain several synagogues; and if the Apostles 
 came in contact with the heathen at all, it would only be with proselytes. 
 But the notices of this part of their journey are scant, nor is any indication 
 given of the length of their stay in Cyprus. Any work among the Gentiles 
 was doubtless hindered by the apotheosis of sensuality for which the island 
 was noted. The contact of Greeks with Phoenicians had caused a fusion 
 between the subtle voluptuousness of the Hellenic race and the more burning 
 passion of the Phoenicians and other Orientals ; and the maritime population 
 who touched at the island from every civilised country were ready learners in 
 the school of degradation. Yenus was the presiding goddess; and as she 
 received from this fact her name of Cypris, so she was most commonly 
 alluded to in the poets as the Paphian, Amathusian, or Idalian, from her 
 temples in various parts of the island. She was 
 
 " Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful, 
 Fresh as the foam, new bathed in Paphian wells." 
 
 It was hitherward that she came as Aphrodite Anadyomeue, when 
 
 " From the sea 
 
 She rose and floated in her pearly shell, 
 A laughing girl." 
 
 It was by these " purple island sides " that she first 
 
 " Fleeted a double light in air and wave." 
 
 Yet in the Paphian temple, where no blood was offered, where her immemorial 
 shrine, famous even in the days of Homer, 2 breathed from a hundred altars 
 the odour of perpetual incense, 3 and where kings and emperors turned aside to 
 do her homage, the image which was enshrined in her adytum was 110 
 exquisite female figure sculptured by the hand of a Phidias or a Scopas, but 
 a coarse truncated cone of white marble 4 a sort of Asherah such as might 
 naturally serve as the phallic symbol of the Assyrian and Sidonian deity from 
 whom this form of nature-worship was derived. 6 And as her temples had the 
 right of asylum a right which was certain to crowd their vicinity with 
 criminals of every variety we might have conjectured, apart from direct 
 testimony, that the worship was to the last degree debasing ; that the Paphian 
 
 1 Acts xiii. 5, KarfrftUuv. s Horn. Od. 8, 362. 8 Virg. Mn. 1. 417. 
 
 4 As it was white (TO S* ayoA/ua OVK a.v ciiedarai? aAAw no i) nvpajuu'St AevKjj) there cannot be 
 much doubt that it was of marble, though. Maximus Tyr. adds >' ( S v\r\ ayvod-rai. (Di&t. 
 8, 8). " Apud Cyprios Venus in modum umbilici, vel ut quidam volunt, Metae, colitur " 
 (Serv. ad JSn. i. 724). 
 
 8 Tac. H. ii. 3 ; Strabo, xiv. 683 ; Athen. XT. 18. The crescent and star represented 
 on coins as adorning the front of the Temple are perhaps a trace of the Phoenician origin 
 of the worship, and of the connexion between the Paphian Venus and the Phoenician 
 Asherah (Movers. Phim. 607). The sun, at Eme&a, had a similar KovomStt irxnn* (Herodian. 
 v. 3), a sort of potTvXioK JuireTrfJ. Models of it were sold (ayoV<"iov omffafuaibi'i Athen. 
 rv. 18).
 
 CTPETJ8. 197 
 
 divinity was no Aphrodite Ourania, 1 but the lowest kind of Aphrodite Fan- 
 demos ; that her worship was simply the prostitution of religion to the excuse 
 of lust. Nor is it strange that under such circumstances there should he 
 deadly opposition between the Jews and the Greek or Phoenician inhabitants, 
 such as existed of old between the Jews and Canaanites. The mutual hatred 
 thus engendered culminated in the internecine war which so soon broke out 
 between the rival populations ; it may have been one of the reasons why in 
 Cyprus we read of no preaching to the heathen. 
 
 After their residence in Salamis the three missionaries traversed the whole 
 island. 8 It is about a hundred miles in length from Salamis to New Paphos ; 
 and they probably followed a main road along the coast, diverging to places 
 like Citium, the birthplace of Zeno the Stoic ; Amathus, one of the shrines of 
 Venus ; and any towns where they would find the little Ghettos, whoso 
 conversion to the faith was their prime object. But not one incident of their 
 journey is preserved for us until they reached the town of Paphos. By this 
 name is intended, as the narrative shows, not the old and famous Paphos, the 
 modern Kuklia, to which wanton pilgrimages were yearly made in honour of 
 the old shrine so " famous-infamous " for many ages, but Nea-Paphos, 3 the 
 modern Baffa, now a decayed and mouldering village, but then a bustling 
 haven, and the residence of the Boman Proconsul Sergius Paulus.* 
 
 It does not in any way impugn the claim of Sergius Paulus to be regarded 
 as a person of intelligence that he had with him, apparently residing in his 
 house, a Jewish impostor named Bar- Jesus, who had arrogated to himself the 
 complimentary title of Elymas, the Ulemah, or "Wizard. 5 A notorious infidel 
 like Philippe galite*, though in other respects a man of ability, could yet try 
 to presage his fate by the sort of cup-augury involved in examining the 
 grounds of coffee (K.v\nco/j.dt>Tfta ; cf . Gen. xliv. 5). A belief in some personal 
 Power, the arbiter of man's destiny, above and beyond himself, is a primary 
 necessity of the human mind. Mankind can never dispense with this belief, 
 however superfluous, in certain cases, and for a time, it may seem to be to the 
 individual. The noble Romans who had lost all firm hold on the national 
 religion, felt themselves driven by a kind of instinctive necessity to get such a 
 connexion with the unseen world as could be furnished them by the mysticism 
 of Oriental quacks. A Marius had resorted to the prognostications of the 
 Jewess Martha. At this particular epoch augurs, haruspices, Babylonians, 
 
 1 The Virgin Mary is adored by Cypriotes under the name Aphrodvtissa I (Lohber, 
 Cyprus, p. 105.) 
 
 2 Acts xiii. 6, tu\06rm M 5\r,v -njv tnj<n> M, A, B, 0, D, E. In omitting ^ our version 
 follows G, H. 
 
 3 " The dance, music, and song of the sacred processions of 3,000 years ago have been 
 replaced by the coo-coo-vaie of the owl, and wild cries of other night-birds, and the 
 
 * -.i^" 1118 bark of famished dogs, left behind by no less famished masters, to roam the 
 8. 1 . ' village in search of carrion. This is the Paphos of to-day " (Cesnola's Cyprus, 
 
 P- 2 }' - XVL, " The Proconsulate of Sergius Paulua." 
 
 tf 81 ** - -^ys, " filim ou sage .... mot arabe dont le pluriel est ovttma. 
 owever, ^. ,, u ,j en aramgen . ce QUJ ren <j f or t douteuse cette 6tymologie
 
 198 THE LIFE AND WORK Off ST. PAUL. 
 
 mathematici, astrologers, magians, soothsayers, casters of horoscopes, fortune- 
 tellers, ventriloquists, dream-interpreters, 1 flocked to Rome in such multitudes! 
 and acquired such vogue, as to attract the indignant notice of both satirists 
 and historians. A few of them like Apollonius of Tyana, and at a later 
 period, Alexander of Abonoteichos, and the cynic Peregrinus attracted 
 universal attention. There was scarcely a Roman family that did not keep or 
 consult its own foreteller of the future ; and Juvenal describes the Emperor 
 Tiberius as seated "with a herd of Chaldseans" on his rock at Capri. 2 Nothing 
 would be more natural than that an intelligent and inquiring Roman, in the 
 ennui of the smallest of the provinces, and finding himself amid a mixed popu- 
 lation, half of Phoenician origin, and devoted to strange forms of religion, 
 should have amused his leisure by inquiries into the bizarre superstitions by 
 which he was surrounded. 3 The prevalence of earthqnf>Kes in Cyprus would 
 be likely to give to the minds of the residents that g/fi-omy and credulous tinge 
 which is often found in countries liable to such terrible inflictions ; and New 
 Paphos had been devastated by an earthquake sufficiently recent 4 to have left 
 a deep impression. Perhaps from this, perhaps from other causes, Bar-Jesus 
 had acquired unusual influence ; but it is an additional confirmation of the 
 accuracy of St. Luke one of those remote and incidental, and therefore 
 unsuspected confirmations, which so often occur to establish the veracity of the 
 sacred writers that we find Cyprus to have been specially famous for its 
 schools of religious imposture, of which one was professedly Jewish. Simon 
 Magus was in all probability an inhabitant of Citium. 6 There is a most 
 singular passage of Pliny, which, when we combine it with his reference to a 
 Sergius Paulus, may be regarded as a confused echo in the mind of the Roman 
 litterateur of these very events, heard from the very Proconsul about whom 
 we are at present reading. He tells us that there were at Paphos two schools 
 of soothsayers, one of which professed connexion with Moses, Jamnes, and 
 Jotapes, who were Jews, and a much more recent Cyprian one. 6 To this 
 school Bar- Jesus must have belonged, and Pliny's allusion throws once more 
 a singular light on the fidelity of the careful Evangelist. 7 
 
 The same feelings which had induced Sergius Paulus to domicile the Jewish 
 sorcerer in the proconsular residence would naturally induce him to send for 
 the new teachers, whose mission had evidently attracted attention by that 
 loving earnestness which differed so widely from the contemptuous neutrality 
 
 1 Juv. iii. 27. "Augur, schoenobates, medicus, magus." 
 
 Tac. H. v. 3; Hor. Sat. I. ii. 1 ; Od. I. xi. 2 ; JUT. Sat. ffl. 42, 60; vi. 543, 553, 562; 
 x. 93; Suet. Tib. 36, 69; Axil. Gell. L 9; JOB. Antt. viii. 2; xx. 5, 1 ; B. J. vi. 5, L 
 Compare Matt. xxiv. 23, 24 ; Acts viii 9 ; xvi 16 ; xix. 19 ; 2 Tim. iii. 13 (tfots} ; Rev. 
 xix. 20. 
 
 See Jos. Antt. xx. 7, 2. 
 
 4 In the reign of Augustus (Dion Cass. fiv. 23). * Supra, p. 146. 
 
 8 Tac. H. v. 3. Plin. H. N. xxx. 2, 6, "Est et alia factio a Mose et Jamne et Jotape 
 Judaeis pendens, sed multis millibus post Zoroastrem. Tcmto recentior est Cypria." In 
 Jamnes and Jotapes there seems to be some dim confusion of supposed Jews with the 
 traditional Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambiea (2 Tim, iii. 8). 
 
 7 Lake i. 3, api0wf irapi|xoAov0>}KOTi<
 
 CYPRUS. 199 
 
 of the synagogue. But the position of soothsayer to s Roman Proconsul 
 even though it conld only last a year 1 was too distinguished and too lucrative 
 to abandon without a struggle. Elymas met the Apostles in open controversy, 
 and spared neither argument nor insult in his endeavour to persuade Sergius 
 of the absurdity of the new faith. Instantly Saul and this is the moment 
 seized by the historian to tell us that he was also called by the name of Paul, 
 which henceforth he exclusively uses came to the front to bear the full force 
 of the sorcerer's opposition. A less convinced or a less courageous man might 
 well have shrunk from individual collision with a personage who evidently 
 occupied a position of high consideration in the immediate household of the 
 noble Roman. But to a spirit like St. Paul's, while there could be infinite 
 compassion for ignorance, infinite sympathy with infirmity, infinite tenderness 
 towards penitence, there could, on the other hand, be no compromise with im- 
 posture, no tolerance for cupidity, no truce with Canaan. He stood up, as it 
 were, in a flame of fire, his soul burning with inspired indignation, against a 
 man whose cowardice, greed, and worthlessness he saw and wished to expose. 
 Fixing on the false prophet and sorcerer that earnest gaze which was perhaps 
 rendered more conspicuous by his imperfect sight, 2 he exclaimed, " O full of 
 all gnile and all villainy, thou son of the devil, 3 thou foe of all righteousness, 
 cease, wilt thou, thy perversion of the Lord's straight paths." And then, 
 perceiving the terror produced on the mind of the unmasked hypocrite by this 
 bold and blighting invective, he suddenly added, " And now, see, the Lord's 
 hand is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a time." 4 
 The denunciation instantly took effect ; the sorcerer felt in a moment that his 
 impostures were annihilated, that he stood in the presence of an avenging 
 justice. A mist swam before his eyes, followed by total darkness, and 
 groping with outstretched hands he began to seek for some one to lead and 
 guide him. 
 
 Nor was it strange that a display of spiritual power so startling and so 
 irresistible should produce a strong conviction on the mind of the Proconsul. 6 
 How far his consequent belief was deep-seated or otherwise wa have no evidence 
 which would enable us to judge. But the silence of St. Luke would seem to 
 indicate that he was not baptised, and we can hardly look on him as a deep and 
 lifelong convert, since otherwise we should, in the rarity of great men in the 
 Christian community, have as certainly heard of him in their records as we 
 
 1 Dion Cassius tells us that them senatorial appointments were rmj<r>i al n^purei 
 (UiL13). 
 
 s Cf. Acts xriii. 1. 
 
 8 Possibly in allusion to his name Bar-Jesus as though he had said, " called the son 
 of the salvation of Jehovah, but really the son of the devil, and the enemy of all 
 righteousness." For io/3dAot of. John viii. 44. The reading of the Peshito Ba/r-Skfirna, 
 " son of a wound " or "son of a name," is hard to account for, unless it be by euphemism 
 (Castell, Lex Syr. s. v.). 
 
 4 Acts xiii. 11, axpi /taipov, literally, " until an opportunity," or, as we should say, " foi 
 the present." "Sciebat Apostolus, sui memor exempli, de tenebris oculorum, mentis 
 posse resurgere ad luoem ; " Bede, following the hint of St. Chrysostom that ov noXa^ww 
 V TO pnua oAA' ciricrrpciocroti 
 
 * Aot3ii.l2.
 
 200 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL, 
 
 hear of the very few who at this period like Flavins Clemens of Flavia Domi- 
 tilla joined the Church from the ranks of the noble or the mighty. 
 
 The question has been often asked why it is at this point in the narrative 
 that the name Saul is finally replaced by the name PauL 1 The old answer 
 supplied by St. Jerome, that he took the name as a trophy of his conversion of 
 Sergius Paulus, has long and deservedly been abandoned ; there would have 
 been in it an element of vulgarity impossible to St. Paul. Nor is there any- 
 thing to urge in favour of the fancy that he took the name as a token of 
 his humility, to signify that he was " the least of the Apostles." 2 It is much 
 more probable that he had either possessed from the first an alternative 
 name for facility of intercourse among the heathen, or that this Roman 
 designation may point to his possession of the Roman franchise, and perhaps 
 to some bond of association between his father or grandfather and the 
 ./Emilian family, who bore the cognomen of Paulus. If he adopted the name 
 on the present occasion it may have been because it was to a slight extent 
 alliterative with his Hebrew name Shaul, which would, in its Grecised form, 
 be represented by Saulos ; but that was a form which he could not use 
 in intercourse with the Greeks, owing to the fact that the word in Greek 
 would be a sort of slang term for " uppish," or wanton. The mere changing 
 of his name was so little unusual that it had been from the earliest ages 
 a custom among his countrymen. Joseph had been known to the Egyptians 
 as Zaphnath Paaneah ; Daniel to the Assyrians as Belteshazzar ; Hadassah to 
 the Persians as Esther; Jesus, Hillel, Onias, Joseph, Tarpho to the Greeks 
 as Jason, Pollio, Menelas, Hegesippus, and Trypho. When not assonant the 
 name was sometimes a translation, as Peter is of Cephas, and Didymns 
 of Thomas. Sometimes, however, this name for use among the Gentiles was 
 due to accidental relations, as when Josephus took the praenomem of Flavins 
 in honour of Vespasian. Of this we have other instances, in the Acts of the 
 Apostles, in the persons of John and Joses, who were known by the Latin 
 designations of Marcus and Justus. In Paul's case, however, as ancient 
 Christian writers have pointed out, the change of name marks also a total 
 change in all the conditions of his life. " Paul suffers what Saul had inflicted ; 
 Saul stoned, and Paul was stoned; Saul inflicted scourgings on Christians, 
 and Paul five times received forty stripes save one ; Saul hunted the Church 
 of God, Paul was let down in a basket ; Saul bound, Paul was bound." 8 
 
 1 " A primo ecclesiae spolio Proo. Serg. Paulo victoriae suae trophaea retulit, erexitque 
 vexillum ut Paulus a Saulo vocaretur " (Jer. ad Philem. 1). In the Toldoth Jeshu the 
 name is connected with ^Q, " he worked." If so, both words being passive participles, 
 the change would be like a change from "sought" to "wrought;" and I cannot nelp 
 thinking that the true explanation may lie here. Heinrichs explains SavAo? 6, 6 u 
 DaOXos der auch, so wie der Proconsul, ebenfalls Paulus hiess." 
 
 2 Paulus. a contraction of Pauxillus, means "least." "Paulus enim parvus " (Aug. 
 Serm. clxix.). " Non ob aliud, quantum mihi videtur hoc nomen elegit nisi ut se osten- 
 deret tamquam minimum Apostolorum" (Aug. De Spir. et Lit. xii.). With his usual 
 exuberancei>f fancy he contrasts the " little " Saul of Benjamin, with the tall persecuting 
 king. But in Conf. viii. 4 he leans to the other theory, "Ipse minimus Apostolorum 
 tuorum, &c. . . . Paulus vocari amavit ob tarn magnae insigne victoriae. 
 
 Ap. Aug. Append, Serm. 204.
 
 OT PISIDIA. 201 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 ANTIOCH IN PISIDIJL 
 
 " Kespondebit tibi Evangelica tuba. Doctor Gentium, vas auroum in toto orbe 
 reeplendens." JER. Adv. Pelag, Dial, iii., p. 645. 
 
 HAVING now traversed Cyprus, " Paul and his company" to uso the expres- 
 sion by which St. Luke so briefly intimates that the whole force of the 
 mission was now identified with one man weighed anchor from Paphos f.u- 
 Perga in Patnphylia. Whether they chose Perga as thoir destination in 
 accordance with any preconceived plan, or whether it was a part of " God's 
 unseen Providence by men nicknamed chance," we do not know. It was not 
 easy for an ancient traveller to go exactly in what direction he liked, and ha 
 was obliged, in the circumscribed navigation of those days, to be guided in his 
 movements by the accident of finding vessels which were bound for particular 
 ports. 1 Now between Paphos, the political capital of Cyprus, and Perga, the 
 capital of Pamphylia, there was in that day a constant intercourse, as would 
 probably still be the case between Satalia and the western port of Cyprus but 
 for the dangerous character of the now neglected harbour of Baffa. For Perga 
 then, the missionaries embarked. They sailed into the deep bight of 
 Attaleia, and up the broad, and in those days navigable, stream of the Cesfcrua, 
 and anchored under the cliffs, which were crowned by the acropolis of the 
 bright Greek city and the marble pillars of its celebrated Temple of 
 Artemis, 
 
 But at Porga they made no stay, and thoir visit was only marked by 
 a single but disheartening incident. This was the desertion by John Mark of 
 the mission cause ; " separating from them, ho returned to Jerusalem." The 
 causes which led him thus to look back after he had put his hand to the 
 plough are not mentioned, but it is evident that to the ardent soul of Paul, at 
 any rate, they appezirod blameworthy, for we shall see that he subsequently 
 refused the companionship of one who had shown such deficient resolution. 2 
 It is, however, but too easy to conjecture the mixed motives by which 
 Mark was actuated. He was young. The novelty of the work had worn oif . 
 Its hardships, even under the favourable circumstances in Cyprus, had not 
 been slight. His mother was at Jerusalem, perhaps alono, perhaps exposed to 
 persecution. It may be. too, that the young man saw and resented the growing 
 ascendency of Paul over his cousin Barnabas. And besides all this, Mark, 
 bred up in the very bosom of tho Church at Jerusalem, may lave felt serious 
 misgivings about tho tendency of that liberal theology, that broad 
 universalism of proffered admission into tho Church, which seemed to throw 
 into the background tho immemorial sanctity, not only of tho oral but ovou of 
 the written Law. Such may have been tho yearnings, tho misgivings, 
 the half-unconscious jealousies and resentments which filled his mind, ami 
 
 1 See the chapter on ancient modes of travel in Friedlander, Siltetigesch. Earns. 
 * Acts rv. 38.
 
 202 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 whatever may have been the qualms of conscience which might otherwise 
 have troubled his desertion of the sacred task, these excuses and arguments 
 for doing so must have met with a powerful ally in the circumstances which 
 were evidently before them. 
 
 For as Mark gazed on the mighty chain of Taurus, and remembered that 
 they were now about to penetrate countries of shifting languages, of unsettled 
 government, of semi -barbarous populations, of strangely mingled worships, 
 the brigand fastnesses of Pamphylians, Selgonses, Pisidians, Lycaonians, 
 Isauriaus, Cilicians, Cliti, Homotlanensos, 1 he may not have been sorry to 
 conceal dislike to the task on which he had entered under the plea of 
 filial duty. At the time his defection must have been to Paul, even more 
 thnn to Barnabas, a positive misfortune. Barnabas, though he clung to his 
 friend and fellow-labourer with entire whole-heartedness, must yet have 
 missed the genial brightness, the graphic utterance, the quick spirit of 
 observation with which his cousin relieved the sombre absorption of Paul in 
 his immediate purpose ; and Paul, who ever loved the personal services of 
 younger companions, must have been a little embittered, as daily worries, 
 became more trying in the absence of a vigorous comrade. There must have 
 been in his heart a feeling of indignation against one who forsook them at 
 the very moment when ho could least bo replaced, and when the difficulties 
 which he could so greatly have lightened began to assume their most formid- 
 able shape. 
 
 So Mark left them, and the Apostles at once made their way towards the 
 interior. Although we are not told of any synagogue at Perga, yet, since 
 they preached there on their return journey, there must have been some 
 special reason for their now leaving the place. This reason has been found in 
 the probability that they reached the town towards the middle of spring, 8 
 when the entire population of the cities on the plain and sea-coast are in the 
 habit of moving inland to the yailahs, or, as they would be called in Switzer- 
 land, " aZps," or mountain pastures, which enable them to escape the fierce 
 and malarious heat of the lower regions. 3 It would be useless to preach in 
 Perga at the very time that its main population were deserting it ; and any of 
 the numerous caravans or family-migrations, which wore filling the roads and 
 passes with mules and camels and herds of cattle, would furnish the Apostles 
 with company and protection. Without such escort it would have boon im- 
 prudent, if not impossible, for them to make their way by those dangerous 
 roads where it is probable that the snow-drifts still lay in many places, and 
 they might often find the bridges shattered and swept away by tho sudden 
 spates of rushing streams. 
 
 The few modern travellers who have visited these parts of Asia Minor 
 
 1 Strabo, xii. 6, 7. See Lewin, 1. 130, sqq. 
 
 2 Con. and Howson, i. 177, who quote Spratt and Forbes, Travels in Lycia, i. 43, 242, 
 213 ; Fellowes, Lycia, 238. 
 
 * A striking description of snch a migration among the Kirghiz Tartars may be found 
 In Mr. Atkinson's Travels.
 
 ANTIOCH IN PISIDLA. 208 
 
 have furnished us with minute and picturesque descriptions of the abrupt 
 stone-paved ascents; the sarcophagi and sculptured tombs among the pro- 
 jecting rocks ; the narrowing valleys through which the rivers descend, and 
 over which frown precipices perforated with many caves ; the sudden bursts 
 of magnificent prospect in which you gaze " from the rocky stops of the 
 throne of winter upon the rich and verdant plain of summer, with the 
 blue sea in the distance ; " the constant changes of climate ; the zones of 
 vegetation through which the traveller ascends ; the gleam of numberless 
 cascades caught hero and there amid the dark pine groves that clothe the 
 lower slopes ; the thickets of pomegranate and oleander that mantle the river- 
 beds ; the wild flowers that enamel the grass with their rich inlay ; the 
 countless ilocks of cattle grazing over pastures whose interminable expanses 
 are only broken by the goat's-hair huts of the shepherd, made to this day of 
 the same material as that by the manufacture of which St. Paul earned his 
 daily bread. And when the traveller has emerged on the vast central plateau 
 of Asia Minor they describe the enchanting beauty of the fresh and salt water 
 lakes by which the road often runs for miles ; the tortoises that sun them- 
 selves in the shallow pools ; the flights of wild swans which now fill the air 
 with rushing wings, and now " ruffle their pure cold plumes " upon the 
 waters ; the storks that stand for hours patiently fishing in the swampy pools. 
 Such must have been the sights which everywhere greeted the eyes of Paul 
 and Barnabas as they made their way from Perga to the Pisidian Antioch. 
 They would have filled a modern missionary with rapture, and the feelings of 
 gratitude and adoi'ation with which a Martyn or a Heber would have " climbed 
 by these sunbeams to the Father of Lights " would have gone far to help 
 them in the endurance of their hard and perilous journeys. Mungo Park, in 
 a touching passage, has described how his soul, fainting within him to the 
 very point of death, was revived by seeing amid the scant herbage of the 
 desert a single tuft of emerald moss, with its delicate filaments and amber 
 spores; and the journals of those whose feet in recent days have been 
 beautiful upon the mountains over which they carried the message of peace, 
 abound in passages delightfully descriptive of the scenes through which they 
 passed, and which they regarded as aisle after aisle iu the magnificent temple 
 of the one true God. But, as wo have already noticed, of no such feeling is 
 there a single trace in the writings of the Apostle or of his historian. The 
 love of natural scenery, which to moderns is a source of delight so continuous 
 and so intense, was little known to the ancients in general, and in spite 
 of a few poetic exceptions, was known perhaps to the Semites of that ago 
 least of all. 1 How often did Paul climb the mountain passes of the Taurus ; 
 how often had ho seen Olympus 
 
 " Soaring snow-clad through its native sky ;" 
 how often had he passed on foot by " the great rivers that move like God's 
 
 1 St. Paul was eminently a homo desideriorum ; a man who, like all the beat 
 lived in the hopes of the future (Kom. riii. 24 ; xv. 4; Tit. ii. 13, &c.).
 
 204 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 eternity ; " how often had his barque furrowed the blue waters of the 
 among those 
 
 " Sprinkled isles, 
 
 Lily on lily, which o'erlace the sea, 
 
 And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps Greece ! " 
 
 But all these scenes of glory and loveliness left no impression upon his mind, 
 or have at least left no trace upon his page. 1 We might pity the loss which 
 he thus suffered, and regret the ineffectualness of a source of consolation 
 which would otherwise have been ever at hand, were it not that to St. Paul 
 such consolations were needless. The soul that lived in heaven, 2 the thoughts 
 which were full of immortality, the conviction that the Lord was at hand, the 
 yearning for the souls for which Clirist died made up to him for all besides. 
 God would have granted all other consolations had he needed them ; but the 
 steps which were ever on the golden streets of the New Jerusalem trod heed- 
 lessly over the volcanic soil of a world treasured up with the stores of fire which 
 should hereafter reduce it to ashes. 3 The goblet which was full of the new 
 wine of the kingdom of heaven had no room in it for the fruit of the vine of 
 even those earthly pleasures which are of all others the most innocent, the 
 most universal, and the most blest. 
 
 Nor must we fail to see that there was an advantage as well as a disadvan- 
 tage in this absorption. If St. Paul never alludes to the transcendent beauties 
 of the lands through which ho travelled, so neither does one word escape him 
 about the recurrent annoyances, the perpetual minor discomforts and vex- 
 ations of travel. The journals of modern wanderers tell us of the drenching 
 rains, the glaring heats, the terrible fatigues, the incessant publicity, tho stings 
 of insects, tho blinding storms of dust, the trying changes of season, the 
 scarcity and badness of provisions. But to Paul all these trivial burdens, 
 which often, nevertheless, require more heroism for their patient endurance 
 than those more serious perils which summon up all our fortitude for their 
 conquest or resistance, were as nothing. He felt the tedium and the miseries 
 of travel as little as he cared for its rewards. All these things had no bearing 
 on his main purpose ; they belonged to the indifferent things of life. 
 
 And so the Apostles made their way up the valley of the Oestrus, passed 
 along the eastern shore of tho large and beautiful Like Eyerdir, and af tor a 
 journey of some forty leagues, which probably occupied about a week, they 
 arrived at the flourishing commercial town of Antioch in Pisidia, or Autiochia 
 Caesarea. Wo learn from Strabo that it had been founded by the Magnetos, 
 re-founded by Seleucus, and subsequently made a Eoinan colony, with free 
 municipal government, by Augustus. The centrality of its position on roads 
 
 1 There are some excellent remarks on this subject in Friedliinder, Sittcn<jcsch> 
 vii. 5, 3. He shows that the ancients rather noticed details than general elfccts. They 
 never allude to twilight colours, or the blue of distant hills, or aerial perspective. 
 Landscape painting, the culture of exotic plants, and the poetry of natural history have 
 developed those feelings in the moderns (Humboldt's Cosmos, ii.). 
 
 s Phil. iii. 20 ; Eph. ii. 6, &c. 2 Pet. iii. 7.
 
 ANTIOCH IN PISIDIA. 205 
 
 which communicated southwards with Perga and Attaleia, westwards with 
 Apamea, northwards with tho great towns of Galatia, and eastwards with 
 Iconium and the Cilician gates, made it a great commercial emporium for the 
 trade of Asia Minor in wood, oil, skins, goat's hair, and Angola wool. Its 
 triio position for- it had long been confused with Ak-sher, tho ancient Philo- 
 raclium was discovered by Mr. Arundell in 1833. 1 Conspicuous among its 
 ruins are the remains of a noble aqueduct, which shows its former importance. 
 Its coins are chiefly remarkable for the prominence given on the one hand to 
 its colonial privileges, and on the other to its very ancient worship of the moon 
 as a masculine divinity under the title of Men Archaios. This worship had in 
 former days been very flourishing, and the temple of Men had been thronged 
 with Hieroduli, who lived on its estates and revenues. Strabo tells us that, 
 some seventy years before this time, on the death of King Amyntas, to whom 
 Pisidia had been assigned by Mark Antony, this temple had been abolished ; 
 but though tho worship may have been entirely shorn of its ancient splendour, 
 it probably still lingered among tho ignorant and aboriginal population. 
 
 But the message of the Apostles was not in the first instance addressed to 
 the native Pisiilians, nor to the Greeks, who formed the second stratiiin of the 
 population, nor to the Romans, who were the latest occupants, but primarily to 
 the Jews who had come thither with the stream of Latin immigration, which 
 secured them equal privileges with the other inhabitants. Doubtless the first 
 care of the Apostles and this was the work in which Mark might have been 
 specially useful was to repair to the " strangers' rooms " attached to ther 
 synagogue, and then to find convenient lodgings in the Jews' quarter, and to 
 provide means of securing a sale for the cilicium, by the weaving of which 
 Paul honourably lived. The trade only occupied his hands, without interrupt- 
 ing either his meditations or his speech, and we may reasonably suppose that 
 not a few of the converts who loved him best, were won rather by the teach- 
 ing and conversations of the quiet rooms where he sat busily at work, than by 
 the more tumultuous and interrupted harangues in the public synagogues. 
 
 But the mission of Paul and Barnabas was not meant for the few alone. 
 They always made a point of visiting the synagogue on the Sabbath Day, and 
 seizing any opportunity that offered itself to address the congregation. The 
 visit to Antioch in Pisidia is rendered interesting by the scenes which led to 
 tho first sermon of St. Paul of which the record has been preserved. 
 
 The town possessed but a single synagogue, which must, therefore, have 
 been a Large one. The arrangements were no doubt almost identical with 
 those which exist in the present day throughout the East. As they entered 
 the low, square, unadorned building, differing from Gentile places of worship 
 by its total absence of interior sculpture, they would see on one side the lattice- 
 work partition, behind which eat a crowd of veiled and silent women. In front 
 of these would be the reader's desk, and in its immediate neighbourhood, 
 
 1 It is near the insignificant modern town of Jalobatz, and its identity is rendered 
 certain by coins and inscriptions. (See Arundell, Asia Mi'iwr, ch. xii. ; Hamilton, 
 Rcteaarche* in Asia Minor, i., ch. xxrii. ; in Con. and Hows. i. 182.)
 
 206 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL* 
 
 facing the rest of the congregation, those chief seats which Rabbis and 
 Pharisees were so eager to secure. The Killeh, or sacred direction towards 
 which all prayer was offered, was Jerusalem ; and on that side would be the 
 curtain, behind which was the ark containing the sacred rolls. 1 Paul, as a 
 former Sanhedrist, aud Barnabas, as a Levite, and both of them as men of 
 superior Jewish education, might fairly have claimed to sit in the chairs or 
 benches set apart for the elders. But perhaps they had been told what their 
 Lord had said on the subject, and took their seats among the ordinary wor- 
 shippers. 2 
 
 Each as he entered covered his head with his tallith, and the prayers 
 began. They were read by the Sheliach or " apostle of the congregation, 3 who 
 stood among the standing congregation. The language employed was pro- 
 bably Greek. Hebrew had long been to the Jews a learned language, under- 
 stood only by the few, and in remote places, like Antioch of Pisidia, known 
 possibly to only one or two. In spite of the stiff conservatism of a few 
 Rabbis, the Jews as a nation had the good sense to see that it would be useless 
 to utter prayers unless they were " understanded of the people." * After the 
 prayers followed the First Lesson, or Parashah, and this, owing to the sanctity 
 which the Jews attached to the very sounds and letters of Scripture, was read 
 in Hebrew, but was translated or paraphrased verse by verso by the fifeturge- 
 man, or interpreter. The Chazzdn, or clerk of the synagogue, took the 
 Thorah-roU from the ark, and handed it to the reader. By the side of the 
 reader stood the interpreter, unless he performed that function for himself, aa 
 could be easily done, since the Septuagint version was now universally dis- 
 seminated. After the Parasliah, was read the short Haphtarah, or what we 
 should call the Second Lesson, from the Prophets, the translation into the 
 vernacular being given at the end of every three verses. After this followed 
 the Midrash, the exposition or sermon. It was not delivered by one set 
 minister, but, as at the present day any distinguished stranger who happens 
 to be present is asked by way of compliment to read the TJiorah, so in those 
 days the Bosh ha-Keneseth might ask any one to preach who seemed likely to 
 do so with profit to the worshippers. 6 
 
 Accordingly on this occasion when the Haphtarah and Parashah were 
 ended, the Batlanim the " men of leisure " who managed the affairs of 
 the synagogue, and corresponded to our churchwardens sent the Chazzdn 
 to ask the strangers if they had any word of exhortation to the people. 
 Some rumour that they were preachers of a new and remarkable doctrine 
 must already have spread in the little Jewish community, and it was evidently 
 
 3 Matt, xxiii. 6, -pu>TOKo8eJpi<u, VTinp. Philo makes frequent allusions to the order and 
 arrangements of synagogue- worship at this period. 
 
 13 rrto. 4 BeracMtk, f . 8, 1 ; Sola, f. 21, 1. 
 
 * irpoe\9uv Si o irpt<rf)vTa.Tot Ktu. ruv Joyfiarw </iiripoTaTof JiaAryTai (Philo, Quod OffMV 
 Prob. 12). Dr. Frankl, in his Jews in the East, tells us that he was constantly called 
 upon to perform this function. Full details of synagogue worship may be found in 
 Maimonides, Jad Hachezaka (Hilch. Tephil. viii. 1012), and s. T. Haphtarah and 
 Synagogue In Kitto's Cyclopadia, by Dr. Ginsburg.
 
 ANTIOCH IN PISIDIA. 207 
 
 expected that thoy would be called upon. Paul instantly accepted the invi- 
 tation. 1 Usually a Jewish preacher sat down during the delivery of hia 
 sermon, 1 as is freely doue by Roman Catholics abroad ; but Paul, Instead of 
 going to the pulpit, seems merely to have risen in his place, and with uplifted 
 arm and beckoning finger 3 in the attitude of one who, however much ho 
 may sometimes have been oppressed by nervous hesitancy, is proved by the 
 addresses wliich have been preserved to us, to have been in moments of 
 emotion and excitement a bold orator he spoke to the expectant throng. 
 
 The sermon in most instances, as in the case of our Lord's address at 
 Nazareth, would naturally take the form of a Midrash on what tho congre- 
 gation had just heard in one or other of tho two lessons. Such seems to 
 have been the line taken by St. Paul in this his first recorded sermon. The 
 occurrence of two words in this brief address, of which one is a most un- 
 usual form, 4 and the other is employed in a most unusual meaning, 5 
 and the fact that these two words are found respectively in the first of 
 Deuteronomy and the first of Isaiah, combined with the circumstance that 
 tho historical part of St. Paul's sermon turns on the subject alluded to iu 
 the first of these chapters, and the promise of free remission is directly 
 suggested by the other, would make it extremely probable that those were 
 the two chapters which he had just heard road. His sermon in fact, or rather 
 the heads of it, wliich can alone be given in tho brief summary of St. Luke, 6 
 is exactly the kind of masterly combination and application of these two 
 Scripture lessons of the day which we should expect from such a preacher. 
 And when turning to the Jewish Lectionary, and bearing in mind its ex- 
 treme antiquity, we find that these two very lessons are combined as tho 
 Parashah and Haphtarah of the same Sabbath, we see an almost convincing 
 proof that those were the two lessons which had been read on that Sabbath 
 Day in the synagogue of Antioch more than 1,800 years ago. 7 Here agaiu 
 we find another minute and most unsuspected trace of the close faithfulness 
 of St. Luke's narrative, as well as an incidental proof that St. Paul spoke 
 in Greek. The latter point, however, hardly needs proof. Greek was at 
 that time the language of the civilised world to an extent far greater than 
 
 1 We can hardly imagine that he showed the feigned reluctance inculcated by tho 
 r&bbis (Scrachdtk, 34, 1). 
 
 2 Luke iv. 20. Cf . Acts xii. 17 ; xxi. 40 ; xxvi. 1. 
 
 4 Acts xiii. 18, tTpo$o$&pi)<rtv (A, 0, E), "carried them as a man carries his little son." 
 LXX., Deut. i. 31 ; cf. Ex. xix. 4 ; Isa. Ixiii. 9 ; Am. ii. 10, &c. He is not here 
 reproaching them, but only speaking of God's mercy to them. The word also occurs in 
 2 Mace, vii. 27. 
 
 5 Acts xiii. 17, ity<o<rv, in the sense of " he brought them up " (Isa. 1. 2) ; whereas 
 elsewhere it means "elevated "or "raised up" (Luke i. 52; 2 Cor. xi. 7). In verso 10 
 he uses K^eK.\i\pov&^<rev (A, A, B, 0, D, E, G, H, &c.) in the rare sense of " divided sis 
 an inheritance " (where our text follows the correction, KaTeK^poSo-rria-ev), as in Deut. i. 38. 
 
 6 It should not be forgotten that no single address of St. Paul in the Acts would take 
 more than five minutes in delivery. 
 
 7 They are read on the Sabbath which, from the first word of the chapter in Isaiah, is 
 called the Sabbath Hazon. In the present list of Jewish lessons, Deut. i. iii. 22 and 
 Isa. i. 122, stand forty-fourth in order tinder the Masoretic title of onm. This brilliant 
 conjecture is due to EengeL
 
 208 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 French is the common language of tho Continent. It is quite certain that 
 all the Jews would have understood it; it is very doubtful whether more 
 than a few of them would have understood the Pisuliau dialect ; it is to the 
 last degree improbable that Paul knew anything of Pisidiau ; and that he 
 suddenly acquired it by the gift of tongues, can only be regarded as an 
 exploded fancy due to an erroneous interpretation. 
 
 St. Paul's sermon is not only interesting as a sign of the more or less 
 extemporaneous tact with which he utilised the scriptural impressions which 
 were hist and freshest in the minds of his audience, but far more as a 
 specimen of the facts and arguments which he urged in his first addresses 
 to mixed congregations of Jews and Proselytes. The numerous and exclu- 
 sively Pauline expressions 1 in which it abounds, show that either notes of it 
 must have been preserved by some Antiochene Christian, or that he must 
 himself have furnished an outline of it to St. Luke. 2 It is further important 
 as an indication that even at this early period of his career Paul had been led 
 by the Spirit of God, if not to the full comprehension, at least to the germ, 
 of those truths which he afterwards developed with such magnificent force 
 and overwhelming earnestness. The doctrine of justification by faith, and of 
 the inutility of the works of the law to procure remission of skis, lie clearly 
 involved in this brief but striking sermon, which also gives us some insight 
 into Paul's method of applying Scripture ; into his adoption of the current 
 chronology of his nation ; 3 and, lastly, into the effects which had been pro- 
 
 1 See (in tho Greek) Acts xiii. 25 compared with xx. 24, 2 Tim. iv. 7 ; 26 with xx. 82 ; 
 27 with xxiv. 21 ; 39 with Rom. vi. 7 ; 39 with Rom. v. 9, Gal. iii. 11, and others, in 
 Alford's references. Compare, too, the thoughts and expressions of 33, 34 with Rom. i. 4, 
 ri. 9 ; and 39 with Rom. viii. 3, Gal. iii. 11. 
 
 2 Perhaps a better hypothesis is that in general outline the three main sections of it 
 (Acts xiii. 1G 22, 2331, 3241) may have been often repeated. (Ewald, vi. 658.) 
 
 8 For instance, in verse 20 he makes the period of the Judges last 450 years. It is 
 true that here the best uncial MSS. transpose the Ireo-i TTpaKo<r<oif iea.1 irevTqKoy-ra. to the 
 previous verse (N, A, B, G, and the Coptic, Sahidic, and Armenian versions). Eat this 
 is exactly one of the instances in which the "paradiplomatic" evidence entirely outweighs 
 that of the MSS. For the reading of the text is found in K, G, II, and many other 
 MSS. ; and while we see an obvious reason why it should have been altered, we see none 
 v r hy the other reading should have been tampered with. The case stands thus. The 
 chronology which gives a period of 450 years to the Judges is in direct contradiction to 
 1 Kings vi. 1, which makes the fourth year of Solomon's reign fall in the 480th year 
 after the Exodus. Why, then, do modern editors adopt it in spite of the oldest 
 uncials? Not, as Bishop Wordsworth says, out of "arbitrary caprice," or "to gratify 
 a morbid appetite of scepticism by contradictions invented by itself, and imputed 
 to Holy "Writ," or "an inordinate love of discovering discrepancies in Holy Scrip- 
 ture ; " but for reasons, of which he must surely have been aware viz., because 
 U) the same erroneous chronology is also found in Josephus (Antt. viii. 3, 1, and 
 potentially in xx. 10, 1), and is, therefore, obviously the current one among the 
 Jews; and was current (2) because it is the exact period given by the addition of 
 the vague and often synchronous periods given in the Book of Judyes itself. And (3) even 
 if we accept the corrected reading which can only be done in the teeth of the rule, 
 " Facilion lectioni praestat ardua" we only create fresh chronological difficulties. 
 On such subjects the knowledge of St. Paul and the Apostles never professes to be mora 
 than the knowledge of their time. To attribute to them a miraculous superiority to the 
 notions of their day in subjects within tho reach of man's unaided research, is an error 
 which all tho greatest modern theologians have rightly repudiated as pregnant with 
 mischief. Similarly, in verse 33, tv T<J> rp^ry t^oXp, though only found in D, is un-
 
 ANTIOCH IK FISIDIA. 209 
 
 daced upon his mind by the speeches he had hoard from St. Peter and from 
 St. Stephen. From the latter of these he borrows his use of what may be 
 called the historic method; from the former, the remarkable Messianic 
 argument for the Resurrection which he founds on a passage in the Second 
 Psalm. 1 
 
 Beginning with a courteous address to the Jews and Proselytes, and 
 bespeaking their earnest attention, he touched first on that providence of God 
 in the history of Israel of which they had just been reminded in the Haphtarah. 
 He had chosen them, had nurtured them in Egypt, had delivered them from its 
 bondage, had carried them like a nursing father in the wilderness, had driven 
 out seven nations of Canaan before them, had governed them by judges for 
 450 years, and then for forty years, as tradition said, had granted them for 
 their king one whom with an allusion to his own name and tribe which is 
 inimitably natural he calls " Saul, the son of Kish, of the tribe of 
 Benjamin." Then fusing three separate passages of scriptural encomium oik 
 David into one general quotation (13-22) he announces the central truth which 
 it was his mission to preach : that, of David's seed, God had raised up accord- 
 ing to His promise One who, as His very name signified, was a Saviour, and to 
 whom the groat acknowledged prophet, John the Baptist, had borne direct 
 witness. It was true that the rulers of Jerusalem and on this painful side of 
 the subject he dwells but lightly had, less from deliberate wickedness than 
 from ignorance, put Him to death, thereby fulfilling the direct prophecies of 
 Scripture. But and this was the great fact on which ho relied to remove the 
 terrible offence of the Cross GOD HAD EAISED HIM FKOM THE DEAD (23-31). 
 This was an historic objective fact, to which, as a fact tested by their living 
 senses, many could bear witness. And lest they should hesitate about this 
 testimony, he proceeded to show that it was in accordance with all those pro- 
 phecies which had been for centuries tho most inspiring part of their nation's 
 faith. The Resurrection to which they testified was the highest fulfilment of 
 the Psalm in which God had addressed David as His son. And there were 
 two special passages which foreshadowed this groat truth. One was in Isaiah, 
 where the Prophet L;td promised to God's true children tho holy, the sure, 
 mercies of David; tho other was that on which St. Peter had dwelt in his 
 speech at Pentecost the confident hope expressed in that Michtain or " Golden 
 Psalm " that God would not leave his eoul in hell, or suffer His holy one to 
 see corruption. More must have been involved in that yearning conviction 
 than could possibly all'oct David himself. He had died, he had seen corrup- 
 tion ; but He of the seed of David whom God had raised of Him alone was 
 it true that His soul was not left in the unseen world, and His flesh had not 
 seen corruption. What they had to preach, then, was forgiveness of sins 
 
 doubtedly the right reading, as against Snrtpsf, which is found in M and the other uncials, 
 which is simply a correction, because the quotation is from Psalm ii. 7 ; and it was over- 
 looked that among the Jews in St. Paul's time the Second Psalm was regarded as tht 
 First, the First being " an introduction to the Psalter." 
 
 1 Compare Acts xiii. 3537 with St. Peter's speech in Acts ii. 87. 
 
 8
 
 210 THE LIFfi AltD WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 through Him. In the Mosaic Law and once more Paul touched but lightly, 
 and in language least likely to cause offence, upon this dangerous ground- 
 remission of sins was not to be found ; but there was not only remission, but 
 justification, for all who believed in Jesus. A quotation from Ilabakkuk 
 formed the striking conclusion of a sermon which had been thus weighted with 
 awful truths and startling testimony. It warned them that however startling 
 that testimony might be, yet if they disbelieved it as their fathers had dis- 
 believed the threat of Chaldean retribution, the contempt of insolent derision 
 might bo followed by the astonishment of annihilating doom (32-41). 1 
 
 Thus, from the standpoint of those who heard him commenting on the 
 passages which had jast sounded in their ears appealing to the prophecies in 
 which they believed quoting, or alluding to, the Scriptures which they held 
 so sacrod relying on the history to which they clung with such fond affection, 
 and pouring his flood of light on those " dark speeches upon the harp " which 
 had hitherto wanted their true explanation thus mingling courtesy and warn- 
 ing, the promises of the past and their fulfilment in the present thus drowning 
 the dark horror which lay in the thought of a crucified Messiah in the dawning 
 light of His resurrection did St. Paul weave together argument, appeal, and 
 testimony to convince them of the new and mighty hope which he proffered, 
 and to foreshadow that which was so difficult for them to accept the doing 
 away of the old as that which, having received its divine fulfilment, must now 
 be regarded as ineffectual symbol and obsolete shadow, that in Christ all things 
 might become new." 
 
 It was not surprising that a discourse so powerful should produce a deep 
 effect. Even the Jews were profoundly impressed. As they streamed out of 
 the synagogue, Jew and Gentile alike 3 begged that the same topics might be 
 dwelt on in the discourse of the next Sabbath;* and after the entire breaking 
 up of the congregation, many both of the Jews and of the Proselytes of the 
 Gate followed Paul and Barnabas for the purpose of further inquiry and con- 
 versation. Both at that time and during the week the Apostles did all they 
 could to widen the knowledge of these inquirers, and to confirm their nascent 
 faith. 6 Meanwhile the tidings of the great sermon spread through the city. 
 
 i .1 j ]. i ,\-j* it .1,1 j... j j.i > r.i,tt null" rill I i.|<l'',l Ii. 
 
 1 Acts xiil. 41, "ye despfsers " corresponds to " among the heathen " in the original of 
 Hab. i. 5, because the LXX. which St. 1'aul here quotes seems to have read O'"uia 
 (j)ogSdtm), " arrogantes," for D'jaa (baffgotm), by one of the numberless instances of variant 
 readings in the Hebrew of which the Greek version affords so striking a proof. 
 
 2 Paul speaks slightingly of his own eloquence ; but we see by the recorded specimens 
 of his sermons to barbarians in Pisidia, to philosophers at Athens, and to Jews at Jeru- 
 salem, how powerful was his method ; and we are sure that there must also have been 
 the " vividus vultus, vividae manus, vividi oculi, denique omnia vivida." 
 
 8 Acts xiii. 42. The E. V. has "the Gentiles besought ;" but TO. flnj is an idle gloss, 
 not found in M, A, B, O, D, E, &c. 
 
 4 i TO jTafv <ra/3/3o.Toi'. The use of puTav for "next following" has puzzled commen- 
 tators, and led them to such erroneous renderings as " for the intervening week ; " but it 
 is found in late Greek (Jos. B. J. v. 4, 2 ; c. Ap. i. 21 ; Plut. Inst. Lac. 42), and la 
 mere extension of the classical Greek idiom. (See my Brief Greek Syntax, 82, iv.) 
 
 * Acts xiii. 43, " urged them to abide by the grace of God ; " of. xx. 24. The expret- 
 Ion ii thoroughly Pauline. (1 Cor. xv. 10 ; 2 Cor. vi. 1, &o.)
 
 ANTIOCH IN PISIDIA. 211 
 
 On the following Sabbath a vast crowd, of all ranks, nationalities, and classes, 
 thronged the doors of the synagogue. Immediately the haughty exclusivenc.ss 
 of the Jews took the alarm. They wore jealous that a single address of this 
 dubious stranger, with his suspicious innovations, should have produced a 
 greater effect than their years of prosolytism. They wore indignant that ono 
 who scorned to have suddenly dropped down among them from the snows of 
 Taurus with an astonishing gospel should, at a touch, thrill every heart with 
 the electric sympathy of love, and achieve more by one message of free salva- 
 tion than they had achieved in a century by raising a prickly hedge around the 
 exclusive sanctity of their Law. Paul again the chief speaker no longer 
 met with attentive and eager listeners ; he was interrupted again and again by 
 flat contradiction and injurious taunts. 1 At last both the Apostles saw that 
 the time was come to put an end to the scene, and to cease a form of ministra- 
 tion which only led to excited recriminations. Summoning up all their courage 
 and few acts are more courageous than the unflinching announcement of a 
 most distasteful intention to an infuriated audience they exclaimed that now 
 they had done their duty, and discharged their consciences towards their own 
 countrymen. They had made to them the offer of eternal life, and that offer 
 had been disdainfully repudiated.* " Lo ! you may be astonished and indig- 
 nant, but now we turn to the Gentiles. In doing so we do but fulfil the 
 prophecy of Isaiah, who said of our Lord that He was ordained for a Light of 
 the Gentiles, and for salvation to the ends of the earth." 
 
 Gladly and gratefully did the Gentiles welcome the mission which now 
 to them exclusively made free offer of all, and more than all, the blessings 
 of Judaism without its burdens. All who, by the grace of God, decided to 
 range themselves in the ranks of those who desired eternal life 3 accepted the 
 faith. More and more widely* the word of the Lord began to spread. But 
 the Jews were too powerful to bo easily defeated. They counted among 
 their proselytes a large number of women, of whom some were of high 
 rank. 6 Their commercial ability had also secured them friends among 
 the leading people of the city, who were the municipal Roman authorities. 
 Tolerant of every legalised religion, the Romans had a profound distaste 
 for religious embroilments, and so long as the Jews behaved peaceably, were 
 quite willing to afford them protection. Knowing that all had gone smoothly 
 
 l Acts xiii. 45, 
 
 * Acts xiii. 46, OVK ifc'ovs Kpivtrt iavrovs r>} alavCov 
 
 1 So-oi 7t<rav TtTaVfieVoi e!s f. at. Those only will find in this expression a hard Calvinism 
 who overlook the half-middle visage of the participle which is found in xx. 13 (cf. ii. 47) 
 and in Philo. In a Calvinistic sense, moreover, the words are in direct antinomy with 
 xiii. 46. The E.V. followed Tyndale, but the Rhemish "pre-ordained" ia even stronger. 
 The close juxtaposition of the two phrases shows the danger of building unscriptural 
 ystems on the altered perspective of isolated expressions. 
 
 4 Acts xiii. 49, 8t<4>'p<ro. 
 
 * Jos. B. J. iL 20, 2 ; cf. Strab. vil. 2 ; Z*arm rqt JtwrtAujiovtot opxrryodf <MOVT<U rit 
 ywaocat ; cf. Juv. Sat. vi 542. In Ps. Ixviii. 11, " The Lord gave the word : great waa 
 the company of the preachers" (lit. "the female messengers," *vayyAi<jTj>i<M, LXX.), 
 fantastic commentators of the literalist type find In the fact that nVv^i^n u feminine, ao 
 indication of the prominent agency of women In the spread of the Gospel.
 
 212 THE LIFX AND WORK OF ST. PATH. 
 
 till those new-comers had appeared, they were readily induced to look on 
 them with dislike, especially since they were viewed with disfavour by the 
 ladies of their families. 1 They joined in the clamour against the Apostles, 
 and succeeded in getting them banished out of their boundaries. The Apostles 
 shook off their feet the deep dust of the parched roads in testimony against 
 them,* and passed on to Iconium, where they would bo under a different 
 jurisdiction. 3 But the departure did not destroy the infant Church which 
 they had founded. It might have been expected that they would leave 
 gloom and despondency among their discouraged converts ; but it was not 
 so. They left behind them the joy of a new hope, the inspiration of a new- 
 faith, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those who had 
 learnt of the heavenly promise. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 *HE CLOSE OF THE JOURNEY. 
 
 u.-k. 
 'ATJOTO* y&p Avitaovft &s teal 'A.piffrort\ri5 (ictprvpti. ScHOL. tn Honi- 11. iv. 88. 
 
 " WHEN they persecute you in this city, flee ye to another," our Lord had 
 said to His twelve Apostles when He sent them forth as lambs among 
 wolves. 4 Expelled from Antioch, 5 the Apostles obeyed this injunction. They 
 might have crossed the Paroreian range to Philomelium, and so have made 
 t heir way westwards to Synnada and the Phrygian cities, or to Colossoa and 
 Laodicea. What circumstances determined their course we cannot tell, bnt 
 they kept to the south of the Pai'oreia, and, following a well- traversed road, 
 made their way to the pleasant city of Iconium. For a distance of about sixty 
 miles the road runs south-eastwards over bleak plains, scoured by wild asses 
 r:nd grazed 1-y countless hnrds of sheep, until it reaches the green oasis on 
 which stands the city of Iconinm. 6 It is the city so famous through the 
 Lliddle Ages, iinder the name of Konieh, as the capital of the Sultans of Roum, 
 ad the scene of the romantic siege by Godfrey of Bouillon. Here, on the 
 edge of an interminable steppe, and nearly encircled by snow-clad .hills, they 
 bad entered the district of Lycaonia, and found themselves in the capital city 
 of an independent tetrarchy. The diversity of political governments which at 
 this time prevailed in Asia Minor was so far an advantage to the Apostles, 
 
 1 avrai 8 r.ai rovt nrJpas irpoKaXovrrai (Strabo, I.e.). For the indulgence of the Romans 
 t-j wards the Jews in the provinces, Kenan refers to Jos. Antt, xiv. 10, 11 ; xvi. 6, 2, 
 4,6.7; Cic. pro Flacco, 28, &o. 
 
 * Matt. x. 14. 
 
 3 Antioch was a Roman colony, under the general jurisdiction of the Propraetor of 
 Gtvlatia. Iconium was under a local tetrarch. (Plin. H. N. v. 27.) 
 
 4 Matt. x. 25. 5 Acts xiii. 61, ittp*\ov wrote. 
 
 6 Strabo, xii. 6. Mentioned in Xen. Anab. i. 2, 19 ; Cic. ad Fam, Hi. 8 ; v. 20 j XT. ^ 
 &G lying &i the intersection of important roads between Ephesus and Tarsus, &c-
 
 XHS CLOSE OP THE JOUBNBY, 213 
 
 that it rendered them more able to escape from one jurisdiction to another. 
 Tlieir ejection from Antioch must have received the sanction of the colonial 
 authorities, who were under the Propraetor of Galatia ; but at Iconiuin they 
 were beyond the Propraetor's province, in a district which, in the reign of 
 Augustus, belonged to the robber-chief Amyntas, and was still an independent 
 tetrarchy of fourteen towns. 1 
 
 Doubtless, as at Antioch, their first care would be to secure a lodging among 
 their fellow-countrymen, and the means of earning their daily subsistence. On 
 the Sabbath they entered as usual the one synagogue which sufficed the Jewish 
 population. Invitations to speak were at first never wanting, and they preached 
 with a fervour which won many converts both among Jews and proselytes. 
 TkeBatlanim, indeed, and the Ruler of the Synagogue appear to have been 
 against them, but at first thoir opposition was in some way obviated. 8 Soim? 
 cf the Jews, however, stirred up the minds of tha .Gentiles against them. 3 
 Over the Proselytes of the Gate the Apostles would be likely to gain a strong 
 influence. It would not be easy to shake their interest in such teaching, or their 
 gratitude to those who were sacrificing all that made life dear to their desire 
 to proclaim it. But when Jewish indignation waa kindled, when the synagogue 
 became the weekly scene of furioua contentions, 4 it would be easy enough to 
 persuade the Gentile inhabitants of tho city that these emissaries, who had 
 already been ejected from Antioch, were dangerous incendiaries, who every- 
 where disturbed the peace of cities. In spite, however, of these gathering 
 storms tho Apostles held their ground, and their courage was supported by the 
 evident blessing which was attending their labour. So long as they wore able 
 not ouly to sway the souk of their auditors, but to testify the power of their 
 
 1 Plin. N.II. v. 25. Some doubt seems to rest on this, from tho existence of a com 
 of the reign of Nero in which it is called Claudiconium, and of a coin of Gallienus in 
 which it is called a colony ; but the adoption of the name of Claudius may have been 
 gratuitous flattery, and the privilege conceded long afterwards. 
 
 2 Although not authentic, there may be some basis of tradition in the reading of I> 
 and (in part) Syr. marg., ol it dpxisrwvoywyoi rdv 'lovSaitw KO.\ o opxoire? nji owaywyrjs cmryayw 
 fSrrolt uoyy.ci- tcara riav tmaliav . . . . 6 ( xvpios e'j>KCV ra^u etpiji/i;:'. 
 
 3 This seems to be suggested by the contrast of 'EAAr^i/ in verse 1 witheflviy in verse 2. 
 
 4 Beuan compares the journey of the Apostles from Ghetto to Ghetto to those of the 
 Arab Ibn Batoutah, and the mediaeval traveller Benjamin of Tudela. A more recent 
 analogy may be found in Dr. Frankl's Jews in the Hast. The reception of these Christian 
 teachers by remote communities of Jews has been exactly reproduced in modem times by 
 the bursts of infuriated curses, excommunications, mobs, and stone-throwings with which 
 modem Jews have received missionaries in some of their larger Moldavian communities. 
 Uere is the description of one such scene by a missionary : " Fearful excommunications 
 were issued in the synagogue, pronouncing most terrible judgments on any Jew holding 
 communication with us ; or who, on receiving any of our publications, did not at once 
 consign them to the flames. The stir and commotion were so great that I and my brother 
 missionaries were obliged to hold a consultation, whether we should face the opposition 
 or fly from the town. "We resolved to remain and face the danger in the name of God, 
 and the next day being Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, we went out with a stock of our 
 publication*. When we got near the synagogue we were driven away by a yelling, cursiu .;, 
 blaspheming crowd, who literally darkened the air with the stones they threw at us. 
 We were in the greatest danger of being killed. Ultimately, however, we faced them, 
 and by dint of argument and remonstrance gained a hearing." (Speech oj the Jtev. M. 
 WolterJberg at Salisbury, August 8, 1876.)
 
 214 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 mission by signs and wonders, they folk that it was not tho time to yield to 
 opposition. Their stay, therefore, was prolonged, and the whole population of 
 the city was split into two factions the one consisting of their enemies, the 
 other of their supporters. At length the spirit of faction grow so hot that the 
 leaders of the hostile party of Jews and Gentiles made a plot to murder 
 the Apostles. 1 Of this they got timely notice, and once more took flight. 
 Leaving the totrarchy of Iconium, they still pursued the great main road, and 
 made their way some forty miles into the district of Antiochus IV., King of 
 Commagene, and to the little town of Lystra in Lycaonia. 
 
 The site of Lystra has never been made out with perfect certainty, but 
 there is good reason to believe that it was at a place now known as Bui Bir 
 .Kilisseh, or tho Thousand and One Churches, once the see of a bishop, and 
 rowdod with the ruins of sacred buildings. It lies in the northern hollows of 
 ,he huge isolated mass of an extinct volcano, "rising like a giant from a plain 
 level as tho sea." * It is called the Kara Dagh, or Black Mountain, and is 
 still the haunt of dangerous robbers. 
 
 Both at Lystra and in the neighbouring hamlets the Apostles seem to 
 have preached with success, and to have stayed for some little time. On one 
 occasion Paul noticed among his auditors a man who had been a cripple from 
 his birth. His evident eagerness 3 marked him out to the quick insight of the 
 Apostle as one on whom a work of power could bo wrought. It is evident on 
 the face of the narrative that it was not every cripple or every sufferer that 
 Paul would have attempted to heal ; it was only such as, so to speak, met 
 half-way tho exertion of spiritual power by their own ardent faith. Fixing 
 hie eyes on him, Paul raised his voico to its full compass, and cried " Rise 
 on thy feet upright." Thrilled with a divine power, the man sprang up ; he 
 began to walk. The crowd who were present at the preachings, which seem 
 on this occasion to have been in the open air, were witnesses of the miracle, 
 and reverting in their excitement, perhaps from a sense of awe, to their rude 
 native Lycaouian dialect 4 just as a Welsh crowd, after being excited to an 
 overpowering degree by tho English discourse of some great Methodist, might 
 express its emotions in Welsh they cried : ' The gods have come down to us 
 in the likeness of men. The tall and venerable one is Zeus ; the other, the 
 younger and shorter one, who speaks so powerfully, is Hermes.' * Ignorant 
 
 1 The Af.la Pauli et Thcdae, of which the scene IB laid at Iconium, are BO purely 
 apocryphal as hardly to deserve notice. They are printed in Grabe, Spicilcg. 1 ; Tischen- 
 dorf, A ctn Apost. Apocr. p. 40. Tertullian says that a presbyter in Asia was deposed for 
 having forged the atory out of love for 1'aul (Dt Bapt, 17) ; St. Jerome adda that it was 
 St. Jolin who deposed him. 
 
 2 Kinneir, Travel* in Karamnnia, p. 212. 
 
 * Acts xiv. 9, ijxov* TOW HavAov AaAovirof. 
 
 4 Jftblotisld, in his monograph Dt Linyitd Lycaonid, concluded that It waa a corrupt 
 Assyrian, and therefore Semitic dialect ; Guhling, that it was Greek, corrupted with 
 Syriac. The only Lycaonian word we know IB i<A/3i, which means " a juniper," as we 
 find in Stcph. JJyzant. 
 
 * It is hardly worth while to produce classical quotation to show that Hermes was the 
 god of eloquence (Hor. Od. i. 10 ; Macrob. Saturn, i. 8). Hence his epithet A^yiot (Qrph. 
 Hymn, xxvii. 6). " Quo didioit culie lingua favnte loqui " (Ov. F. v. 6G8).
 
 THE CLOSE OF THK JOUBNEY. 215 
 
 of the native dialect, the Apostles did not know what the crowd were saying, 1 
 and withdrew to their lodging. But meanwhile the startling rumour had 
 spread. Lycaonia was a remote region where still lingered the simple faith 
 in the old mythologies.* Not only were there points of resemblance in Central 
 Asia between their own legends and the beliefs of the Jews, 3 but this region was 
 rendered famous as the scone of more than one legendary Epiphany, of which 
 
 the most celebrated recorded in the beautiful tale of Philemon and Baucis 4 
 
 was said to have occurred in this very neighbourhood. Unsophisticated by the 
 prevalent disbelief, giving ready credence to all tales of marvel, and showing 
 intense respect for any who seemed invested with special sacrodnoss, 6 the 
 Lycaoniaus eagerly accepted the suggestion that they were once more favoured 
 by a visit from the old gods, to whom in a faithless age they had still been 
 faithful. And this being so, they at least would not be guilty either of the 
 Impious scepticism which had ended in the transformation into a wolf of their 
 eponymous prince Lycaon, or of the inhospitable carelessness which for all 
 except one aged couple had forfeited what might have been a source of 
 boundless blessings. Before the gate of the town was a Temple of Zeus, their 
 guardian deity. The Priest of Zeus rose to the occasion. While the Apostles 
 remained in entire ignorance of his proceedings he had procured bulls and 
 garlands, and now, accompanied by festive crowds, came to the gates to do 
 them sacrifice. 9 Paul and Barnabas were the last to hear that they were 
 about to be the centres of an idolatrous worship, but when they did hear it 
 they, with their sensitive conceptions of the awful majesty of the one true 
 God, were horror-stricken to an extent which a Gentile could hardly have 
 understood. 7 Bending their garments, they sprang out with loud cries among 
 the multitude, expostulating with them, imploring them to believe that they 
 were but ordinary mortals like themselves, and that it was the very object of 
 their mission to turn them from these empty idolatries to the one living and 
 true God, who made the heaven, and the . earth, and the sea, and all that in 
 them is. And so, as they gradually gained more of the ear of the multitude, 
 they explained that during past generations God had, as it were, suffered all 
 the heathen to walk in their own ways, 8 and had not given them special 
 
 1 See Chrysost. Horn. xxx. The notion of St. Jerome, that the power of the Apostles 
 to speak to the Lycaoniana in their own language was one of the reasons why the people 
 took them for gods, is utterly baseless. 
 
 3 Some remarkable proofs are given by Dollinger (Judcnth. u. Htidenth. bk. viii. 2, 5). 
 1 For instance, the sort of dim tradition of the Deluge at Apamea Kibotos. 
 
 4 Ov. Met. viii; 626, seq. ; Fatt. r. 495 ; Dio. Chrysost. Oral, xxxiii. 408. On the 
 common notion of these epiphanies, we Horn. Od, xvi. 484 ; Hes. Opp. et D. 247 ; 
 Cat. Ixv. 384. 
 
 Tyana, the birthplace of the contemporary thaumaturge, ApolloniuB, who was 
 everywhere received with so deep a reverence, is not far to the east of Lystra and Derbe. 
 
 Probably the gates of the house, cf. xii. 13, JuL Poll. Onomatt. L 8, 77 (cf. Virg. 
 Eel. iii. 487 ; Tert. De Cor. Mil. x.). 
 
 1 Mcncxcnus, the physician of Alexander, claimed to be a god, as did Alexander of 
 Abonoteichus, to say nothing of the Divi CaMret. 'Ef^nj&iirar, K, A, B, C.D, E, &c. 
 Barnabas is put first because he is most reverenced aa^etu Poliauchot. In the itory at 
 liaucis and Philemon the miracle at once led to * sacrifioa. 
 
 Acts xiv. 16, wiw ri ir+ ^ui 9'i
 
 216 THJB LIFE AND WORK O* ST. PAUL. 
 
 revelations; and yet even in those days Ho had not left Himself without 
 witness by the mercies which He then sent, as He sends them now, "by 
 giving us from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, by filling our hearts with 
 food and gladness." 
 
 Such was the strong yet kindly and sympathetic protest uttered by the 
 Apostles against the frank superstition of these simple Lycaonians. It was 
 no time now, in the urgency of the moment, to preach Christ to them, the sole, 
 object being to divert them from an idolatrous sacrifice, and to show the futile 
 character of the polytheism of which such sacrifices formed a part. Paul, 
 who was evidently the chief speaker, does this with that inspired tact which 
 can always vary its utterances with the needs of the moment. No one can 
 read the speech without once more pereciviug its subtle and inimitable coin- 
 cidence with his thoughts and expressions. 1 The rhythmic conclusion is not 
 nnaccordant with the style of his most elevated inoocls ; and besides the appro- 
 priate appeal to God's natural gifts in a town not in itself unhappily situated, 
 but surrounded by a waterless and treeless plain, we may naturally suppose 
 that the " filling our hearts with food and gladness " was suggested by the 
 garlands and festive pomp which accompanied the bulls on which the people 
 would afterwards have made their common banquet. Nor do I think it 
 impossible that the words may be an echo of lyric songs 2 sung as the pro- 
 cession made its way to the gates. To use them in a truer and loftier con- 
 nexion would be in exact accord with the happy power of seizing an argument 
 which St. Paul showed when he turned into the text of his sermon at Athens 
 the vague inscription to the Unknown God. 
 
 But the Lyetrenians did not like to be baulked of their holiday and of 
 their banquet ; and those who had been most prominent in proclaiming the 
 new epiphany of Zeus and Hermes were probably not a little ashamed. 
 M. Kenan is right in the remark that the ancient heathen had no conception 
 of a miracle as the evidence of a doctrine. If, then, the Apostles could work 
 a miracle, and yet indisputably disclaim all notion of being gods in disguise, 
 what were they, and what became of their miracle P The Lycaouiaas, in the 
 sulky revulsion of their feelings, and with a somewhat uneasy sense that they 
 had put themselves into a ridiculous position, were inclined to aveoige their 
 error on those who had innocently caused it. They were a faithless and 
 fickle race, liable, beyond the common wont of mobs, to sudden gusts of feeling 
 
 1 Compare liv. 15, curb TOVTWV rS>V fn.a.ta.itav iirurrpefaiv im Qcov S>vra. with 1 Thess. i. 9, 
 iirc<rrp4$ale irpbj TOV Qcov airb TUV tiSiatov, K.T.A., and the anarthrous Gtov <aiTa with Koni. ix. 
 
 26, &c. Compare too the very remarkable expression and thought of ver. 1C with 
 the speech' at Athens, xvii. 30, Rom. i. 20, ii. 15, &c., and ver. 17 with Horn. i. 19, 20. 
 The readings "us" and "our hearts" (qplv and iunuv, A, B, G, H, and the Coptio and 
 Ethiopian versions) are net certain, since these are exactly points in which diplomatic 
 evidence can hardly be decisive ; but they arc surely much more in St. Paul's manner, 
 and illustrate the large sympathy with which he was always ready to become all thinga 
 to all men, and therefore to Gentiles to speak as though he too were a Gentile. 
 
 3 Mr. Humphry in loc. not unnaturally took this for the fragment of some lyrio 
 ong, and though most editors have rejected his conjecture, I think that its apparent 
 improbability may partly be removed by the suggestion in the text (infra, Excursus III., 
 P. 6%).
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE JOTTENKT. 217 
 
 and impulse. 1 In their disappointment they would be Inclined to assume 
 that if theso two mysterious strangers were not gods they were despicable 
 Jews ; and if their miracle was not a sign of their divinity, it belonged to the 
 malefic arts of which they may well have heard from Roman visitors. And 
 on the arrival of the Jews of Antioch and Iconium at Lystra, with the express 
 purpose of buzzing their envenomed slanders into the ears of these country 
 people, the mob were only too ripe for a tumult. They stoned Paul and, when 
 they thought he was dead, dragged him outside their city gates, leaving him, 
 perhaps, in front of the very Temple of Jupiter to which they had been about 
 to conduct him as an incarnation of their patron deity. But Paul was not 
 dead. This had not been a Jewish stoning, conducted with fatal deliberate- 
 ness, but a sudden riot, in which the mode of attack may have been due to 
 accident. Paul, liable at all times to tho swoons which accompany nervous, 
 organisations, had been stunned, but not killed; and while the disciples stood! 
 in an agonised group around what they thought to be his corpse, he recovered 
 his consciousness, and raised himself from the ground. The mob meanwhile 
 had dispersed; and perhaps in disguise, or under cover of evening for all 
 these details were as nothing to Paul, and are not preserved by his biographer 
 he re-entered tho little city. 
 
 Was it in the house of Eunice and Loia that ho found the sweet repose 
 and tender ministrations which he would need more than ever after an 
 experience so frightful? If Lystra was thus the scene of one of his intensost 
 sufi-ermgs, and one which, lightly as it is dwelt upon, probably left on his 
 already enfeebled constitution its lifelong traces, it also brought him, by the 
 merciful providence of God, its own immense compensation. For it was at 
 Lystra that he converted the son of Eunice, then perhaps a boy of fifteen, 2 for 
 whom he conceived that deep affection which breathes through every line of 
 tho Epistles addressed to him. This was the Timothens whom he chose as tho 
 companion of his future journeys, whom he sent on his most confidential 
 messages, to whom he entrusted the oversight of his most important churches, 
 whom he summoned as the consolation of his last imprisonment, whom ha 
 always regarded as tho son in tho faith who -was nearest aiid dearest to his 
 heart. If Luke had been with St. Paul in this his first journey, ho would 
 probably hava mentioned a circumstance which the Apostlo doubtless regarded 
 as one of God's best blessings, and as one which would help to obliterate in a 
 feeling of thankfulness even the bitter memories of Lystra. 3 But we who, 
 from scattered allusions, can see that it was here and now that St. Paul first 
 mot with the gentlest and clearest of all his converts, may dwell with pleasure 
 on the thought, that Timotheus stood weeping in that group of disciples who 
 
 1 Commenting on the treachery of Pandarus, in 77. iv, 88 92, the Scholiast quotes 
 tlie testimony of Aristotle to the untrustworthy character of the Lycaonians ; and see 
 Cic. f>p. ad Att. Y. 21, &c., who speaks of the natives of these regions with great 
 con tempt. 
 
 2 This can hardly he regarded KB In any way doubtful if ire compare 1 Tim. i. 2, 18 
 and 2 Tim. ii. 1 with Act* xvi. 1, 
 
 a 2 Tim. iii. 11.
 
 218 THE LIFE AND WORK O BT. PAUL. 
 
 surrounded the bleeding missionary, whose hearts glowed with amazement 
 and thankfulness when they saw him recover, who perhaps helped to convey 
 him secretly to his mother's house, and there, it may be, not only bound his 
 wounds, bnt also read to him in the dark and suffering hours some of the 
 precious words of those Scriptures in which from a child he had been trained. 
 
 But after so severe a warning it was scarcely safe to linger even for a 
 single day in a town where they had suffered such brutal violence. Even if 
 the passion of the mob had exhausted itself, the malignity of the Jews was 
 not so likely to bo appeased. Once more the only safety seemed to be in 
 flight; once more they took refuge in another province. From Lystra in 
 Lycaonia they started, under the grey shades of morning, while the city was 
 yot asleep, for the town of Derbe, 1 which was twenty miles distant, in the 
 district of Isaurica. It is grievous to think of one who had been so cruelly 
 treated forced to make his way for twenty miles with his life in his hand, and 
 still all battered and bleeding from the horrible attack of the day before. 
 But if the dark and rocky summit of Kara Dagh, the white distant snows of 
 Mount JEgaeus, 3 and the silver expanse of the White Lake had little power 
 to delight his wearied eyes, or calm his agitated spirit, we may be sure that 
 He was with him whom once he had persecuted, but for whose sake he waa 
 now ready to suffer all; and that from hour to hour, as he toiled feebly and 
 wearily along from the cruel and fickle city, " God's consolations increased 
 upon his soul with the gentleness of a sea that caresses the shore it covers." 
 
 At Derbe they were suffered to rest unmolested. It may be that the 
 Jews were ignorant that Paul was yet alive. That secret, pregnant with 
 danger to the safety of the Apostle, would bo profoundly kept by the little 
 band of Lystrenian disciples. At any rate, to Derbe the Jews did not follow 
 him with their interminable hate. The name of Derbe is omitted from the 
 mention of places where he reminds Timothy that he had suffered afflictions 
 and persecutions. His work seems to have been happy and successful, 
 crowned with the conversion of those disciples whom he ever regarded as 
 " his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing." Here, too, he gained one more 
 friend in Gains of Dorbe, who afterwards accompanied him on his last visit to 
 Jerusalem. 3 
 
 And now that they were so near to Cybistra (the modern Eregli), through 
 
 1 It appears from the evidence of coins compared with. Dio Cass. lix. 8, that both 
 Derbe and Lystra, were under Antiochus IV. of Commagene (Eckhcl, iii. 255 ; Lewin, 
 Fasti Sacri, p. 250). If tbe inference be correct they could not, even in a political sense, 
 be called " Churches of Galatia." 
 
 2 The site of Derbo is still doubtful. Strabo (xii. 6) calls it a foovpiov lo-awpta? <u AIM*, 
 where it has long been seen that the true reading must be AI'MI-^, and if so the lake must 
 be Ak Ghieul, or the "White Lake." Near this place Hamilton found a place called 
 Divle, which would be an easy metathesis for the name AfA^ei'a, by which the town was 
 sometimes called ; but another site much more to the north, where he found the ruins of 
 an Acropolis, seems more likely. This, which is the site marked in Kiepert's mnp, 
 answers the requirements of Strabo, xii. 6, since it is on the confines of Isaurica and 
 Cappadocia, on a lake, and not far from Laranda (Karawan). See Lewin, i. 151. 
 
 3 Acts xx. 4. The Gaiua of xix. 29 waa a Macedonian, and of Horn, xvi, 23 and 1 Cor. 
 L 14 a Corinthian.
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE JOURNKT. 219 
 
 which a few stages would have brought them to the Cilician gates, and so 
 through Tarsus to Antioch, it might have been assumed that this would have 
 been the route of their return. Why did they not take it P There may be 
 truth in the ingenious suggestion of Mr. Lewin, 1 " that the road as is some- 
 times still the case had been rendered impassable by the waters of Ak Ghieul, 
 swollen by the melting of the winter snows, and that the way through the 
 mountains was too uncertain and insecure." 1 But they may have had no 
 other reason than their sense of what was needed by the infant Churches 
 which they had founded. Accordingly they went back, over the wild and 
 dusty plain, the twenty miles from Dorbe to Lystra, the forty miles from 
 Lystra to Iconium, the sixty miles from Iconium to Antioch. It may well 
 be supposed that it needed no slight heroism to face once more the dangers 
 that might befall them. But they had learnt the meaning of their Lord's 
 saying, " He who is near Me is near the fire." Precautions of secrecy they 
 doubtless took, and cheerfully faced the degrading necessity of guarded 
 movements, and of entering cities, perhaps in disguise, perhaps only at late 
 nightfall and early dawn. The Christians had early to learn those secret 
 trysts and midnight gatherings aid private watchwords by which alone they 
 could elude the fury of their enemies. But the Apostles accomplished their 
 purpose. They made their way back in safety, everywhere confirming the 
 disciples, exhorting them to constancy, preparing them for the certainty and 
 convincing them of the blessing of the tribulations through which we must 
 enter the kingdom of God. 3 And as some organisation was necessary to 
 secure the guidance and unity of these little bodies of converts, they held 
 solemn meetings, at which, with prayer and fasting, they appointed elders, 4 
 before they bestowed on them a last blessing and farewell. In tliis manner 
 they passed through Lycaonia, Iconium, and Pisidia, and so into Painphylia; 
 and since on their first journey they had boon unable to preach in Perga, they 
 did so now. Possibly they found no ship ready to sail down the Cestrus to 
 their destination. They therefore made their way sixteen miles overland to 
 the flourishing seaport of Attaleia, at the mouth of the Katarrhaktes, which at 
 that time found its way to the sea over a range of cliffs in floods of foaming 
 waterfall ; and from thence for they never seem to have lingered among the 
 fleeting and mongrel populations of these seaport towns they took ship to 
 Seleucia, saw once more the steep cone of Mount Casius, climbed the slopes of 
 Coryphaeus, and made their way under the pleasant shade of ilex, and myrtle, 
 and arbutus, on the banks of the Oroutes, until once more they crossed the 
 well-known bridge, and saw the grim head of Charon staring over the street 
 Singon, in which neighbourhood the little Christian community wore prepared 
 to welcome them with keen interest and unbounded love. 
 
 1 Referring to Hamilton (Retcarchcs, li. 313), who found the road from Eregli im- 
 passable from this cause. 
 
 2 Strabo, XII. vi. 25 ; Tac. Ann. iil. 48 ; xii. 55 ; Cic. ad Alt. v. 20, 5, &c. 
 
 8 Acts xiv. 22. The fob may imply a general Christian sentiment. It cannot in this 
 connexion be relied on as showing the presence of St. Luke. 
 
 4 Acts xiv. 23, xipoToVaxT is perfectly general, as in 2 COT. viii 19.
 
 220 THE LIFE ANI> WORK OF ST, PAUL. 
 
 So ended the first mission journey of the Apostle Paul the first flight as 
 it were of the eagle, which was soon to soar with yet bolder wing, in yet wider 
 circles, among yet more raging storms. We have followed him by the brief 
 notices of St. Luke, but we have no means of deciding either the exact date 
 of the journey, or its exact duration. It is only when the crises in the history 
 of the early Church synchronise with events of secular history, that we can 
 ever with certainty ascertain the date to which they should be assigned. 1 
 We have seen that Paul and Barnabas visited Jerusalem about the time of 
 Herod Agrippa's death, and this took place in April A.D. 44. After this 
 they returned to Antioch, and the next thing wo are told about them is theii* 
 obedience to the spiritual intimation which marked them out as Evangelists to 
 the heathen. It is reasonable to believe, therefore, that they spent about a 
 year at Antioch, since they could not easily find vessels to convoy them from 
 place to place except in tho months during which the sea was regarded as 
 open. Now navigation with the ancients began with the rising of the 
 Pleiades, that is, in the mouth of March; and we may assume with fair 
 probability that March, A.D. 45, is the date at which they began their 
 evangelising labours. Beyond this all must be conjecture. They do not seem 
 to have spent more than a mouth or two in Cyprus ; 2 at Antioch in Pisidia 
 their stay was certainly brief. At Iconium they remained "a considerable 
 tmie ; " but at Lystra again, and at Derbe, and on their return tour, and at 
 Perga and Attaleia, the narrative implies no long residence. Taking into 
 account the time consumed in travelling, we are hardly at liberty to suppose 
 that the first circuit occupied much more than a year, and they may have 
 returned to the Syrian Antioch in the late spring of A.D. 46. 3 
 
 1 See Chronological Excursus, infra, p. 753. 
 
 * Acts xiv. 3, Ixavov xpw- This ma 7 mean anything, from a month or two, up to a 
 year or more. It is a phrase of frequent occurrence in St. Luke (see Acts viii. 11 ; xxvii. 
 9 ; Luke viii. 27 ; xx. 9). 
 
 3 That Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Derbe, and Lystra were not the churches of 
 Galatia, as has been suggested by Boitger (Eeiti-agc, i. 28, sq.), Renan, Hausrath, and 
 others, is surely demonstrable. Galatia had two meanings the first ethnographical, the 
 second political. The ethnographic use was the popular and the all but universal one. 
 It meant that small central district of Asia Minor, about 200 miles in length, which was 
 occupied by the three Gallic tribes the Trocmi, the Tolistobogii, the Tectosages with 
 the three capitals, Tavium, Pessinus, and Ancyra. Politically it meant a "department," 
 an "administrative group," a mere agglomeration of districts thrown into loose cohesion 
 by political accidents. In this political meaning the Roman province of Galatia was 
 based on the kingdom of Amyntas (Dion Cass. liii. 26), a wealthy grazier and freebooter, 
 who had received from Mark Antony the kingdom of Pisidia, and by subsequent additions 
 had become possessed of Galatia Proper, Lycaonia, parts of Pamphytta, and Cilicia 
 Aspera. On his death various changes occurred, but when Paul and Barnabas were on 
 their first journey Pamphylia was under a propraetor ; Iconium was a separate tetrarchy ; 
 Lystra and Derbe belonged to Antiochus IV. of Commageno. Galatia, Pisidia north of 
 the Paroreia, and the greater part of Lycaonia formed the Roman province of Galatia. 
 But even if we grant that St. Paul and St. Luke might have used the word Galatia in 
 its artificial sense, even then Antioch in Pisidia appears to be the only town mentioned 
 in this circuit which is actually in the Roman province. This alone seems sufficient to 
 disprove the hypothesis that in the first journey we have a narrative of the founding of 
 the Galatian Church. Further, a far as St. Luke is concerned, it would be a confused 
 method, unlike his careful accuracy, to use the words Pisidia, Lycaonia, Pamphylia, and 
 later in his narrative Mysia, and other districts in their geographical sense, and then
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE JOTJBNEY. 221 
 
 But brief as was the period occupied, the consequences were immense. 
 For though Paul returned from this journey a shattered man though twenty 
 years afterwards, through a vista of severe afflictions, he still looks back, as 
 though they had happened but yesterday, to the "persecutions, afflictions, 
 which came upon him at Antioch, at Iconinm, at Lystra ; what persecutions 
 he endured, and yet from all the Lord delivered him" 1 though the journey- 
 ings and violence, and incessant menace to life, which has tried even men 
 of such iron nerves as Oliver Cromwell, had rendered him more liable than 
 ever to fits of acute suffering and intense depression, 8 yet, in spito of all, he 
 returned with the mission -hunger in his heart; with the determination 
 more strongly formed than ever to preach the word, and be instant in season 
 and out of season ; with the fixed conviction that the work and destiny in life 
 to which God had specially called him was to bo the Apostle of the heathen. 3 
 
 That conviction had been brought unalterably home to his soul by the 
 experience of every town at which they had preached. Up to a certain point, 
 and that point not very far within the threshold of his subject, the Jews were 
 willing to give him a hearing; but when they began to perceive that the 
 Gospel was universal that it preached a God to whom a son of Abraham 
 was no whit dearer than any one in any nation who feared Him and loved 
 righteousness that it gave, in fact, to the title of "son of Abraham" a 
 significance so purely metaphorical as to ignore all special privilege of blood 
 their anger burnt like Same. It was the scorn and indignation of the elder 
 brother against the returning prodigal, and his refusal to enjoy privileges 
 which henceforth he must share with others. 4 The deep-seated pride of the 
 
 -t'iVir.LJ iU <i ;>U" i.Vfhi. lv ^MiJ tt>'.\ ;/'?.. i. VJJr>.!..i..!.,ii : -.-,..' ,.- -nii.'.fc . 
 
 suddenly, without any notice, to use Galatia in Acts xvi. in its political sense, especially 
 as this political sense was shifting and meaningless. It can hardly be supposed that 
 since he must hundreds of times have heard St. Paul mention the churches of Galatia, 
 he should, if these were the churches of Galatia, never drop a hint of the fact, and, 
 ignoring the Roman province altogether, talk of Antioch "of Pisidia," and Lystra and 
 Derbe, "cities of Lycaonia." I should be quite content to rest an absolute rejection of 
 the hypothesis on these considerations, as well as on the confusion which it introduces 
 into the chronology of St. Paul's life. The few arguments advanced in favour of this view 
 e.g., the allusion to Barnabas in Galatians ii. 1 are wholly inadequate to support it 
 against the many counter improbabilities. Indeed, almost the only serious consideration 
 urged in its favour namely, the very cursory mention in Acts xvi. 6 of what we learn 
 from the Epistle was the founding of a most important body of churches is nullified by 
 the certainty which meets us at every step that the Acts does not furnish ua with a 
 complete biography. In other instances also as in the case of the churches in Syria 
 and Cilicia he leaves us in doubt about the tune and manner of their first evangeli- 
 sation. The other form of this theory, which sees the founding of the Galatian churches 
 in the words K<H rr\v ircplx<apov (Acts xiv. 6), escapes some of these objections, but offers 
 far greater difficulties than the common belief which sees the evangelisation of Galatia 
 in the cursory allusion of Acts xvi. 6. 
 
 1 2 Tim. iii. 11. * Gal. vi. 17. 
 
 1 Cor. Ls. 21 ; Gal. v. 11 ; Rom. XT. 16 ; Eph. iii. 6, &c. 
 
 In BeracMth, 
 
 is far off, and , 
 
 prodigals are dearer to God (as being here addressed first) than Pharisees and elder 
 brothers ; hut it is the penitents of Israel who are contemplated, just as some of the 
 Fathers held out hopes to Catholics and Christians (merely on the ground of that 
 privilege) which they denied to others. (Jer. in Isa. Ixvi. 16, in Eph. iv. 12, &o.)
 
 222 THE LIFE AND WORK O* 1 St. PAtTL. 
 
 Jews rose in arms. Who were these obscure innovators who dared to run 
 counter to the cherished hopes and traditional glories of well-nigh twenty 
 centuries ? Who were these daring heretics, who, in the name of a faith 
 which all the Rabbis had rejected, were thus proclaiming to the Gentiles the 
 abandonment of all exclusive claim to every promise and every privilege which 
 generations of their fathers had held most dear ? 
 
 But this was not all. To abandon privileges was unpatriotic enough ; but 
 what true Jew, what observer of the Halachah, could estimate the atrocity of 
 apostatising from principles? Had not Jews done enough, by freely ad- 
 mitting into their synagogues the Proselytes of the Gate ? Did they not 
 even offer to regard as a son of Israel every Gentile who would accept the 
 covenant rite of circumcision, and promise full allegiance to the Written and 
 Oral Law ? But the new teachers, especially Paul, seemed to use language 
 which, pressed to its logical conclusion, could only be interpreted as an 
 utterly slighting estimate of the old traditions, nay, even of the sacred rite of 
 circumcision. It is true, perhaps, that they had never openly recommended 
 the suppression of this rite ; but it was clear that it occupied a subordinate 
 place in their minds, and that they were disinclined to make between their 
 Jewish and Gentile converts the immensity of difference which separated a 
 Proselyte of Righteousness from a Proselyte of the Gate. 
 
 It is very possible that it was only the events of this journey which finally 
 matured the views of St. Paul on this important subject. The ordinary laws 
 of nature had not been reversed in his case, and as he grew in grace and in the 
 knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, so his own Epistles, 1 though each has 
 its own divine purpose, undoubtedly display the kind of difference in his way 
 of developing the truth which we should ordinarily attribute to growth of 
 mind. And it is observable that St. Paul, when taunted by his opponents 
 with having once been a preacher of circumcision, does not meet the taunt by 
 a denial, but merely by saying that at any rate his persecutions are a sign that 
 now that time is over. In fact, he simply thrusts aside the allusion to the past 
 by language which should render impossible any doubts as to his sentiments iu 
 the present. In the same way, in an earlier part of his Epistle, 2 he anticipates 
 the charge of being a time-server a charge which he know to be false in 
 spirit, while yet the malignity of slander might find some justification of it in 
 his broad indifference to trifles not by any attempt to explain his former line 
 of action, but by an outburst of strong denunciation which none could mistake 
 for men-pleasing or over-persuasiveness. Indeed, in the second chapter of 
 the Galatians, St. Paul seems distinctly to imply two things. The one is that 
 it was the treacherous espionage of false brethren that first made him regard 
 the question as one of capital importance; the other that his views on 
 the subject were at that time so far from being final, that it was with & 
 certain amount of misgiving as to the practical decision that he went up to the 
 
 1 2 Cor. v. 16 ; 1 Cor. xiii. 9 12. Bengel says that when tlie Epistles are arranged- 
 chronologically, " incrementum apostoli spirituals cognoscitur " (p. 5S3), 
 * Gal. i. 10.
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE JOURNEY. 223 
 
 consultation at Jerusalem. It was the result of this interview tho discovery 
 that James and Kephas had nothing to contribute to any further solution of 
 the subject which first made him determined to resist to the utmost the 
 imposition of the yoke on Gentiles, and to follow the line which he had 
 generally taken. But he had learnt from this journey that nothing but the 
 wisdom of God annihilating human foolishness, nothing but the gracious 
 Spirit of God breaking the iron sinew in the nock of carnal ob.sliuacy, could 
 lead the Jews to accept the truths he preached. Paul saw that the husband- 
 men in charge of tho vineyard would never be brought to confess that they 
 had slain the Heir as they had slain well-nigh all who went before Him. 
 Though He had come first to His own possessions, His own people refused to 
 receive Him. 1 Israel after the flesh would not condescend from their haughty 
 self-satisfaction to accept the free gift of eternal life. 
 
 And, therefore, he was now more than ever convinced that his work would 
 lie mainly among the Gentiles. It may be that the fury and contempt of the 
 Jews kindled in him too dangerously for the natural man kindled in him in 
 spite of all tender yearnings and relen tings too strong an -indignation, too 
 fiery a resentment. It may be that he felt how much more adapted others 
 were than himself to deal with these ; others whose affinities with them wore 
 stronger, whose insight into tho inevitable future was less clear. Tho Gentiles 
 were evidently prepared to receive tho Gospel. For these other sheep of God 
 evidently the fulness of time had come. To those among them who were 
 disposed for eternal life the doctrine of a free salvation through the Son of God 
 was infinitely acceptable. Not a few of them had found in the Jewish 
 teaching at least an approach to ease. 2 But tho acceptance of Judaism could 
 only be accomplished at the cost of a heavy sacrifice. Even to become a 
 "Proselyte of the Gato" subjected a man to much that was distasteful; but 
 to become a Proselyte of the Gate was nothing. It was represented by all the 
 sterner bigots of Judaism as a step so insignificant as to be nearly worthless- 
 And yet how could any man stoop to that which could alone make him 
 a Proselyte of Righteousness, and by elevating him to this rank, place on him 
 a load of observances which were dead both in the spirit and in the letter, 
 and wliich yet would most effectually make his life a burden, and separate 
 him not morally, but externally from all which he had loved and valued 
 most ? 3 The sacrifices which an African convert has to make by abandoning 
 polygamy which a Brahmin has to make by sacrificing caste are but a small 
 measure of what a Gentile had to suffer if he made himself a Jew. How 
 
 1 John i. 11, eli TO. ISia. , . . ol HIM* 
 
 2 Further than the outermost pale of Judaism they could not approach. Religions 
 thoughtfulness in a Gentile was a crime, "A Gentile who studies the Law (beyond the 
 seven Noachian precepts) is guilty of death;" for it is said (Deut. x.xxiii. 4) "Moses 
 commanded us a Law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob ;" but not of 
 Gentiles (and, therefore, Rashi adds it is robbery for a Gentile to study the Law). 
 (Sanhedrin, i. 59, l.j This ia embodied by Maimonides, Dig. Hilchoth Menachin, x. 9. 
 
 * "A Gentile who offers to submit to all the words of tho Law except one is not 
 received." Rabbi Jose Ben Rabbi Jehudah said, "Even if he rejects one of the 
 HalacMtk of the Scribes " (BenchorCth, I. 30, 2).
 
 224 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 eagerly then would such an inquirer embrace a faith which, while it offered 
 him a purer morality, and a richer hope for the future, and a greater strength 
 for the present, and a more absolute remission for the past, offered him these 
 priceless boons unaccompanied by the degradation of circumcision and the 
 hourly worry of distinctions between meats ! Stoicism might confront him 
 with the ban-en inefficiency of " the categorical imperative ; " the Gospel 
 offered him, as a force which needed no supplement, the Spirit of the living 
 Christ. Yes, St. Paul felt that the Gentiles could not refuse the proffered 
 salvation. He himself might only live to see the green blade, or at best to 
 gather a few weak ears, but hereafter he was confident that the full harvest 
 would be reaped. Henceforth he knew himself to be essentially the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles, and to that high calling he was glad to sacrifice his life, 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 'w.tii! t'-jr "T-.xf J 
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 
 
 IK -xAvruv, vuffiv ifiavrby 'EAOTAQ2A, 
 1 COB. ix. 19. 
 
 THE first step of Paul and Barnabas on their arrival at Antioch had been to 
 summon a meeting of the Church, and give a report of their mission and its. 
 success, dwelling specially on the proof which it afforded that God had now 
 opened to the Gentiles " a door of faith." God Himself had, by His direct 
 blessing, shown that the dauntless experiment of a mission to the heathen was 
 in accordance with His will. 
 
 For some time the twa Apostles continued to rest from their toils ami 
 perils amid the peaceful ministrations of the new metropolis of Christianity. 
 But it is not intended that unbroken peace should ever in this world continue 
 for long to bo the lot of man. The Church soon began to be troubled by a 
 controversy which was not only of pressing importance, but which seemed 
 likely to endanger the entire destiny of the Christian faith. 
 
 Jewish and Gentile converts were living side by sido at Antioeh, waiving 
 the differences of view and habit which sprang from their previous training, 
 and united heart and soul in the bonds of a common love for their common 
 Lord. Had they entered into doubtful disputations, 1 they would soon have 
 found themselves face to face with problems which it was difficult to solve ; 
 but they preferred to dwell only on those infinite and spiritual privileges of 
 which regarded themselves as equal sharers. 
 
 Into this bright fraternal community came the stealthy sidelong intrusion 
 of certain personages from Judaea, 2 who, for a time, profoundly disturbed the 
 peace of the Church. Pharisees scarcely emancipated from their Pharisaism 
 
 1 Rom. xiv. 1, fir) (if tltxplvtlf jiaXoyiffJl" 1 '* 
 
 3 Gal. ii. 4, tropntr^AOor ; of. Judo 4, wofMio'ttvow, "eneaked in."
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 225 
 
 Jews still in bondage to their narrowest preconceptions brethren to whom 
 the sacred name of brethren could barely be conceded 1 they insinuated 
 themselves into the Church in the petty spirit of jealousy and espionage, 2 not 
 with any high aims, but with the object of betraying the citadel of liberty, 
 and reducing the free Christiana of Antioeh to their own bondage. St. Luke, 
 true to his conciliatory purpose, merely speaks of them as "certain from 
 Judaea;" but St. Paul, in the heat of indignant controversy, and writing 
 under a more intense impression of their mischievous infhicnco, vehemently 
 calls them " the false brethren secretly introduced." 3 But though, through- 
 cut their allusions to this most memorable episode in the history of early 
 Christianity, the Apostle and the Evangelist are writing from different points 
 of view, they are in complete accordance as regards the main facts. The 
 combination of the details which they separately furnish enables us to re- 
 produce the most important circumstances of a contest which decided for 
 ever the future of the Gentile Church.* 
 
 These brethren in name, but aliens in heart, came with a hard, plausible, 
 ready-made dogma one of those shibboleths in which formalists delight, and 
 which usually involve the death-blow of spiritual religion. It demanded 
 obedience to the Law of Moses, especially the immediate acceptance of cir- 
 cumcision 5 as its most typical rite; and it denied the possibility of salvation 
 on any other terms. It is possible that hitherto St. Paul may have regarded 
 circumcision as a rule for Jews, and a charitable concession on the part of 
 Gentiles. On these aspects of the question ho was waiting for the light of 
 God, which came to him in the rapid course of circumstances, as it carno to 
 the whole world in the fall of Jerusalem. But even among the Jews of the 
 day, the more sensible and the more enlightened had seen that for a pious 
 Gentile a mere external mutilation could not possibly be essential. Ananias, 
 who had the honour of converting the royal family of Adiabene, had distinctly 
 advised Izates that it was not desirable to risk his crown by external com- 
 pliance to a needless rite. 6 It was only when men like Eleazar fierce and 
 
 1 This is expressly stated in the margin of the later Syriao version, and in two cursive 
 SISS. 8, 137. Epiphanius says that "their leaders -were Cerinthus, the subsequent 
 Gnostic opponent of St. John, and 'Ebion'" (Haer. 2S, 30). But Ebion is a mere 
 "mythical eponymus" (Mansel, Gnostic Her. 125 ; Tert. De praescr. Haeret. 33). Ebionite 
 is an epithet (Epiphan. ffaer. xxx.), and means "poor" (Orig. <?. Cdi, ii. 1; Neander, 
 Ch. Hist. ii. 14). 
 
 2 Gal. ii. 4, KarntrKo^a-ai. I suppose that the title nrraits (moomhah) one authorised 
 by a diploma to give decisions would have been technically claimed by these visitors. 
 
 3 Gal. ii. 4, TOU? wapfi<ra.KTovs $<v5aM\<j>ovs, "falsos et supcrinducticiosfratres" (Tert. adv. 
 Marc. v. 3). The strongly f ' 
 
 "false teachers -who shall t 
 
 4 The addition in D ana , , .. . . 
 
 the Constituti&nes Apostdicae, <u TCIS I0e<rt? o's fccr-afaro, though not genuine, yet show 
 what was felt to be implied. 
 
 6 Acts xv. 1, npLTwOtfrt, " be once circumcised ; " M, A, B, 0, D. Even Joscphus (see 
 next note) seems to think that the horrible death of Apion was a punishment in kind for 
 hisridicule of circumcision (e. Ap. ii. 14). From this anecdote we can measure the courage 
 of St. Paul, and the intense hatred which his views excited. 
 
 " .Josephus, as a liberal Pharisee, held tfce same view (Antt. xx. 2, 4 ; Tit. 23, 31). Th 
 Talmud mentions a certain Akiles (whom some identify with Aqnila, the Greek translator
 
 228 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAtTL. 
 
 narrow litoralists of the school of Shammai intervened, that Proselytes of 
 the Gate -were taught that their faith and their holiness were valueless unless 
 they assumed the badge of Proselytes of Righteousness. 1 Izates and Mono- 
 bazus, as was sure to be the case with timid and superstitious natures, had 
 risked all to meet the views of these uncompromising zealots, just as from 
 baser motives Aziz, King of Emesa, and Polemo of Cilicia had yielded in 
 order to win the hands of the wealthy and beautiful princesses of the house of 
 Herod. 2 But it was quite certain that such an acceptance of Mosaism would 
 continue to bo, as it always had been, extremely exceptional ; and Paul saw 
 that if Christianity was to be degraded into the mere superimposition of a 
 belief in Christ as the Jewish Messiah upon the self-satisfaction of Sham- 
 maite fanaticism, 3 or even on the mere menace of the Law, it was not possible, 
 it was not even desirable, that it should continue to exist. The force of habit 
 might, in one who had been born a Jew, freshen with the new wine of the 
 Gospel the old ceremonialism which had run to the lees of Rabbinic tradition. 
 In Jerusalem a Christian might not be sensible of the loss ho suffered by 
 chaining his new lif e to the corpse of meaningless halachoth ; but in Antioch, 
 at any rate, and still more in the new missionfields of Asia, such bondage 
 could never be allowed. 
 
 "Wo can imagine the indignant grief with which St. Paul watched this 
 continuous, this systematic* attempt to undo all that had been done, and to 
 render impossible all further progress. Was the living and life-giving spirit 
 to be thus sacrificed to the dead letter ? Were these new Pharisees to coin- 
 pass sea and land to make one proselyte, only that they might add the pride 
 of the Jew to the vice of the Gentile, and make him ten times more narrow 
 than themselves ? Was the superstitious adoration of dead ordinances to 
 dominate over the heaven-sent liberty of the children of God? If Moses 
 had, under Divine guidance, imposed upon a nation of sensual and stiff- 
 necked slaves not only a moral law of which Christ Himself had indefinitely 
 deepened the obligation, but also the crushing yoke of " statutes which wert 
 
 of the Bible) as having submitted to circumcision, and also a Roman senator (Abhdda Zara, 
 10 ; Hamburger, s.v. " Beschneidung "). The Roman Metilius saved his life by accepting 
 circumcision (Jos. B. J. ii. 17, 10). Antoninus forbade it injthe case of Gentile proselytes 
 (Gieseler, i., 38). 
 
 1 " So great is circumcision," said Rabbi [Jehnda Hakkadosh], "that but for it tha 
 Holy One, blessed be He, would not have created the world ; for it is said (Jer. xxxiii. 25), 
 'But for My covenant [i.e., circumcision] I would not have made day and night, and the 
 ordinance of heaven and earth'" (Ncdarim, f. 31, 2). "Abraham was not called 
 ' perfect ' till he was circumcised. It is as great as all the other commandments " (Exod. 
 xxxiv. 27), (Id. f. 32, 1). It was one of the laws in the case of which the Jews preferred 
 death to disobedience (Shabbath, f. 130, 1). The "good king" in Pseudo-Baruch ( 61, 
 66) is one who does not allow the existence of an uncircumcised person on the earth. 
 
 2 Izates and Monobazus would have been called "lion-proselytes," and Aziz and 
 Polemo "Shechemite proselytes." 
 
 3 " How many laws have you ?" asked a Gentile of Shammai. "Two, "said Shammai, 
 " the written and the oral." " I believe the former," said the Gentile, " not the latter ; 
 accept me as a proselyte on condition of learning th written law only." Shammai 
 ejected him with a curse (Shablath, f, 31, 1), 
 
 4 Acts XT. 1
 
 THK CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 22? 
 
 not good, and ordinances whereby they could not live," 1 was this yoke now 
 that it had boon abolished, now that it had become partly impossible and mostly 
 meaningless to be disastrously imposed on necks for which its only effect 
 would be to madden or to gall? 8 Was a Titus, young, and manly, and free, 
 and pure, with the love of Christ burning like a fire on the altar of his soul, 
 to be held at arm's length by some unregenerate Pharisee, who while he wore 
 broad tepMllin, and tsitsith with exactly the right number of threads and 
 knots, was yet an utter stranger to the love of Christ, and ignorant as a child 
 of His free salvation P Were Christians, who were all brethren, all a chosen 
 generation and a royal priesthood, to be treated by Jews, who had no merit 
 beyond the very dubious merit of being Jews, as though they were unclean 
 creatures with whom it was not even fit to eat P The Jews freely indulged in 
 language of contemptuous superiority towards the proselytes, but was such 
 language to be for one moment tolerated in the brotherhood of Christ ? s 
 
 It is easy to understand in what a flame of fire Paul must often have stood 
 up to urge these questions during the passionate debates which immediately 
 arose.* It may be imagined with what eager interest the Gentile proselytes 
 would await the result of a controversy which was to decide whether it was 
 enough that they should bring forth the fruits of the Spirit love, joy, peace, 
 long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance or whether 
 they must also stick up mezuzoth on their houses, and submit to a concision, 
 and abstain from the free purchases of the market, and not touch perfectly 
 harmless kinds of food, and petrify one day out of every seven with a rigidity 
 of small and conventionalised observances. To us it may seem amazing that 
 the utterances of the prophets were not sufficient to show that the essence of 
 religion is faith, not outward service ; and that so far from requiring petty 
 accuracies of posture, and dress, and food, what the Lord requires of us is that 
 we should do justice, and love mercy, and wait humbly with our God. 6 But 
 the Judaisers had tradition, authority, and the Pentateuch on their side, and 
 the paralysis of custom rendered many Jewish converts incapable of resisting 
 conclusions which yet they felt to be false. So far as they were true Christians 
 at all, they could not but feel that the end of the commandment was love out 
 of a good heart and a pure conscience, and faith unfeigned ; but when their 
 opponents flourished in their faces the Thorah-rolls, and asked them whether 
 they dared to despise the immemorial sanctities of Sinai, or diminish the 
 obligation of laws uttered by Moses amid its burning glow, the ordinary Jew 
 
 l Ezek. xx. 25. 
 
 3 " Circumcidere genitalia instituere ut divcrsitate noscantur," says Tacitus (Hist. T 4 
 5 ),and adds as an aggravation " Transgressi in morem eorum idem usurpant." 
 
 s Here is a specimen of the language of Jewish Rabbis towards proselytes : " Prose- 
 lytes and those who sport with children [the meaning is dubious] delay the coming of the 
 Messiah. As for proselytes, it is explained by Rabh Chelbo's remark, that they are as 
 injurious to Israel as a scab (since in Isa. xiv. 1 it is said, ' strangers' vrill be joined to 
 them (inDDJi), and nnco means ' a scab ') ; because, says Rashi, they are not up to the 
 precepts, and cause calamities to Israel " (Niddah, f. 13, 2). 
 
 4 Acts xv. 2. 
 
 Mio. vi. 8 ; Deut. z. 12 ; HOB, vL 6 ; 1 Sam. XT. 22.
 
 22$ -THE LTFS AND WOHE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 and the ordinary Gentile were perplexed. On these points the words of Jesus 
 had been hat a beam in tha darkness, certain indeed to grow, but as yet only 
 shining aniid deep midnight. They did not yet understand that Christ's fulfil- 
 ment of the Law was its abrogation, and that to maintain the type in tho 
 presence of the antitype was to hold up superfluous candles to tho sun. From 
 this imminent peril 01 absorption in exclusive ritual one man saved the Church, 
 and that man was Paul. With all the force of his argument, with all the 
 weight of his authority, he affirmed and insisted that the Gentile converts 
 should remain in the free conditions tinder which they had first accepted the 
 faith of Christ. 1 
 
 When there appeared likely to be no end to the dispute, 2 it became 
 necessary to refer it to the decision of the Church at Jerusalem, and especially 
 of those Apostles who had lived with the living Jesus. It is far from im- 
 probable that this plan was urged nay, demanded by the Judaisera them- 
 selves, 8 who must have been well aware that the majority of that Church 
 looked with alarm and suspicion on what they regarded as anti-Judaic innova- 
 tions. There may even have been a certain insolence (which accounts for the 
 almost irritable language of St. Paul long afterwards) in their manner of 
 parading their immensely superior authority of living witnesses of the life of 
 Jesus like James and Kephas. They doubtless represented the deputation to 
 Jerusalem as a necessary act of submission, a going up of Paul and Barnabas 
 to be judged by the Jerusalem synod. 4 At this period Paul would not openly 
 repudiate the paraded superiority of the Twelve Apostles. When he says to 
 the Galatians that "he consulted them about the Gospel he was preaching, lest 
 he might be, or had been, running to no purpose," he shows that at this period 
 he had not arrived at the quite unshaken conviction, which made him subse- 
 quently say that " whether he or an angel from heaven preached any other 
 gospel, let him be anathema." 6 In point of fact it was at this interview that 
 
 ' Comp. MS. D, i\eysv yap o HavAos fievtiv QVTUS icd.9as liri'orevcw 8t~<r 
 
 ^ The expressions of Acts XV. 2, ycrcfievij? o5v ard<retaf KOI av^rnireta^ OVK oAi'yjj?, K.T.X. 
 
 aro very sti-cng. 5ron is "insurrection" (Mark xv. 7; Luke xxih. 19). For avfijnjo-if 
 
 see Acts vi. 9 ; xxviii. 29 j Mark be. 14. 
 
 3 As is again asserted in D, jrapijyyeiXa*' auTotc TO> TtavXw Ko.1 ><p Bcipj'a/5a Vai rimy aAAm? 
 avaflcuveiv irpbs TOVS dirooroXovj, K.T.X., 3wu Kptduxrtp err* auTCis 7rpt TOV jTjnjfioTOS TOWTOV. 
 
 4 See the previous extract from D. 
 
 8 I have here assumed without hesitation that the visit to Jerusalem of Gal. il. 1 10, 
 though there mentioned as though it were a second visit, was identical with that of Acta 
 xv., and therefore was in reality his third visit. There are in the Acts of the Apostles 
 five visits of St. Paul to Jerusalem viz., (1) after his conversion (ix. 26); (2) with the 
 Antiochene contribution (xi. 30) ; (3) to consult the Apostles about the necessity of 
 circumcision for the Gentiles (xv. 2) ; (4) after his second missionary journey (xviii. 22) ; 
 (5) before his imprisonment at Csesarea (xxi.). Now this visit of Gal. ii. could not 
 possibly have been the first ; nor, as is proved by Gal. ii. 7, as well as by the whole 
 chronology of his life, could it have been the second ; nor, as we see from the presence 
 of Barnabas (comp. Gal. ii. 1 with Acts xv. 39), could it have been the fourth ; for no 
 one can assume that it was without accusing St. Paul of disingenuous suppression when 
 he spoke to the Galatians of this sole intercourse which he had had with the Apostles ; 
 and that it was not tho fifth is quite decisively proved by Gal. ii. 11. By the exhaustive 
 method, therefore, we see that the visit dwelt on in Gal. ii. must have been the third. 
 It would, indeed, be conceivable that it was come visit cot recorded by tha author of i ha
 
 THE CONSULXAIXOK AX JERUSALEM. 229 
 
 ha learnt that his own insight and authority were fully equal to those of the 
 Apostles who were in Christ before him ; that they had nothing to tell him and 
 nothing to add to him ; that, on the contrary, there were spheres of work which 
 belonged rather to him than to them, and in wliich they stood to him in the 
 position of learners; 1 that Jesus had fulfilled His own promise that it was 
 better for His children that He should go away, because His communion with 
 them by the gift of His Holy Spirit was closer and more absolute than by Hia 
 actual presence. 2 But even now Pan! must have chafed to submit the decision 
 of truths which ho felt to bo true to any human authority. But for one cir- 
 cumstance he must have felt like an able Roman Catholic bishop a Stross- 
 meyer or a Dupanloup who has to await a decision respecting tenets which he 
 deems irrefragable, from a Pope in all respects his inferior in ability and in 
 enlightenment. That circumstance was the inward voice, the spiritual intima- 
 tion which revealed to him that this course was wise and necessary. St. Luke, 
 of course, tells the external side of the event, which was that Paul went by 
 desire of the Church of Antioch ; but St. Paul himself, omitting this as 
 irrelevant to his purpose, or regarding it as an expression of the will of 
 Heaven, tells his converts that he went up " by revelation." Prom Paul also 
 we learn the interesting circumstance that among those who accompanied him-j 
 self and Barnabas was Titus, perhaps a Cretan Gentile whom he had converted 
 at Cyprus during his first journey. 3 Paul took him as'a Gentile representative 
 of his own converts, a living pledge and witness that uncircumciscd Greeks, 
 seeing that they wore equal partakers of the gift of the Holy Ghost, were not 
 to be treated as dogs and outcasts. The declared approval of God was not to 
 be set aside for the fantastic demands of man, and the supercilious tolerance 
 or undisguised contempt of Jews for proselytes was at once a crime and an 
 ignorance when displayed towards a brother in the faith. 
 
 Acts if there were any reason whatever for such a supposition ; but when we consider 
 bow impossible it was that such a visit should have occurred without the knowledge of 
 St. Luke, and how eminently the facts of it accorded with the views which he wished to 
 further, and how difficult it is to find any other occasion on which such a visit would 
 have been natural, we have no valid reason for adopting such an hypothesis. Nor, 
 indeed, can anything be much clearer than the identity of circumstances in the visits 
 tlius described. In the two narratives the same people go up at the same time, from 
 the same place, for the same object, in consequence of the same interference by the same 
 agitators, and with the same results. Against the absolute certainly of the conclusion 
 that the visits described were one and the same there- is nothing whatever to ecfc but 
 trivial differences of detail, every one of which is accounted for in the text. As for 
 fc)t. Paul's non-allusion to the so-called "decree," it is sufficiently explained by its local, 
 partial, temporary and, so far as principles were concerned, indecisive character ; by 
 the fact that the Galatiana were not asklny for concessions, but seeking bondage ; and by 
 tha Apostle's determination not to settle such questions by subordinating his Apoutolic 
 independence to any authority which could be described as cither " of man or by man," 
 l.y anything, in short, except the principles revealed by the Spirit of God Himself. 
 1'rof. Jowett (Gal. i. 253) speaks of tho unbroken imago of harmony presented by the 
 narrative of the Acts contrasted with the tone of Gal. ii. 2 6; but "an unbroken imago 
 of harmony " is not very accordant with the TO.U.;) av^Tr,^t of Acts xv. 7, which is an 
 obvious continuation of the ati<j<.^ ta.1 ^r-qnK OVE oA.i'yij of ^er. 2. Tho extent to which the 
 Acts "casts thereil of time over the diilerences of the Apostles " seems to mo to b 
 often exaggerated. 
 
 Gal. ii. 79. * John yvi. 7. s Ewald, Ocsch. vi. 455.
 
 230 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF 8T. PAUL. 
 
 Alike the commencement and the course of their overland journey were 
 cheered by open sympathy with their views. From Antioch they were 
 honourably escorted on their way; and as they passed through Berytus, 
 Tyre, Sidon, and Samaria, narrating to the Churches the conversion of the 
 Gentiles, they like Luther on his way to the Diet of Worms were en- 
 couraged by unanimous expressions of approval and joy. On arriving at 
 Jerusalem they were received by the Apostles and elders, and narrated to 
 thorn the story of thoir preaching and its results, together with the inevit- 
 able question to which it had given rise. It was on this occasion appa- 
 rently that some of the Christian Pharisees at once got up, and broadly 
 insisted on the moral necessity of Mosaism and circumcision, implying, 
 therefore, a direct censure of the principles on which Paul and Barnabas 
 had conducted their mission. 1 The question thus stated by the opposing 
 parties was far too grave to be decided by any immediate vote ; the deli- 
 berate judgment of the Church on so momentous a problem could only be 
 pronounced at a subsequent meeting. Paul used the interval with his 
 usual sagacity and power. Knowing how liable to a thousand varying 
 accidents are the decisions arrived at by promiscuous assemblies fearing 
 lest the voice of a mixed gathering might only express the collective in- 
 capacity or the collective prejudice he endeavoured to win over the leaders 
 of the Church by a private statement of the Gospel which he preached. 
 Those leaders were, he tells us, at this time, James, 2 who is mentioned 
 first because of his position as head of the Church at Jerusalem, and 
 Peter and John. These he so entirely succeeded in gaining over to his 
 cause he showed to them with such unanswerable force that they could 
 not insist on making Gentile Christians into orthodox Jews without in- 
 curring the tremendous responsibility of damming up for ever the free 
 river of the grace of God that they resigned to his judgment the mission 
 to the Gentiles. Eminent as they were in their own spheres, great as 
 was their force of character, marked as was their individuality, they could 
 not resist the personal ascendency of Paul. In the presence of one whose 
 whole nature evinced the intensity of his inspired conviction, they felt tliat 
 they could not assume the position of superiors or guides. 3 Whatever may 
 have been their original prejudices, these noble-hearted men allowed neither 
 their private predilections nor any fibro of natural jealousy to deter their 
 acknowledgment of their great fellow-workers. They gave to Paul and 
 Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, and acknowledged them as Apostles 
 to tho Gentiles. One touching request alone they made. The Church of 
 Jerusalem had been plunged from tho first in abject poverty. It had 
 suffered perhaps from the temporary experiment of communism; it had 
 
 1 The irapeM\9ri<rav vb TTJ* KKA)<7ias of Acts xv. 4 implies a preliminary meeting 
 distinct from the <rvTJx<h7<u' n of ver. 6. 
 
 3 Not here characterised as " the Lord's brother," because James, the son of Zebedee, 
 was dead, and James, the son of Alphffius, was an Apostle of whom nothing is known. 
 
 1 Gal. JL 7, ii6m< ; 9, yv4irr.
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JEKU8ALEM. 231 
 
 suffered certainly from the humble rank of its first converts, the persecu- 
 tions which they had endured, and the chronic famine to which their city 
 was liable. Paul and Barnabas were working in wealthy Antioch, and 
 were likely to travel among Gentiles, who, if not rich, were amply supplied 
 with the means of livelihood. Would they forget Jerusalem? Would they 
 suffer those to starve who had walked with Jesus by the Lake of Galileo, and 
 sat beside His feet when He preached the Sermon on the Mount ? Already 
 once they had brought from Antioch the deeply acceptable Chaluka, 1 which 
 in the fiercest moment of famine and persecution had as much relieved the 
 brethren as the royal bounties of Helena had sustained the Jews. Surely 
 they would not let religious differences prevent them from aiding the hunger- 
 bitten Church ? It might be that they had been treated by Jerusalem Chris- 
 tians of the Pharisaic party with surreptitious opposition and undisguised 
 dislike, but surely this would not weigh with them for a moment. The three 
 heads of the afflicted Church begged the missionaries to the luxurious world 
 "that they would remember the poor." It was a request in every respect 
 agreeable to the tender and sympathetic heart of Paul. 2 Apart from all 
 urging, he had already shown spontaneous earnestness 3 in his holy work of 
 compassion, and now that it came to him as a sort of request, by way of 
 acknowledging the full recognition which was being conceded to him, he was 
 only too glad to have such means of showing that, while he would not 
 yield an inch of essential truth, he would make any amount of sacrifice in the 
 cause of charity. Thenceforth Paul throw himself into the plan of collecting 
 alms for the poor saints at Jerusalem with characteristic eagerness. There 
 was scarcely a Church or a nation that he visited which he did not press for 
 contributions, and the Galatians themselves could recall the systematic plan 
 of collection which he had urged upon their notice. 4 In the very hottest 
 moment of displeasure against those who at any rate represented themselves 
 as emissaries of James, he never once relaxed his kindly efforts to prove to 
 the Church, which more than all others suspected and thwarted him, that even 
 theological differences, with all their exasperating bitterness, had not dulled 
 the generous sensibility of a heart which, by many a daily affliction, had learnt 
 to throb with sympathy for the afflicted. 
 
 One part, then, of his mission to Jerusalem was fulfilled when the Lord's 
 brother, and he to whom He had assigned "the keys of the kingdom of 
 heaven," and he who had leaned his head at tho Last Supper upon His breast, 
 had yielded to him their friendly acknowledgment. It is on this that ho 
 chiefly dwells to the Galatians. In their Churches brawling Judaisers had 
 dared to impugn his commission and disparage his teaching, on the asserted 
 
 s GaL ii, 10. 6 ical i<nroM<ura. aM irovro rroirjo-ai ', lit., " which also I was eager to do at 
 once that very tiling." " Quod etiam sollicitus fui hoc ipsum facere." (Vulg.) 
 
 s Acts xi. 29. 
 
 * 1 Cor. xvi. 3; cf. 2 Cor. viii., ix. ; Rom. rv. 27. Even many years after we find 
 St. Paul still most heartily fulfilling this part of the mutual compact (Acts xxiv. 17), 
 Phrygia alone seems to have contributed nothing.
 
 232 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAT7Z* 
 
 authority of the mother Church and its bishop. It was Paul's oLjocfc to prors 
 to them that his sacred independence had been acknowledged by the very men 
 who were now thrust into antagonism with his sentiments. There may be in 
 his language a little sense of wrong ; but, on the other hand, no candid reader 
 can fail to see that a fair summary of the antagonism to which he alludes is 
 this " Separation, not opposition; antagonism of the followers rather than of 
 the leaders ; personal antipathy of the Judaisers to St. Paul rather than of 
 St. Paul to the Twelve." 1 
 
 But St. Luko is dealing with another side of this visit. To him the 
 authority of Paul was not a subject of doubt, nor was it seriously questioned 
 by those for whom he wrote; but with the teaching of Paul it was far 
 different, and it was Luke's object to show that the main principles involved, 
 so far from being dangerous, had received the formal sanction of the older 
 Apostles. That there was a severe struggle he does not attempt to conceal, 
 but ho quotes an authentic document to prove that it ended triumphantly in 
 favour of the Apostle of tho Gentiles. 
 
 A concrete form was given to this debate by the presence of Titus as one 
 of Paul's companions. Around this young man arose, it is evident, a wild 
 clamour of controversy. The Judaisers insisted that he should be circumcised. 
 So long as he remained uncircumcised they refused to eat with him, ov to 
 regard Ir'm as in any true sense a brother. They may eYCu have been indig- 
 nant with Paul for his freo companionship with this Gentile, as they had 
 previously been with Peter for sharing the hospitality of Cornelius. The 
 Agapae were disturbed with these contentions, and with them the celebration 
 of the Holy Communion. Alike Titus and Paul must have had a troubled 
 time amid this storm of conflicting opinions, urged with the rancorous intensity 
 which Jews always display when their religious fanaticism is aroused. Even 
 after the lapse of five or six years 2 St. Paul cannot speak of this episode in 
 his life without an agitation which affects his knguage to so extraordinary a 
 degree as to render uncertain to us the result, of which doubtless the Galatians 
 were aware, but about which we should be glacl to have more complete 
 certainty. The question is, did Paul, in this particular instance, yield or not ? 
 In other words, was Titus circumcised? In the case of Timothy, Paul 
 avowedly took into account his Jewish parentage on the mother's side, aud 
 therefore circumcised him sis a Jew, and not as a Gentilo, because otherwise it 
 would have been impossible to secure his admission ainoHg Jews. Evcu this 
 might bo enough to givo rise to tho charges of inconsistency with which we 
 kuow him to have been assailed. But if he had indeed bowed to tho storm in 
 tho case of Titus if he, the firmest champion of Christian unciicumcibion, the 
 foremost preacher of the truth that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision was 
 anything nor uneircuiucioion, but faith which workoth by lovo,had still allowed 
 
 1 Joweti, fiomans, &c., i. 326. lu this essay, and that of Dr. Lightfoot on " St. Paul 
 aud the Three" (GaL 276316), the reader will find the facts fairly appreciated and 
 carefully (stated. 
 
 2 Tlie date of the "Council" at Jerusalem is about A.D. 61 ; that of the Epistle to 
 tLe Galatians about A.D. 53,
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 233 
 
 an adult Gentile convert to submit to a Jewish rite which had no meaning 
 except as an acknowledgment that he was bound to keep the Mosaic Law 
 then, indeed, he might be charged with having sacrificed the very point at 
 issue. He might of course urge that he had only done it for the moment by way 
 of peace, because otherwise the very life of Titus would have been endangered, 
 or because his presence in the Holy City might otherwise have caused false 
 rumours and terrible riots, 1 as the presence of Trophimus did in biter years. 
 He might say, " I circumcised Titus only because there was no other chance of 
 getting the question reasonably discussed ;" but if he yielded at all, however 
 noble and charitable may have been his motives, he gave to his opponents a 
 handle against him which assuredly they did not fail to use. 
 
 Now that he was most vehemently urged to take this step is clear, and 
 perhaps the extraordinary convulsiveness of his expressions is only due to the 
 memory of all that he must have undergone in that bitter straggle. 2 In hold- 
 ing out to the last he had, doubtless, been forced to encounter the pressure of 
 nearly the whole body of the Church at Jerusalem, including almost certainly 
 all who were living of the twelve Apostles, and their three leaders. Perhaps 
 even Barnabas himself might, as afterwards, have lost all firm grasp of truths 
 which seemed sufficiently clear when he was working with Paul alone on the 
 wild uplands of Lycaonia. Certainly St. Paul's moral courage triumphed over 
 the severest tost, if he had the firmness and fortitude to hold out against this 
 mass of influence. It would have been far bolder than Whitofield standing 
 before a conclave of Bishops, or Luther pleading his cause at Rome. As far 
 as courage was concerned, it is certain that no fear would ever have induced 
 him to give way ; but might he not have yielded ad interim, and as a charitable 
 concession, in order to secure a permanent result P 
 
 Let us consider, in all its roughness, his own language. " Then," he says, 
 " fourteen years after, 3 I again went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking 
 
 1 This element of the decision has been universally overlooked. Gentiles of course 
 there were in Jerusalem, but for a Jew deliberately to introduce an uncircumcised 
 Gentile a* a full partaker of all rclif/ious rites in a Judceo- Christian community was a 
 terribly dangerous experiment. If all the power and influence of Josephus could hardly 
 save from massacre two illustrious and hiyhly -connected Gentiles who had f.ed to him for 
 rcfui/e although there was no pretence of extending to them any religious privileges 
 because the multitude said that " they ought not to be suffered to live if they would not 
 change their religion to the religion or those to whom they fled for safety" (Vit. 31), how 
 could Paul answer for the life of Titus f 
 
 2 This is the view of Dr. Lightfoot (Gal. p. 102), who says, "The counsels of the 
 Apostles of the circumcision are the hidden rock on which the grammar of the sentence 
 is wrecked;" and "the sensible undercurrent of feeling, the broken grammar of the sen- 
 tence, the obvious tenour of particular phrases, all convey the impression that, though the 
 final victory was complete, it was not attained without a struggle, in which St. Paul 
 maintained, at one time almost single-handed, the cause of Gentile freedom." I give my 
 reason afterwards for adopting a different conclusion. The sense of a complete victory 
 contemplated years afterwards would hardly produce all this agitation. It would have 
 been alluded to with the calm modesty of conscious strength. Not so an error of judg- 
 ment involving serious consequences though actuated by the best motives. If Titus wot 
 not circumcised, why does not Paul plainly say sot 
 
 8 Gal. ii. 16. Fourteen years after his first visit,
 
 334 THE LIFE AND WOBK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 mith me aiso Titus. 1 Now, I went up in accordance with a revelation, and I 
 referred to them 2 the Gospel which I am preaching among the Gentiles 
 privately, however, to those of repute, lest perchance I am now running, 3 or 
 wren had run, to no purpose. 4 But not even Titus, who was with me, Greek 
 hough he was, was obliged to be circumcised; but [he was only circumcised?] 
 because of the stealthily-introduced false brethren people who came secretly 
 in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, in order that they 
 shall 6 utterly enslave us, [(to whom) not even] 6 for an hour did we yield by 
 way of submission in order that the truth of the Gospel may remain entirely 
 with you; 7 from those, however, who are reputed 8 to be something whatever 
 they were * makes no matter to mo God accepts no man's face well, to me 
 
 1 And some others, whom, however, he could hardly be said to " take with him " 
 (Acts xv. 2). 
 
 2 ivtOeniiv OUTOCS, "communicated" or "referred to them" not "placed in their 
 hands" (cf. Acts xxv. 14). Tertullian says "ad patrocinium Petri, <fcc.," which is too 
 strong. 
 
 3 I take Tpe'xu as an indie., but it may be the subjunctive, as in 1 Thess. iii. 5, and for 
 the metaphor Phil. ii. 16. 
 
 4 Dr. Lightfoot takes this to mean "that my past and present labours might not be 
 thwarted by opposition or misunderstanding." So Theophylact, ad loc., Iva. w ardo-is 
 yc'njrai tai tea ap0jj TO <TKa.vSa\ov. The context seems to me to show that it implies a desire 
 on St. Paul's part to know whether anything valid could be urged against his own personal 
 conviction. And so Tert. adv. Marc. i. 20 ; v. 3 ; iv. 2. The admission of the possibility 
 of a misgiving as to the practical issue only adds strength to the subsequent confirma- 
 tion. To St. Paul's uncertainty or momentary hesitation I would compare that of St. 
 John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 3). 
 
 5 Ka.raSov\^tTov<r>. (, A, B, C, D, E). I have literally translated the bold solecism, 
 which was not unknown to Hellenistic Greek, and by which it gains in vividness (cf. iv. 17, 
 
 Iva. AjAoun). 
 
 In the insertion, omission, or variation of these two words ots ov5e the MSS. and 
 quotations become as agitated and uncertain as the style of the writer. If we could 
 believe that the word ovfie "not even " was spurious it would then, I think, be obvious 
 that St. Paul meant to say, " Owing to these false brethren / did, it is true, make a 
 temporary concession (n-pos <upai-), but only with a view of ultimately securing for you 
 a permanent liberty" (Sianetvy npix vna<;) ; "ostendens," as Tertullian says, propter quid 
 fecerit quod nee fecisset nee ostendisset, si illxid propter quod fecit non accidisset " (adv. 
 Marc. v. 3). , But admittedly the evidence of the manuscripts is in favour of retaining 
 the negative, though it is omitted in Irenams, is absent from many Latin copies, is 
 declared on the doubtful authority of Victorinns to have been absent from the majority 
 of Latin and Greek manuscripts, and is asserted by Tertullian to have been fraudulently 
 introduced by the heretic Marcion. Surely the uncertainty which attaches to it, joined 
 to the fact that even its retention by no means excludes the supposition that Paul, to his 
 own great subsequent regret, had given way under protest while the debate was pending, 
 are arguments in favour of this having been the case. If this view be right it would give a 
 far deeper significance to such passages as Gal. i. 10 ; iv. 11. In that case his vacillation 
 was an error of policy, which we have no more reason to believe was impossible in his 
 case than a moral error was in that of St. Peter at Antioch ; but it would have been an 
 error of practical judgment, not of unsettled principle ; an error of noble self-abnegation, 
 not of timid complaisance. And surely St. Paul would have been the very last of men 
 to claim immunity from the possibility of error. " The fulness of divine gifts," says Dr. 
 Newman, " did not tend to destroy what is human in him, but to spiritualise and 
 perfect it." 
 
 7 SiafxeiVr]. 8 JoKoGires, "seem," not "seemed," as in E.V. 
 
 9 Kenan and others see in this a covert allusion to the former disbelief of James ; 
 this is utterly unlikely, seeing that the reference is also to Peter and John. It means, 
 rather, "however great their former privilege in nearness to the living Christ" (cf. 
 2 Cor. vi. 16). Indeed, it is better to join the >ror to the oiwoi, " qualescunque."
 
 IHE CONSULTATION AT JEETJSALEM. 235 
 
 these in repute added nothing." Such is a literal translation 01 his actual 
 words in this extraordinary sentence ; and he then proceeds to narrate the 
 acknowledgment of the Three, that his authority was in no sense disparate 
 with theirs ; nay, that in dealing with the Gentiles he was to be regarded as 
 specially endowed with Divine guidance. 
 
 But does he mean that, " I never for a moment yielded and circumcised 
 Titus, in spite of the enormous pressure which was put upon ine " ? or does he 
 mean, " I admit grieved as I am to admit it that in the case of Titus I did 
 yield. Titus was circumcised, but not under compulsion. I yielded, but not 
 out of submission. The concession which I made vast as it was, mistaken as 
 it may have been was not an abandonment of principle, but a stretch of 
 charity " ? 
 
 It must be remembered that Paul "cared for ideas, not for forms;" the 
 fact that circumcision was a matter in itself indifferent the admitted truth 
 that men could be saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by that 
 alone may have induced him, under strong pressure, 1 to concede that the rite 
 should be performed with the same kind of half -contemptuous indifference to 
 the exaggeration of trifles which makes him say to the Galatians in a burst of 
 bitter irony, " I wish that, while they are about it, these Judaisers, who make 
 so much of circumcision, would go a little farther still and make themselves 
 altogether like your priests of Agdistis." 2 When Paul took on him the 
 Nazarite vow, when he circumcised Timothy, 3 he did it out of a generous desire 
 to remove all needless causes of offence, and not to let his work be hindered 
 by a stiff refusal to give way in things unimportant. We know that it was his 
 avowed principle to become all things to all men, if so be ho might win some. 
 His soul was too large to stickle about matters of no moment. Can we not 
 imagine that in the wild strife of tongues which made Jerusalem hateful so 
 long as the uncircumcised Titus was moving among the members of the 
 Church, Paul might have got up and said, " I have come here to secure a 
 decision about a matter of vast moment. If the presence of Titus looks to 
 you like an offensive assertion of foregone conclusions well, ifc is only an 
 individual iushinco and while the question is still undecided, I will have him 
 circumcised, and wo shall then be able to proceed more calmly to the considera- 
 tion of the general question " ? Might he not have regarded this as a case in 
 Yi-hich it was advisable " reculer pour mieux sauter " ? and to his own friends 
 who shared his sentiments might he not have said, " What does it matter Lti 
 this particular instance? It can mean nothing. Titus himself is generous 
 enough to wish it for the sake of peace ; he fully understands that he is merely 
 yielding to a violent prejudice. It may be most useful to him in securing 
 future admission to Jewish assemblies. To him, to us, it will bo regarded as 
 'concision,' not 'circumcision;' an outward observance submitted to from 
 voluntary good nature ; not by any means a solemn precedent, or a significant 
 rite " ? And would not Titus have also urged the Apostle not to be deterred 
 
 ) Acts xv. 10. * GaL Y IT In the Creek). ActsxvL&
 
 236 THE LIFE AND WORK OF SI. PAUL. 
 
 by any consideration for him? Might he not naturally have said, "I am 
 grieved that there should be all this uproar and heart-burning on my account, 
 and I am quite willing to allay it by becoming a proselyte of righteousness " ? 
 If Titus took this generous line, Paul's reluctance to take advantage of his 
 generosity might have been increased, and yet an additional argument would 
 have been supplied to his opponents. " Moses," they would have said, 
 " commanded circumcision ; we cannot let this Gentile sit at our Agapze without 
 it ; he is himself, much to his credit, quite ready to consent to it ; why do you 
 persist in troubliug our Israel by your refusal to consent P " 
 
 For whatever may be urged against this view, I cannot imagine why, if 
 Paul did not yield, he should use language so ambiguous, so involved, that 
 whether we retain the negative or not his language has still led many as it 
 did in the earliest ages of the Church to believe that he did the very thing 
 which he is generally supposed to be denying. Nothing could have been 
 easier or pleasanter than to say, '' I did not circumcise Titus, though every 
 possible effort was made to force me to do so. My not doing so even at 
 Jerusalem, even at the beginning of the whole controversy, even at the head- 
 quarters of the Judfeo-Christian tyranny, even in the face of the evident wish 
 of the Apostles proves, once for all, both my independence and my con- 
 sistency." But it was immensely more difficult to explain why he really had 
 given ivay in that important instance. It may be that Titus was by his side 
 while he penned this very paragraph, and, if so, it would be to Paul a yet 
 more bitter reminder of a concession which, more than aught else, had been 
 quoted to prove his subjection and his insincerity. He is therefore so anxious 
 to show why ho did it, and what were not his motives, that ultimately he uncon- 
 sciously omits to say it in so many words at all. 1 And if, after the decision 
 of the meeting, and the battle which ho had fought, Paul still thought it 
 advisable to circumcise Timothy merely to avoid offending the Jews whom he 
 was about to visit, would not the same motives work with him at this earlier 
 period when he saw how the presence of Titus threw the whole Church into 
 confusion? If the false inferences which might be deduced from the con- 
 cession were greater in the case of a pure-bloodod Gentile, on the other hand 
 the necessity for diminishing offence was also more pressing, and tho obliga- 
 tormess of circumcision had at that timo been loss seriously impugned. And 
 it is even doubtful whether such a course was not overruled for good. But 
 for this step would it, for instance, have been possible for Titus to be overseer 
 of tho Church of Crete ? Would any circumcised Jew have tolerated at this 
 epoch the " episcopate " of an uncircuincised Gentile ? I have dwelt long 
 
 1 "Cette transaction cofttA bcaucoup a Paul, ct la phrase Jans laquelle il en parlo est 
 \iiic dcs plus originales qu'il ait ccritca. Lc mot qui lui couto scmble ne pouvoir couler 
 do sa plurao. La phrase au premier coup d'oiil parait dire que Titus ne fut p;is circoncis, 
 t.iiidis qu'eile implique qu'il le fut" (lienan, St. Paul, p. 92). It need hardly be said that 
 tliore ia no question of suppression here, because I assume that the fact was perfectly well 
 known. We find a similar characteristic of style and character in Rom. ix. Baur, on the 
 other hand (but on very insufficient grounds), thinks that "nothing can bo more absurd." 
 Yet it wa.3 the view of Tertullian (c. Marc. Y. 3), and Baur equally disbelieves the ex- 
 pressly asserted circumcision of Timothy f
 
 THB CONSULTATION AT JEBUSALEM. 237 
 
 npon this incident because, if I ain right, there are few events in the biography 
 of St. Paul more illustrative alike of his own character and of the circum- 
 stances of his day. He would rather have died, would rather have suffered a 
 schism between the Church of Jerusalem and the Churches of her Gentile 
 converts, than admit that there could be no salvation out of the pale of 
 Mosaism. In this or that instance he was ready enough perhaps, in tho 
 largeness of his heart, too ready for his own peace to go almost any length 
 rather than bring himself and, what was infinitely more dear to him, the 
 Gospel with which ho had been entrusted, into collision with the adamantine 
 walls of Pharisaic bigotry. But ho always let it be understood that his 
 principle remained intact that Christ had in every senso abolished tho curse 
 of the Law that, except in its universal moral precepts, it was no longer 
 binding on the Gentiles that the " traditions of the fathers " had for them 
 no further significance. He intended at all costs, by almost unlimited con- 
 cession in the case of individuals, by unflinching resistance when principles 
 were endangered, to establish, as far at any rate as the Gentiles were con- 
 cerned, the truth that Christ had obliterated the handwriting in force against 
 us, and taken it out of the way, nailing the torn fragments of its decrees to 
 His cross. 1 
 
 And so the great debate came on. The Apostles at any rate, their 
 leaders had to a great extent been won over in private conferences; the 
 opponents had been partially silenced by a personal concession. Paul must 
 have looked forward with breathless interest to the result of the meeting 
 which should decide whether Jerusalem was still to be the metropolis of the 
 Faith, or whether she was to be abandoned to the isolation of unprogressive 
 literalism, while the Gospel of Christ started on a new career from Antioeh 
 and from the West. One thing only must not be. She must not swathe the 
 daily-strengthening youth of Christianity in the dusty cerements of an 
 abolished system ; she must not make Christianity a religion of washings and 
 eleansings, of times and seasons, of meats and drinks, but a religion of holi- 
 ness and of the heart a religion in which men might eat or not as they 
 pleased, and might regard every day as alike sacred, so that they strove with 
 all their power to reveal in their lives a love to man springing out of the root 
 of love to God. 
 
 We are not surprised to hear that there was much eager and passionate 
 debate. 2 Doubtless, as in all similar gatherings of the Church to settle dis- 
 puted questions, there were mutual recriminations and misunderstandings, 
 instances of untenable argument, of inaccurate language, of confused concep- 
 tions. The Holy Spirit, indeed, was among them then, as now, in all gatherings 
 of faithful Christian men : He was with them to guide and to inspire. But 
 neither then nor now as we see by the clearest evidence of the New Testa- 
 ment then, and as we see by daily experience now did His influence work 
 to the miraculous extinction of human differences, or obliteration of human 
 
 Col it. 14. See on this dissension Hooker, Bed. Pol. IV. xi 4
 
 238 THE LIFE AND WORK OB 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 imperfections. Those who supported the cause of Paul rendered themselves 
 liable to those charges, so terrible to a Jew, of laxness, of irreligion, of apostasy, 
 of unpatriotism, of not being believers in revealed truth. Was not Moses 
 inspired P Was the Sacred Pentateuch to be reduced to a dead letter ? 
 Were all the curses of Ebal to be braved ? Were the Thorah-rolls to be flung 
 contemptuously into the Dead Sea ? On the other hand, those who main- 
 tained the necessity of circumcision and of obedience to the Law, laid them- 
 selves open to the fatal question, " If the Law is essential to salvation, what, 
 then, has been the work of Christ ? " 
 
 But when the subject had been amply discussed, Peter arose. 1 Which 
 side he would take could be hardly doubtful. He had, in fact, already braved 
 and overborne the brunt of a similar opposition. But an exceptional instance 
 was felt to be a very different thing from a universal rule. It was true that 
 Peter did not now stand alone, but found the moral support, which was so 
 necessary to him, in the calm dignity of Barnabas and the fervid genius of 
 Paul. But in all other respects his task was even more difficult than it had 
 been before, and, rising to the occasion, he spoke with corresponding boldness 
 and force. 2 His speech was in accordance with the practical, forthright, non- 
 argumentative turn of his mind. Filled with energetic conviction by the 
 logic of facts, he reminded them how, long ago, 3 the question had been prac- 
 tically settled. God had selected him to win over the first little body of 
 converts from the Gentile world ; and the gift of the Spirit to them had 
 showed that they were cleansed by faith. To lay on them the burden of the 
 Law a burden to the daily life which it surrounded with unpractical and 
 often all but impracticable observances a burden to the conscience because 
 it created a sense of obligation of which it could neither inspire the 
 fulfilment nor remedy the shortcoming a burden which had therefore been 
 found intolerable both by their fathers and themselves 4 was simply to 
 tempt God by hindering His manifest purposes, and resisting His manifest 
 will. In one doctrine all present were agreed ; 6 it was that alike the Jews 
 and the Gentile converts should be saved only by the grace of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. The inference then was obvious, that they were not and could 
 not be saved by the works of the Law. In the observance of those works the 
 Jews, on whom they were originally enjoined, might naturally persevere till 
 fresh light came ; but these hereditary customs had never been addressed to 
 the Gentiles, and, since they were unnecessary to salvation, they must 
 
 1 On the views of St. John, see Excursus XVII., " St. John and St. Paul." 
 
 2 Acts xv. 7 11. Again we have to notice the interesting circumstance that in this 
 brief speech the language is distinctly Petrine. Such minute marks of authenticity are 
 wholly beyond the reach of a forger. 
 
 3 The expression o<J>' i\^tpS>v <ipx<uW would naturally refer to the ipxn of the Gospel (cf. 
 xL 15 ; xxL 16 ; Phil. iv. 15). But if the conversion of Cornelius took place during the 
 " rest " procured for the Church by the absorption of the Jews in their attempt to rebut 
 the mad impiety of Gaius, A.D. 40, that was not twelve years before this time. 
 
 4 Gal. v. 3. The Law was a fvyis Sov\tiat, the Gospel a uyfc xp7|crr<fc, 
 (Matt. xi. 29, 30). 
 
 Cf. Acts xi. 17,
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 289 
 
 obviously be to the Gentiles not burdensome only, but a positive stumbling- 
 block. 
 
 The weight of Peter's dignity had produced silence in the assembly. The 
 excitement was now so far calmed that Paul and Barnabas were at least 
 listened to without interruptions. Barnabas who, in the Jewish Church, 
 still retained his precedence, and who was as acceptable to the audience from 
 his past liberality as Paul was unacceptable from his former persecutions 
 spoke first ; but both he and Paul seem to have abstained from arguing the 
 question. All the arguments had been urged at private conferences when 
 words could be deliberately considered. They were not there to impress 
 their own views, but to hear those of the Apostles and of the Church they 
 governed. Barnabas never seems to have been prominent in debate, and Paul 
 was too wise to discuss theological differences before a promiscuous audience. 
 They confined themselves, therefore, to a simple history of their mission, 
 dwelling especially on those " signs and wonders " wrought by their hands 
 among the Gentiles, which were a convincing proof that, though they might 
 not win the approval of man, they had all along enjoyed the blessing of 
 God. 
 
 Then rose James. Every one present must have felt that the practical 
 decision of the Church Paul must have felt that, humanly speaking, the 
 future of Christianity depended on his words. A sense of awe clung about 
 him and all he said and did. Clothed with a mysterious and indefinable 
 dignity as " the brother of the Lord," that dignity and mystery were enhanced 
 by his bearing, dress, manner of life, and entire appearance. Tradition, as 
 embodied in an Ebionite romance, and derived from thence by Hegesippus, 1 
 represents him as wearing no wool, but clothed in fine white linen from head to 
 foot, and either from some priestly element in his genealogy, or to symbolise 
 his " episcopate " at Jerusalem as wearing on his forehead the petalon, or 
 golden plate of High-priesthood. 2 It is said that he was so holy, and so highly 
 esteemed by the whole Jewish people, that he alone was allowed, like the 
 High Priest, to enter the Holy Place ; that he lived a celibate 3 and ascetic 
 life ; that he spent long hours alone in the Temple praying for the people, 
 till his knees became hard and callous as those of the camel ; that he had the 
 power of working miracles ; that the rain fell in accordance with his prayers ; 
 that it was owing to his merits that God's impending wrath was averted from 
 the Jewish nation; that he received the title of "the Just" and Obliam, or 
 " Rampart of the People ; and that he was shadowed forth in the images of ^ 
 
 1 "The Ascent of James." The narrative of Hegesippus Is quoted at length by 
 Eusebius, H. E, ii. 23. Other passages which relate to him are Epiphan. Haer. 
 bocviii. 7, 13, 14 ; Jor. De Ftrr. Ittustr. 2 ; Comm. in Gal. i. 19. 
 
 2 Epiphan. Haer. xxix. 4. The same story Is told of St. John, on the authority of 
 Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus (Euseb. H. E. iii. 31 ; v. 24). Either Polycrates haa 
 taken literally some metaphorical allusion, or John really did sometimes adopt a symbol 
 of Christian High-priesthood. The former seems the more probable supposition. 
 
 8 This is rendered doubtful by 1 Cor. ix. 5, unless he was an exception to the other 
 Desposyni,
 
 240 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 the prophets. 1 Some of these details must be purely imaginative ; but legends, 
 as has well been said, are like the clouds that gather upon the mountain sum- 
 mits, and show the height and take the shapes of the peaks about which they 
 cling. We may readily believe that he was a Nazarite, perhaps even an 
 ascetic one who, by the past affinities of his character, was bound rather to 
 B.anns, and John Baptist, and the strict communities of the Essenes, than to 
 the disciples of One who came eating and drinking, pouring on social life the 
 brightness of His holy joy, attending the banquet of the Pharisee at Caper- 
 naum, and the feast of the bridegroom at Cana, not shrinking from the tears 
 with which Mary of Hagdala or the perfumes with which Mary of Bethany 
 eiabathed his feet. 
 
 Such was the man who now rose to speak, with the long locks of the 
 Nazarite streaming over his white robe, and with all the sternness of aspect 
 which can hardly have failed to characterise one who was so rigid in his 
 convictions, so uncompromising in his judgments, so incisive in his speech. 
 The importance of his opinion lay in the certainty that it could hardly fail to 
 be, at least nominally, adopted by the multitude, among whom he exercised an 
 authority, purely local indeed and limited, but within those limits superior 
 even to that of Peter. The most fanatical of bigots could hardly refuse to be 
 bound by the judgment of one who was to the very depth of his being a loyal 
 Jew ; to whom even unconverted Jews looked up with reverence ; to whom 
 the " Law," which neither St. Peter nor St. John so much as mention in their 
 Epistles, was so entirely the most prominent conception that he does not 
 once mention the Gospel, and only alludes to it under the aspect of a law, 
 though as "the perfect law of liberty." 2 
 
 His speech which, as in so many other instances, bears internal marks of 
 authenticity 3 was^thoroughly Judaic in tone, and yet showed that the private 
 arguments of the Apostles of the Gentiles had not been thrown away on a 
 mind which, if in comparison with the mind of a Paul, and even of a Peter, it 
 was somewhat stern and narrow, was yet the mind of a remarkable and holy 
 man who would not struggle against the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. 
 Peter, in one of those impetuous outbursts of generous conviction which 
 carried him beyond his ordinary self, had dauntlessly laid down broad 
 principles which are, perhaps, the echo of thoughts which Paul had impressed 
 upon his mind. It would have been too much to expect that James would 
 speak with equal breadth and boldness. Had he done so, we should have felt 
 at once that he was using language unlike himself, unlike all that we know of 
 
 1 Dan. i. 8, 12 ; Tob. i. 11, 12. i? ol *po$qrat &jAov<n atpl OVTOV (Heges. ubi gupr.). 
 This, perhaps, refers to Isa. iii. 10. If he be the Jacob of Kephur Sechaniah he is 
 indeed regarded as a Min, yet he is represented as having various dealings with orthodox 
 Eabbis (Gratz, Gnostic, u. Judaism, p. 25). The name Oblias, rr'jyin, is explained by 
 Hausrath to mean "Jehovah my chain," with allusion to the Nazarite vow. Hitzig. 
 (.K7. Propheten) thinks the name may refer to the staff called " bands " in Zcch. xi. 7. 
 Is it possible the name may be some confusion of Abh learn, "father of the people"} 
 
 2 James i. 25 ; ii. 12. 
 
 * E.g., " on whom my name has been called ; " cf. James 11 7.
 
 THE CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM, 241 
 
 him, unlike the language of his own Epistle. But though his speech is as 
 different from St. Peter's as possible though it proposed restrictions where 
 he had indicated liberty it yet went farther than could have been hoped; 
 farther than bigots either liked or cordially accepted; and, above all, It 
 conceded the main point at issue hi implying that circumcision aud the 
 ceremonial law were, as a whole, non-essential for the Gentiles. 
 
 Requesting their attention, he reminded them that Symeon 1 as, using the 
 Hebrew form of the name, he characteristically calls his brother Apostle had 
 narrated to them the Divine intimations which led to the call of the Gentiles, 
 and this ho shows was in accordance with ancient prophecy, and, therefore, 
 with Divine fore-ordination, 2 -But obviously this was patent to all Jewa 
 alike the Gentiles would never accept the whole Mosaic Law. His au- 
 thoritative decision, 3 therefore, took the form of " a concession and a reserve." 
 He proposed to release the converted Gentiles from all but four restrictions 
 which belonged to what was called the Noachian dispensation 4 abstinence, 
 namely, from things polluted by being offered to idols, 5 and from fornication, 
 and from anything strangled, and from blood. 8 " For," he adds, hi words 
 which are pregnant with more than one significance, " Moses from of old hath 
 preachers in the synagogues in every city, being read every Sabbath day." 
 By this addition he probably meant to imply that since Moses was universally 
 read in synagogues attended both by Jews and by Gentile converts, we will 
 tell the Gentiles that this Law which they hear read is not universally 
 binding on them, but only so far as charity to the Jew requires; and we will 
 tell the Jewa that we have no desire to abrogate for them that Law to whose 
 ordinances they bear a weekly witness. 
 
 One of the most remarkable points in this speech is the argument deduced 
 from the prophecy of Amos, which was primarily meant as a prophecy of the 
 restoration of Israel from captivity, but which St. James, with a large 
 insight into the ever-widening horizons of prophecy, applies to the ideal 
 restoration, the reception of Jehovah as their common Father by the great 
 family of man. In the rebuilding of the ruined tabernacle of David he sees 
 the upraising of the Church of Christ as an ideal temple to which the Gentiles 
 also shall be joined. Nor is it a little striking that in adducing this prophecy 
 he quotes, not the Hebrew, but mainly the Septuagint. 7 The Greek differs 
 
 seems to 
 
 1 As in 2 Peter i. 1. This is the last mention of Peter in tha Acts. 
 
 8 Amos ix. 11, 12. The true reading here, among numberless divergences, 
 be yviavra. OLTT aluvot (*, B, C), "it has been known of old." James affirms what Amos 
 prophesied, but bis speech is not free from difficulties. (See Baur, Paul. i. 124.) 
 
 fyii (cpiVw, but he was onlypranws inter pares. (See Acts xv. ft; xxi. 25.) 
 
 4 See Gen. ix. 4. 
 
 6 Acts XV. 30, AXicr/i^ara rS>v iSiiAwv = el&<a\69vTa. (ver. 29 ; XXI. 25) AAuryAi - goal, to 
 redeem with blood" (Dan. i. 8 ; Mai. i. 7). We are told that the Jews in the days of 
 Antiochus were ready to die rather than fl$io\o6vr<av aTrvffve<r9a.i. 
 
 6 These two restrictions are practically identical, the m tra being only forbidden 
 
 eTv (ver, 19) occurs only in the LXX. 
 
 i*
 
 242 THE LIFE AND WORK OP Si, FAUt. 
 
 essentially from the Hebrew, and differs from it in the essence of thtS 
 interpretation, which lies not only in the ideal transference from the Temple 
 to the Church, but in direct reference to the Gentiles viz. : 
 
 " That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles 
 upon whom My name is called, saith the Lord." 
 
 But the Hebrew says, much less appositely to the purpose of the speaker, 
 
 " That they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen 
 npon whom My name is called, saith the Lord." 
 
 The difference is due to one of those numberless and often extraordinary 
 variations of the original text of which the Septuagint is so decisive a proof, 
 aud which makes that version so interesting a study. 1 This application of 
 James may be regarded as implicitly involved even in the Hebrew, and is yet 
 more directly supported by other passages ; 2 but the fact that here and else- 
 where the New Testament writers quote and argue from the undeniably 
 variant renderings of the Septuagint, quoting them from memory, and often 
 differing in actual words both from these and from the Hebrew, shows how 
 utterly removed was their deep reverence for Scripture from any superstition 
 about the literal dictation of mere words or letters. 
 
 The debate was now at an end, for all the leaders had spoken. The 
 objections had been silenced ; the voice of the chief elder had pronounced the 
 authoritative conclusion. It only remained to make that conclusion known to 
 those who were immediately concerned. The Apostles and Elders and the- 
 whole Church therefore ratified the decision, and selected two of their own 
 body, men of high repute Judas Barsabas and Silas 3 to accompany the 
 emissaries from the Church of Antioch on their return, and to be pledges 
 for the genuineness of their written communication. The letter which they 
 sent embodied their resolutions, and ran as follows : " The Apostles and 
 Elders 4 and brethren to the brethren from the Gentiles in Antioch and) Syria- 
 
 1 The LXX. seema clearly to have read OTH (ad&m), "man," for D'n> (cddm). Dt, 
 Davidson, Sacr. Hermen. p. 462, goes BO far as to suppose that the Jews have here' 
 altered the Hebrew text. 
 
 2 E.g., Ps. Lsxxvi. 9 ; xxii. 31 ; cii. 18 ; Isa. xliii. 7. 
 
 3 The Silas of Acts ia, of course, the Silvanus the name being Romanised for con-- 
 venience of the Epistles (1 Thess. i. 1 ; 2 Thess. i. 1), and perhaps of 1 Pet. v. 12. He 
 is not mentioned in the Acts after the first visit of St. Paul to Corinth, and in undesigned 
 coincidence with this his name disappears in the superscription of the Epistles after that 
 time. (See Wordsworth, Phil. i. 1.) 
 
 4 Although jcal ol is omitted (M, A, B, 0, the Vulgate and Armenian versions, 
 Irenseus, and Origen, and the /ecu. by D), I still believe them to be genuine. The diplo- 
 matic evidence seems indeed to be against them, the weight of the above Uncials, &o., 
 being superior to that of E, G, H, the majority of Cursives, and the Syriac, Coptic, and 
 yEthiopic versions. But objection to the apparent parity assigned to the brethren 
 might have led, even in early days, to their omission, while if not genuine it is not easy 
 to see why they should have been inserted. They also agree better with ver. 22, " with 
 the whole Church," and ver. 24, "going out from among us." The importance of the 
 reading is shown by its bearing on such debates as the admission of laymen into ecclesi- 
 astical conferences, &o. Wordsworth quotes from Beveridge, Codex Canonum Vindi- 
 catus, p. 20, the rule "Laid adjudicium de doctrina aut disciplina, Eccksiastica ferendum 
 nunquam admissi sunt." . , ... ; _ .
 
 TH CONSULTATION AT JfiBtTSALSfc. 243 
 
 and Cilicia, greeting. 1 Since we heard that some who went out from among na 
 troubled you with statements, subverting 1 your souls, who received no 
 injunction from ns, s we met together, and decided to select men and send them 
 to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 4 persons 5 who have given up 
 their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. 8 We have therefore 
 commissioned Judas and Silas to make in person the same announcement to you 
 by word of mouth namely, that it is our decision, under the guidance of the 
 Holy Ghost, 7 to lay no further burden 8 upon you beyond these necessary 
 things : to abstain from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from 
 strangled, and from fornication, in keeping yourselves from which it shall be 
 well with you. Farewell." 9 
 
 It will bo observed that throughout this account I have avoided the terms 
 " Council " and " decree." It is only by an unwarrantable extension of terms 
 that the meeting of the Church at Jerusalem can be called a " Council," and 
 the word connotes a totally different order of conceptions to those that were 
 prevalent at that early time. The so-called Council of Jerusalem in no way 
 resembled the General Councils of the Church, either in its history, its 
 constitution, or its object. It was not a convention of ordained delegates, but 
 a meeting of the entire Church of Jerusalem to receive a deputation from 
 the Church of Antioch. Even Paul and Barnabas seem to have had no vote 
 in the decision, though the votes of a promiscuous body could certainly 
 not be more enlightened than theirs, nor was their allegiance due in any way 
 to James. The Church of Jerusalem might out of respect be consulted, but 
 it had no claim to superiority, no abstract prerogative to bind its decisions on 
 the free Church of God. 10 The " decree " of the " Council " was little more 
 than the wise recommendation of a single synod, addressed to a particular dia- 
 
 . 
 1 vaiptw, lit. "rejoice." It is a curious circumstance that the Greek salutation for 
 
 , 
 
 the Hebrew salutation would be DiV^, " Peace " is only found in the letter of a Gentile, 
 Claudius Lysias (xxiii. 26), and in the letter of him who must have taken a main part in 
 drawing up this letter (James i. 1). 
 
 2 o.vatrKevaovrt*, lit., "digging up from the foundations" (Thuc. iv. 116). 
 
 3 This disavowal is complete, and yet whole romances about counter-missions in direct 
 opposition to St. Paul, ana organised by James, are securely built on the expression in 
 Gal. ii. 12, T ii>a? awb 'laK<i/3ov, though it is very little stronger than the rim KareMovKs in-b 
 rijs 'loviat'os of xv. 1, and not so strong as the TIWS f TIHUV it\6ovrrs here. 
 
 * In order, of course, that no possible suspicion might attach to the letter as an 
 expression of their real sentiments. 
 
 5 I have expressed the difference of avSpaf and ivQpuravt, but the only difference 
 Intended is that the latter expression is more generic. 
 
 6 They were martyrs at least in will (Alf.). 
 
 7 Cf. Ex. xiv. 81; 1 Sam. xii. 18. Hence the "Sancto Spiritu suggerente," com- 
 monly prefixed to decrees of Councils. 
 
 8 This word (cf. ver. 10) seems to show the hand of Peter (cf. Rev. ii. 24). 
 
 9 D, followed by some versions, and many Cursives, has the curious addition, 
 " and whatsoever ye do not wish to be done to yourselves, do not to another. Farewell, 
 walking in the Holy Spirit." With these minimum requirements, intended to put 
 Gentiles on the footing of Proselytes of the Gate, compare Lev. xvii. 816 ; xviii. 20. 
 
 10 See Article xxi. Pope Benedict XTV. says, "Speticm quandam et imaginem 
 Synodi in praedicta congregatione eminere" (De Synod. i. 15; op Denton, Act* 
 ii. 82).
 
 244 THE LIFB AND WOES OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 triet, and possessing only a temporary validity. 1 It was, in fact, a local 
 concordat. Little or no attention has been paid by the universal Church to 
 two of its restrictions ; a third, not many years after, was twice discussed and 
 settled by Paul, on the same general principles, but with a by no means 
 identical conclusion. 8 The concession which it made to the Gentiles, in not 
 insisting on the necessity of circumcision, was equally treated as a dead letter 
 by the Judaising party, and cost Paul the severest battlo of his lifetime to 
 maintain. If this circular letter is to be regarded as a binding and final 
 decreo, and if tho meeting of a single Church, not by delegates but in the 
 person of all its members, is to bo regarded as a Council, never was the 
 decision of a Council less appealed to, and never was a decree regarded as so 
 entirely inoperative alike by those who repudiated the validity of its conces- 
 sions, 3 and by those who discussed, as though they were still an open question, 
 no less than three of its four restrictions. 4 
 
 The letter came to the Churches like a message of peace. I; Its very limita- 
 tion was, at the time, the best proof of its inspired wisdom. Considering the 
 then state of the Church, no decision could have more clearly evinced the 
 guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. 5 It was all the more valuable because 
 there were so many questions which it left unsolved. The heads of the 
 Church admitted and that was something that circumcision was non- 
 essential to Gentiles, and they may seem to have indulged in an extreme 
 liberality in not pressing tho distinction between clean and unclean moats, 
 and, above all, in not insisting on the abstinence from the flesh of swine. By 
 these concessions they undoubtedly removed great difficulties from the path of 
 Gentile converts. But, after all, a multitude o most pressing questions 
 remained, and left au opening for each party to hold almost exactly the same 
 opinions as before. A Gentile was not to be compelled to circumcision and 
 Hosaism. Good ; but might it not be infinitely better for him to accept them P 
 Might there not have been in the minds of Jewish Christians, as in those of 
 later Rabbis, a belief that " even if Gentiles observe the seven Noachiaa pre- 
 cepts, they do not receive the same reward as Israelites ? " a It is, at any rate, 
 clear that neither now nor afterwards did the Judaisers admit Paul's dogmatic 
 principles, as subsequently stated to the Galatians and Romans. Probably 
 
 . 
 
 i Hooker, Eccl. Pol. IV. xi. 5. 2 Rom. xiv. ; 1 Cor. viii. 
 
 3 Gal. iii. 1 ; v. 2, and passim. It is astonishing to find that even Justin declares the 
 eating of fl8<a\o6vTa to be as bad as idolatry, and will hold no intercourse with those who 
 
 do it (Dial. c. Tryph. 35) ; but the reason was that by that time (as in the days of the 
 Maccabees) it had been adopted by the heathen aa a test 
 1 Cor. x. 20, 21. (Ritschl, Alt. Kath. Kirch, 310, 2nd ed.) 
 
 St. Paul discusses tho question of meats offered to idols without the remotest 
 reference to this decree, and the Western Church have never hold themselves bound to 
 abstain "from things strangled," and from blood (Aug. c. Faust, xxxii. 13). St. Paul's 
 gilenco about the decree when he writes to the Romans perhaps rises from its pro- 
 visional and partial character. It was only addressed to the Gentile converts of 
 " Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia." 
 
 6 "Ha virent que le seul moyen d'e*ohapper aux grands questions est de ne pas lea 
 rlsoudre . . . de laisser lea problems* I'oaer et moorir faute de raison d'etre " (Ren in, 
 St. P. 93). 
 
 Abhtda Zara, i . 8, L
 
 THB CONSULTATION AT JERUSALEM. 245 
 
 they regarded him, at the best, as the Ananias for futnre Eleazers. 1 Above 
 all, the burning question of social relations remained untouched. Titus had 
 been circumcised as the only condition on which the members of the Church 
 at Jerusalem would let him move on an equal footing among themselves. It 
 was all very well for them to decide with more or less indifference about 
 " clioois learets," " the outer world," " people elsewhere," " those afar," 3 as 
 though they could much more easily contemplate the toleration of uncircum- 
 cised Christians, provided that they were out of eight and out of mind in 
 distant cities ; but a Jew was a Jew, even if he lived in the wilds of Isauria 
 or the burnt plains of Phrygia ; and how did this decision at Jerusalem help 
 him to face the practical question, " Am I, or am I not, to share a common 
 table with, to submit to the daily contact of people that eat freely of that 
 which no true Jew can think of without a thrill of horror 'the unclean 
 beast ?" 
 
 These were the questions which, after all, could only be left to the solution 
 of time. The prejudices of fifteen centuries could not be removed in a day. 
 Alike the more enlightened and the more bigoted of Jews and Gentiles con- 
 tinued to think very much as thoy had thought before, until the darkness of 
 prejudice was scattered by the broadening light of history and of reason. 
 
 The genuineness of this cyclical letter is evinced by its extreme naturalness. 
 A religious romancist could not possibly have invented anything which left so 
 much unsolved. And this genuineness also accounts for the startling appear- 
 ance of a grave moral crime among things so purely ceremonial as particular 
 kinds of food. There is probably no other period iu the history of the world 
 at which the Apostles would have found it needful to toll their Gentile con- 
 verts to abstain from fornication, as well as from things offered to idols, things 
 strangled, and blood. The first of these four prohibitions was perfectly intel- 
 ligible, because it must have boon often necessary for a Gentilo Christian to 
 prove to his Jewish brethren that he had no hankering after the " abominable 
 idolatries " which he had so recently abandoned. The two next prohibitions 
 were desirable as a concession to the indefinable horror with which the Jews 
 and many other Eastern races regarded the eating of the blood, which they 
 considered to bo " the very life." 3 But only at such a period as this could a 
 moral pollution have been placed on even apparently the sama footing as 
 matters of purely national prejudice. That the reading is correct,* and that 
 
 * See Plleiderer, ii. 13. * Acta ii. 39, oi jpa.< ; Col. iv. 5, oi . 
 
 8 Gen. ix. 4 ; Lev. xvii. 14. So too Koran, Sur. v. 4. See Biihr, SyttudZk, ii. 207. 
 On the other hand, " the blood" was a special delicacy to the heathen (Horn. Od, iii. 
 470; xviii. 44; Ov. Met. xii. 154); and hence "things strangled" were with them a 
 common article of food. Rutilius calls the Jew, "Huinauis animal dissocial ecib is'' (It. i. 
 884). Even this 'restriction involved a most inconvenient necessity for nerer eating any meat 
 but kosher, t.f., meat prepared by Jewish butchers in special accordance with the laws of 
 slaughtering (moTTO). It would more or less necessitate what would be, to Gentile at 
 any rate, most repellent the " cophinus foenumque supellex" (Juy- &*< "i- 1^) which 
 were, for these reasons, the peculiarity of the Jew (Sidon. Up. vii. C). 
 
 4 There is not the faintest atom of probability In Bentley a conjecture of noontut. At 
 the same time, it must be noted as an extraordinary stretch of liberality on the part of 
 the Judaisers not to require the abstention from rmne's flesh by their Gentile brethren
 
 246 THK LIFE AND WORK O ST. PAT7I* 
 
 the thing forbidden is the sin of fornication, 1 not idolatry, or mixe t d marriages, 
 or marriages between blood relations (1 Cor. v. 1), or second marriages 
 (1 Tim. iii. 2), or any of the other explanations in which an astonished exegesis 
 has taken refuge, must be regarded as certain. How, then, can the fact be 
 accounted for ? Only by the boundless profligacy of heathendom ; only by 
 the stern purity of Christian morals. The Jews, as a nation, were probably 
 the purest among all the races of mankind ; yet even they did not regard this 
 sin as being the moral crime which Christianity teaches us to consider it; * 
 and they lived in the midst of a world which regarded it as so completely a 
 matter of indifference that Socrates has no censure for it, 3 and Cicero declares 
 that no Pagan moralist had ever dreamt of meeting it with an absolute pro- 
 hibition. 4 What is it that has made the difference in the aspect which sensu- 
 ality wears to the ancient and to the modern conscience P I have no hesitation 
 in answering that the reason is to be found in the purity which every page of 
 the New Testament breathes and inspires, and specially in the words of our 
 Blessed Lord, and in the arguments of St. Paul. If the blush of modesty on 
 youthful cheeks is a holy thing, if it be fatal alike to individuals and to nations 
 " to burn away in mad waste " the most precious gifts of life, if debauchery 
 be a curse and stain which more than any other has eaten into the heart of 
 human happiness, then the saintly benefactor to whose spirituality we owe the 
 inestimable boon of having impressed these truths upon the youth of every 
 Christian land is he who taught by the Spirit of the Lord showed more 
 clearly, more calmly, more convincingly than any human being has ever 
 shown, the true heinousness, the debasing tendency, the infusive virulence of 
 sins which, through the body, strike their venom and infix their cancer into 
 
 ('lovato Qarrov o.v an-odavoi ij \oipelov <f>a.yoi, Sext. Emp. ; see Tac. H, v. 4 ; Sen. Ep. 108, 22 ; 
 Macrob. Sat. ii. 4). This abstinence was common in the East (Dion Cass. Ixxix. 11). 
 
 , ' The notion that Tropi'ei'a can mean things told (wtpvyiu) in the market after idol feast* 
 is also utterly untenable. See the question examined by Baur, Paul. i. 14G, teq. 
 Besides, the four prohibitions correspond to those attributed to Peter in Ps. Clem. Horn, 
 
 Vil. 4, Where ^.7) atcaSapria^ filovv = iropvfia. 
 
 5 In point of fact the Jews probably regarded the other three things with infinitely 
 greater horror than tliis. The practice even of their own Rabbis, though veiled under 
 certain decent forms, was far looser than it should have been, as is proved by passages 
 in the Talmud (Gittin, f. 90 ; Joma, f. 18, 2 ; Selden, Ux. Hebr. iii. 17). 
 
 s Xen. Mem. iii. 13. 
 
 * This passage is remarkable as coming from one of the purest of all ancient writers 
 (Cio. pro Gael. xx. ; cf. Ter. Addph, i. 2, 21). The elder Cato was regarded as a model 
 of stern Roman virtue, yet what would be thought in Christian days of a man who spoke 
 and acted as he did? (I [or. Sat. i. 2, 31.) If Cato could so regard the sin, what must 
 have been the vulgar estimate of it? Nor must it be forgotten that the letter was 
 addressed to Jews and Gentiles alike familiar with an epoch in which, as indeed for 
 many previous centuries, this crtme, and crimes yet more heinous, formed a recognised 
 part of the religious worship^ of certain divinities {cf. Baruch vi. 43; Strabo, viii. 6); 
 and in which the pages of writers who reek with stains like these formed a port -of the 
 current literature. Few circumstances can show more clearly the change which Christi- 
 anity has wrought. But to every reader of the letter the immediate link of connexion 
 between iJw\o0vTa and iroprei'a would be but too obvious. Further, it should be steadily 
 observed that the allusions stern yet tender, uncompromising yet merciful of St. 
 Paul's own Epistles to the preraleuce of this sin, show most decidedly that if conversion 
 at once revealed to Christians its true heinousness, it often failed to shield them against 
 temptation to its commission.
 
 8T PETER AND ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. 247 
 
 the soul ; of sins which have this peculiar sin fulness that thoy not only 
 destroy the peace and endanger the salvation of the soul which is responsible 
 for itself, but also the souls of others, which, in consequence of tho sinner's 
 guilty influence, may remain impenitent, yet for the sake of which, no less than 
 for bis own, Christ died. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. | 
 
 r "Separati epulis, discreti cubilibus." TAC. H. T. 6. 
 
 " At ais Ecclesia est sancta, Patres sunt sancti. Bene ; Bed Ecclesia quamlibet 
 sancta tamen cogitur dicere Remitte nobis peccata nostra. Sic Patres quamlibet 
 Bancti per remissionem peccatorum salvati sunt." LUTHER, Comm. on Galat. i. 
 
 SUCH, then, was the result of the appeal upon which the Judaisors had 
 insisted ; and so far as the main issue was concerned the Judaisers had been 
 defeated. The Apostles, in almost indignantly repudiating the claim of these 
 men to express their opinions, had given them a rebuff. They had intimated 
 their dislike that the peace of Churches should be thus agitated, and had 
 declared that circumcision was not to be demanded from the Gentiles. It 
 needed but a small power of logic to see that, Christianity being what it was, 
 the decision at least implied that converts, whether Jews or Gentiles, were to 
 bear and forbear, and to meet together as equals in all religious and social 
 gatherings. The return of the delegates was therefore hailed with joy in 
 Antioch, and the presence of able and enlightened teachers like Judas and 
 Silas, who really were what the Pharisaic party had falsely claimed to be 
 the direct exponents of the views of the Apostles diffused a general sense of 
 unity and confidence. After a brief stay, these two emissaries returned to 
 Jerusalem. 1 On Silas, however, the spell of Paul's greatness had been so 
 powerfully exercised that he came back to Antioch, and threw in his lot for 
 some time with the great Apostle of the Gentiles 2 . 
 
 Paul, in fact, by the intensity of his convictions, the enlightenment of his 
 nnderstanding, the singleness of his purpose, had made himself completely 
 master of the situation. He had come to the very forefront in the guidance 
 of the Church. The future of Christianity rested with the Gentiles, and to 
 the Gentiles the acts and writings of Paul were to be of greater importance 
 than those of all the other Apostles. His Apostokte had been decisively 
 recognised. He had met Peter and John, and even the awe-inspiring brother 
 
 1 The true reading is not irpbs TOUS 'Airoo-roXow, as in our version, but " to those who 
 
 ent them " (n-pbs TOV? anxxrTeiAarras avrouv N, A, B, C, D). 
 
 '-The reading of our version, ver. 34, "Notwithstanding it pleased Silas to abide 
 there still," is the pragmatic gloss of a few MSS., to which D adds ,i6m 'Iou&s it-op v0ij. 
 It is not found in n, A, B, G, E, H. Of course, either this fact or the return of 
 Silas is implied by ver. 40, but the separate insertion of it is exactly one of those 
 trivialities which ancient writers are far less apt than moderns to record.
 
 248 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of the Lord, in conference, and found himself so completely their equal in the 
 gifts of the Holy Ghost, that it was impossible for them to resist his 
 credentials. He had greatly enlarged their horizon, and they had added 
 nothing to him. He had returned from Jerusalem more than ever conscious 
 of himself, conscious of his own power, clear in his future purposes. He 
 inspired into the Church of Antioch his own convictions with a force which 
 no one could resist. 
 
 But since the letter from Jerusalem suggested so many inquiries, and laid 
 down no universal principle, it was inevitable that serious complications 
 should subsequently arise. A scene shortly occurred which tested to the 
 extremest degree the intellectual firmness and moral courage of St. Paul. St. 
 Peter seems about this time to have begun that course of wider journeys 
 which, little as we know of them, carried him in some way or other to his 
 final martyrdom at Rome. "We do not again hear of his presence at Jerusalem. 
 John continued there in 'all probability for many years, and Peter may have 
 felt his presence needless ; nor is it unlikely that, as Peter dwelt on the wider 
 views which he had learnt from intercourse with his brother Apostle, ho may 
 have found himself less able to sympathise with the more Judaic Christianity 
 of James. At any rate, we find him not long after this period at Antioch, and 
 there so frankly adopting the views of St. Paul, that he not only extended to 
 all Gentiles the free intercourse which he had long ago interchanged with 
 Cornelius, but seems in other and more marked ways to have laid aside the 
 burden of Judaism. 1 Paul could not but have rejoiced at this public proof 
 that the views of the Apostle of the circumcision were, on this momentous 
 subject, identical with his own. But this happiness was destined to be 
 seriously disturbed. As tho peace of the Church of Antioch had been pre- 
 viously troubled by " certain which came down from Jerusalem," so it was 
 uow broken by the arrival of " certain from James." Up to this time, in the 
 Agapw of Antioch, the distinction of Jew and Gentile had been merged in a 
 common Christianity, and this equal brotherhood had been countenanced by 
 the presence of the Apostle who had lived from earliest discipleship in the 
 closest intercourse with Christ. But now a cloud suddenly came over this 
 frank intercourse. 3 Under the influence of timidity, the plastic nature of 
 Peter, susceptible as it always was to the impress of the moment, began to 
 assume a new aspect. His attitude to the Gentile converts was altered. " He 
 began to draw away and separate himself," in order not to oft'end the rigid 
 adherents of the Lord's brother. 3 It is not said that they claimed any direct 
 authority, or were armed with any express commission ; but they were strict 
 Jews, who, however much they might tolerate the non-observance of the Law 
 by Gentiles, looked with suspicion perhaps almost with horror on any Jew 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 14, tfcucwt xal ov\ 'lovScuxwf 6Js. Nothing definite can be made of the 
 tradition that St. Peter was first Bishop of Antioch. 
 
 2 If the reading ifAflo/ in GaL ii. 12 were right it could only point to James himself ; 
 but this would have been a fact which tradition could not have forgotten, and Jamei 
 seems never to have left Jerusalem. 
 
 8 Gal. ii. 12, vircVreAAey KCU i.<f>iapi(w
 
 ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. 249 
 
 who repudiated obligations which, for him at any rate, they regarded as 
 stringent and sacred. 1 A false shame, a fear of what these men might 
 say, dislike to face a censure which would acquire force from those 
 accumulated years of habit which the vision of Joppa had modified, but not 
 neutralised perhaps too a bitter recollection of all he had gone through on a 
 former occasion when he " had gone in unto men uucircumcised and eaten 
 with them " led Peter into downright hypocrisy. 2 Without any acknowledged 
 change of view, without a word of public explanation, he suddenly changed his 
 course of life, and it was almost inevitable that the other Jewish Christians 
 should follow this weak and vacillating example. The Apostle who " seemed 
 to be a pillar " proved to be a " reed shaken with the wind." 3 To the grief 
 and shame of Paul, even Barnabas Barnabas, his fellow-worker in the 
 Churches of the Gentiles even Barnabas, who had stood side by side with him 
 to plead for the liberty of the Gentiles at Jerusalem, was swept away by the 
 flood of inconsistency, and in remembering that he was a Levite forgot that he 
 was a Christian. In fact, a strong Jewish reaction set in. There was no 
 question of charity here, but a question of principle. To eat with the Gentiles, 
 to live as do the Gentiles, was for a Jew either right or wrong. Interpreted in 
 the light of those truths which lay at the very bases of the Gospel, it was 
 right ; and if the Church was to be one and indi visible, the agreement that the 
 Gentiles were not to put on the yoke of Mosaism seemed to imply that they 
 were not to lose status by declining to do so. But to shilly-shally on the 
 matter, to act in one way to-day and in a different way tc-morrow, to let the 
 question of friendly intercourse depend on the presence or absence of people 
 who were supposed to represent the stern personality of James, could not under 
 any circumstances bo right. It was monstrous that the uucircumcised Gontiln 
 convert was at one time to be treated as a brother, and at another to be shunned 
 as though ho were a Pariah. This was an uncertain, underhand sort of pro- 
 cedure, which St. Paul could not for a moment sanction. He could not stand 
 by to see the triumph of the Pharisaic party over the indecision of men like 
 Peter and Baraabas. For the moral weakness which succumbs to impulse he 
 had the deepest tenderness, but he nover permitted himself to maintain a truce 
 with the interested selfishness which, at a moment's notice, would sacrifice a 
 duty to avoid an inconvenience. Paul saw at a glance that Kophas* (and tho 
 Hebrew name seemed best to suit the Hebraic defection) was wrongwrong 
 
 1 How anxious James was to conciliate the inflammable multitude who were "zealous 
 for tlie Law " is apparent from Acts xxi. 24. 
 
 - The forger of the letter of Peter to James, printed at the head of the Clementina 
 Homilies, deeply resents the expression, 2. But St. Peter's " hypocrisy " consisted in 
 "having impHed an objection which he did not really feel, or which his pr "" itnm 
 
 did notlustify " (Jowett, Ghd, i. 246). It is idle to say that this shows the non-existence 
 of the "decree;" that, as I have shown, left the question of intercourse with th 
 Gentiles entirely undefined. 
 
 3 See Hausrath, p. 252. " Boldness and timidity first boldness, then timidity were, 
 the characteristics of his nature" (Jowett, i. 243). See aJso Excursus XVIL, " Bt. John 
 and St. Paul." 
 
 4 Gal. il. 11, K>54>a (H. A, B, G):
 
 250 THE LIFE AND WORK 05 1 81. PAUL. 
 
 intellectually, if not morally and that he was mainly responsible for the wrong 
 into which the others had been betrayed by his example. Ho did not, there- 
 fore, hesitate to withstand him to the face. It was no occasion for private 
 remonstrance ; the reproof must be as public as the wrong, or the whole cause 
 might be permanently imperilled. Perhaps few things demand a firmer reso- 
 lution than the open blame of those who in age and position are superior to 
 ourselves. For one who had been a fierce persecutor of Christians to rebuke 
 one who had lived in daily intercourse with Christ was a very hard task. It 
 was still more paiuf ul to involve Barnabas and other friends in the same cen- 
 sure ; but that was what duty demanded, and duty was a thing from which 
 Paul never shrank. 
 
 Rising at somo public gathering of the Church, at which both Jews and 
 Gentiles were present, he pointedly addressed Peter in language well calculated 
 to show him that he stood condemned. 1 " If thou," he said before them all, 
 " being a born Jew, art living Gentile fashion and not Jew fashion, how 2 canst 
 thou try 3 to compel the Gentiles to Judaise P " * So far his language complained 
 of his brother Apostle's inconsistency rather than of his present conduct. It 
 was intended to reveal the inconsistency which Peter had wished to hide. It 
 directly charged him with having done the very thing which his present with- 
 drawal from Gentile communion was meant to veil. " You have been living as 
 a Gentile Christian in the midst of Gentile Christians ; you may alter your 
 line at this moment, but such has been your deliberate conduct. Now, if it is 
 unnecessary for you, a born Jew, to keep the Law, how can it be necessary, 
 even as a counsel of perfection, that the Gentiles should do so ? Yet it must 
 be necessary, or at least desirable, if, short of this, you do not even consider 
 the Gentiles worthy of your daily intercourse. If your present separation 
 means that you consider it to be a contamination to eat with them, you are 
 practically forcing them to be like you in all respects. Be it so, if such is your 
 view ; but let that view be clearly understood. The Church must not be de- 
 ceived as to what your example has been. If indeed that conduct was wrong, 
 then say so, and let us know your reasons ; but if that conduct was not wrong, 
 then it concedes the entire equality and liberty which in the name of Christ we 
 claim for our Gentile brethren, and you have left yourself no further right to 
 cast a doubt on this by your present behaviour." It has been the opinion of 
 some that St. Paul's actual speech to Peter ended with this question, and that 
 the rest of the chapter is an argument addressed to the Galatians. But 
 though, in his eager writing, Sfc, Paul may unconsciously pass from what he 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 11, KaTeyvGxrfwVo? fa. This is the word which gives such bitter offence to the 
 forger of the Clementine Homilies, xvii. 18, 19. " Thou didst withstand me as an oppo- 
 nent (ivavruK av8(<miica.s /not) . . . If thou caUest me condemned ((tarryi/w^eVos) thou accusewt 
 God who revealed Christ to me," &c., and much more to the same effect. 
 
 * rco. 
 
 3 Gal. ii. 14. The wrong aspirate in oux'IovSaiVi* may be a Ciliciam. But surely the 
 editors should give iis !ovSaiVfc. The {</>' tAn-i'Si of the best MSS. in 1 Cor. ix. 10 is supported 
 by the occurrence of eAtrt? in inscriptions. 
 
 4 avayico^eif, "are by your present conduct practically obliging." "He was half a 
 Gentile, and wanted to make the Gentiles altogether Jewi " (Jowett, Qalat. i. 244),
 
 BT. PKTEB AND ST. PAUL AT AKTIOCH. 251 
 
 said in the assembly at Antioch to the argument which he addressed to apos- 
 tatising converts in Galatia, yet he can hardly have thrown away the opportunity 
 of impressing his clear convictions on this subject upon Peter and the Church 
 of Antioch. He wished to drive home the sole legitimate and logical conse- 
 quence of the points already established ; and we can scarcely doubt that he 
 used on this occasion some of those striking arguments which we shall 
 subsequently examine in the Epistle to the Galatians. 1 
 
 They all turn on the great truth over which the Holy Spirit had now given 
 him so firm a grasp the truth of Justification by Faith alone. If no man 
 could see salvation save by means of faith, and on account of Christ's mercy, 
 then even for the Jew the Law was superfluous. The Jew, however, might, 
 on grounds of national patriotism, blamelessly continue the observances which 
 were ancient and venerable, 2 provided that he did not trust in them. But the 
 Gentile was in no way bound by them, and to treat him as an inferior because 
 of this immunity was to act in contradiction to the first principles of Christian 
 faith. The contrasted views of St. Paul and of the Judaists were here 
 brought into distinct collision, and thereby into the full liglit on which 
 depended their solution. Faith without the Law, said the Judaists, means a 
 state of Gentile " sinfulness." Faith with the Law, replied St. Paul, means 
 that Christ has died in vain. 3 Among good and holy men love would still be 
 'the girdle of perf ectness ; but when the controversy waxed fierce between 
 
 1 See on GaL ii. 1621, infra, p. 436. 
 
 9 See some admirable remarks on the subject in Augustine, Ep. Ixxxii. He argues 
 that, after the revelation of faith in Christ, the ordinances of the Law had lost their 
 life : but that just as the bodies of the dead ought to be honourably conducted, with no 
 feigned honour, but with real solemnity to the tomb, and not to be at once deserted to 
 the abuse of enemies or the attacks of dogs so there was need that the respect for the 
 Mosaic Law should not be instantly or rudely flung aside. But, he says, that even for a 
 Jewish Christian to observe what could still be observed of the Law after it had been 
 abrogated by God's own purpose in the destruction of Jerusalem, would be to act the 
 part, not of one who honours the dead, but of one who tears out of their resting- 
 places the buried ashes of the slain. 
 
 1 Holstein, Protestantenbibel, 729. This dissension if dissension it could be called 
 between the two great Apostles will shock those only who, in defiance of all Scripture, 
 persist in regarding the Apostles as specimens of supernatural perfection. Of course, the 
 'errors of good men, eren if they be mere errors of timidity On one side and vehemence on 
 jthe other, will always expose them to the taunts of infidels. But when Celsus talks of 
 'the Apostles "inveighing against each other so shamefully in their quarrels," he is 
 jguilty so far as the New Testament account of the Apostles is concerned of gross 
 calumny (op. Orig. c. Celt. v. 64). The "blot of error," of which Porphyry accused St. 
 Peter, shows only that he was human, and neither Gospels nor Epistles attempt to 
 conceal his weaknesses. The "petulance of language " with which he charges St. Paul 
 finds no justification in the stern and solemn tone of this rebuke; stud to deduce from 
 this dispute " the lie of a pretended decree " is a mere abuse of argument. We may set 
 aside at once, not without a feeling of shame and sorrow, the suggestion (Clem. Alex. a. 
 Euseb. H. E. i. 12) that this Kephas was not St. Peter, but one of the Seventy ; and the 
 monstrous fancy monstrous, though stated by no less a man than Origen (op. Jer. Ep. 
 cxii.), and adopted by no less a man than Chrysostom (ad loc.), and for a time by 
 Jerome that the whole was a scene acted between the two Apostles for a doctrinal pur- 
 pose 1 As if such dissimulation would not have been infinitely more discreditable to 
 them than a temporary disagreement in conduct 1 The way in which St. Peter bore the 
 rebuke, and forgave and loved him who administered it, Is ten-thousandfold more to his 
 honour than the momentary inconsistency i to his disgrace.
 
 252 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 inspired conviction on the one side, and designing particularism on the other, 
 hard terms were used. " Your principle ia a nullification of Moses, of inspira- 
 tion, of religion itself," said the Judaists ; " it is downright rationalism ; it is 
 rank apostasy." " Your Gospel," replied the Apostle, " is no Gospel at all ; 
 it is the abnegation of the Gospel ; it is a bondage to carnal rudiments ; it is a 
 denial of Christ." 
 
 A reproof is intolerable when it is administered out of pride or hatred, but 
 the wounds of a friend are better at all times than the precious balms of an 
 enemy that break the head. We are not told the immediate effect of Paul's 
 words upon Peter and Barnabas, and in the case of the latter we may fear 
 that, even if unconsciously, they may have tended, since human nature is very 
 frail and weak, to exasperate the subsequent quarrel by a sense of previous 
 difference. But if Peter's weakness was in exact accordance with all we know 
 of his character, so too would bo the rebound of a noble nature which restored 
 him at once to strength. The needle of the compass may tremble and be 
 deflected, but yet it is its nature to point true to the north ; and if Peter was 
 sometimes swept aside from perfectness by gusts of impulse and temptation ; 
 if after being the first to confess Christ's divinity he is the first to treat Him 
 with presumption ; if at one moment he becomes His disciple, and at another 
 bids Him depart because ho is himself a sinful man ; if now he plunges into 
 the sea all faith, and now sinks into the waves all fear; if now single-handed 
 he draws the sword for His Master against a multitude, and now denies Him 
 with curses at the question of a servant-maid we are not surprised to find 
 that one who on occasion could be the boldest champion of Gentile equality 
 was suddenly tempted by fear of man to betray the cause which ho had helped 
 to win. 1 But the best proof that he regretted his weakness, and was too 
 noble-hearted to bear any grudge, is seen in the terms of honour and affection 
 iu which he speaks of Paul and his Epistles. 2 It is still more clearly sbown 
 by his adopting the rery thoughts and arguments of Paul, and in his reference, 
 while writing among others to the Galatians, to the very words of the Epistle 
 iu which his own conduct stood so strongly condemned. 3 The legend which 
 is commemorated in the little Church of " Domine quo vadis " near Home, is 
 another interesting proof either that this tendency to vacillation in Peters 
 actions was well understood in Christian antiquity, or that he continued to tho 
 last to bo the same Peter " consistently inconsistent," as he has most happily 
 bcen called 'liable to weakness and error, but ever ready to confess himself in 
 tho wrong, and to repent, $nd to amend : 
 
 " And as tha water-lily starts and slides 
 
 TT it, i T i-ii n: t i 
 
 Upon the level in little putts of wind, 
 
 Though anchored to the bottom such was ho." 
 
 ' 
 
 1 At each tn epoch of transition it was inevitable that charges of inconsistency 
 Bhovtld be freely bandied about on both sides, and with a certain amount of plausibility. 
 Cf. Gal. vi. 13. 
 2Pet.iii. 15. 
 
 3 Comp. 1 Pet. il. 16, 17 with Gal. v. 1, 13, 14, and 1 Pet, H. 24 with a passage of this 
 rery remonstrance (Gal. ii. 20).
 
 ST. PBTBK AND ST. FAUX. AT ANTIOOH. 253 
 
 Bat while to a simple and lofty soul like that of Peter there might almost 
 be something of joy in the frank acknowledgment of error and the crushing 
 down of all anger against the younger, and, at that period, far less celebrated 
 man who had publicly denounced him, such was by no means the case with the 
 many adherents who chose to elevate him into the head of a faction. 1 What 
 may have been the particular tenets of the Kephaa-party at Corinth, we have 
 no means for deciding, and the only thing which we can imagine likely wag 
 that their views were identical with those of the least heretical Ebionites, who 
 held the Mosaic Law to be binding in its entirety on all Jews. Whatever may 
 have been the action of James, or of those who assumed his authority, 2 neither 
 in the New Testament, nor in the earliest Christian writings, is there any trace 
 of enmity between Paul and Peter, or of radical opposition between their 
 views. 3 The notion that there was, has simply grown up from the pernicious 
 habit of an over-ingenious criticism which " neglects plain facts and dwells 
 on doubtful allusions." Critics of this school have eagerly seized upon the 
 Clementines a malignant and cowardly Ebionite forgery of iincertaiu date 
 as furnishing the real clue to the New Testament history, while they deliber- 
 ately ignore and set aside authority incomparably more weighty. Thus the 
 silence* of Justin Martyr about the name and writings of St. Paul is 
 interpreted into direct hostility, while the allusions of the genuine Clement, 
 which indicate the unanimity between the Apostles, are sacrificed to the covert 
 attacks of the forger who assumes his name. But St. Paul's whole argument 
 turns, not on the supposition that he is setting up a counter-gospel to the 
 other Apostles, b*t on Peter's temporary treason to his own faith, 
 hia own convictions, his own habitual professions; 5 and all subsequent 
 facts prove that the two Apostles held each other in the highest mutual 
 
 1 " And I of Kephas ;" but when Paul again refers to the parties, with the delicate 
 consideration of true nobleness, he omits the name of Kephas. - ttty 
 
 2 The minute accounts of a counter-mission inaugurated by James are nothing more 
 or less than an immense romance built on a single slight expression (T^O? 0*0 'Ia<i/3ou), 
 applicable only with any certainty to the one occasion to which it is referred. In Gal. ii. 
 12 ; iv. 16 ; 1 Cor. L 12 ; ix. 1, 3, 7 ; 2 Cor. iii. 1 ; x. 7 J Phil. L 15, 17, we see the tracer 
 of a continuous opposition to St. Paul by a party which, in the nature of things, must 
 have had its head-quarters in Jerusalem ; and of course the leaders at Jerusalem could 
 not remain wholly uninfluenced by the tone of thought around them, and the views 
 which were in the very atmosphere which they daily breathed. Yet they publicly 
 disavowed the obtrusive members of their community (Acts xv. 24), and towards St. 
 Paul personally they always, as far as we know, showed the most perfect courtesy and 
 kindness, and to them personally he never utters one single disrespectful or unfraternal 
 word. There is not a trace of that stern or bitter tone of controversy between them and 
 him which we find interchanged by Bernard and Abelard, Luther and Erasmus, Fcnclon 
 and Bossuet, Wesley and Whitefield. He always speaks of them with gentleness and 
 respect (1 Cor. ix. 5 ; Eph. iii. 5, &c.). 
 
 ^ Even the Praedicatio Pauli (preserved in Cyprian, De Rebaptismate) implies that 
 they were reconciled at Rome before their martyrdom, " postremo in urbe, quasi tuno 
 primum, invicem sibi esse cognitos." 
 
 4 On the explanation of this silence, which does not, however, exclude apparent 
 allusions, see Westcott, Canon., p. 135; Lightfoot, Gal., p. 310. Who can.suppose that 
 
 . 
 
 Justin's yMvOt a* > on xayi, ifoi>)v <*$ wwts (Cohort, ad Grate., p. 40) beam only an acci- 
 dental resemblance to Gal. iv. 12 7 
 8 JUaurice, Unity, 497.
 
 254 THE LIFE AND WOEK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 csteom ; they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were 
 not divided. 1 , 
 
 Thug, then, thanks to St.. Paul, the battle was again won, and the Judaisers, 
 who wore so anxious to steer the little ship of the Church to certain wreck and 
 ruin on the rocks of national bigotry, could no longer claim the sanction of the 
 relapsing Peter. But no sooner was all smooth in the. Church of Antioch than 
 the old mission -hunger seized the heart of Paul, and urged him with noble 
 restlessness from the semblance of inactivity. Going to his former comrade 
 Barnabas, he said, " Come, let us re-traverse our old ground, and see for our- 
 selves how our brethren are hi every city in which we preached the word of the 
 Lord." Barnabas readily acceded to the proposal, but suggested that they 
 should take with them his cousin Mark. 2 But to this Paul at once objected. 
 The young man who had suddenly gone away home from Pamphylia, and left 
 them, when it was too kte to get any other companion, to face the difficulties 
 and dangers of .the journey alone, Paul did not think it right to take with 
 them. Neither would give way; neither put in practice the exquisite and 
 humble Christian lesson of putting up with less than his due. A quarrel rose 
 between these two faithful servants of God as bitter as it was deplorable, 3 and 
 the only hope of peace under such circumstances lay in mutual separation. 
 They parted, and they suffered for their common fault. They parted to forgive 
 each other indeed, and to love and honour each other, and speak of each other 
 hereafter with affection and respect, but never to work together again ; never 
 to help each other and the cause of God by the union of their several gifts ; 
 never to share with one another in the glory of Churches won to Christ from 
 the heathen ; and in all probability to rue, in the regret of lifelong memories, 
 the self-will, the want of mutual concession, the unspoken soft answer which 
 turueth away wrath, which, in a few bitter moments, too late repented of, 
 robbed them both of the inestimable solace of a friend. 
 
 Which was right ? which was wrong ? We are not careful to apportion 
 between them the sad measure of blame, 4 or to dwell on the weaknesses 
 which marred the perfection of men who have left the legacy of bright 
 examples to all the world. In the mere matter of judgment each was partly 
 right, each partly wrong ; 6 their error lay in the persistency which did not 
 
 1 See Excursus XVIII., "The Attacks on St. Paul in the Clementines." In the Romish 
 Church the commemoration of St. Paul is never separated from that of St. Peter. On the 
 feast-days set apart to each saint, the other ia invariably honoured in the most prominent 
 way. 
 
 2 The true reading of Acts xv. 37 Is /3ovA<Tt>, , A, B, C, E, Syr., Copt., <Eth., &o. 
 (Vulg. volffat). The word is characteristically mild compared with the eqoally 
 characteristic vehemence of the ^fi'ov . . . JIT) of St. Paul. 
 
 * Notice the emphatic tone of the original in Acts XT. 39. The word frapofv0>b; 
 (= " exacerbatio," provocation") implies the interchange of sharp language; but it 
 also implies a temporary ebullition, not a permanent quarrel. Elsewhere it only 
 occurs iu Heb. x. 24 ; Deut. xxix. 28 (LXX.). 
 
 4 " Viderint ii qui de Appstolis judicant ; mihi non tarn bene est, immo non tarn 
 maid est, ut Apostolos committam " (Tert. De Praescr. 24). 
 
 '' Paul us severior, Barnabas clementior ; uterque in BUO sensu abtmdat ; et tameo 
 duscnsio habet aliquid humauae f ragilitatia " (Jer. Adv. Pclay. ii. 522).
 
 ST. PETER AWD ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. 255 
 
 admit of mutual accommodation. Each was like himself. St. Barnabas may 
 have suffered himself too strongly to be influenced by partiality for a relative ; 
 St. Paul by the memory of personal indignation. Barnabas may have erred 
 on the side of leniency ; Paul on the side of sternness. St. Paul's was so far 
 the worst fault, yet the very fault may have risen from his loftier ideal. 1 
 There was a " severe earnestness " about him, a sort of intense whole-hearted- 
 ness, which could make no allowance whatever for one who, at the very point 
 at which dangers began to thicken, deserted a great and sacred work. Mark 
 had put his hand to the plough, and had looked back ; and, conscious of the 
 serious hindrance which would arise from a second defection, conscious of the 
 lofty qualities which were essential to any one who was honoured with such 
 Divine responsibilities, St. Paul might fairly have argued that a cause must 
 not be risked out of tenderness for a person. 8 Barnabas, on the other hand, 
 might have urged that it was most unlikely that one who was now willing to 
 face the work again should again voluntarily abandon it, and he might fairly 
 have asked whether one failure was to stamp a lifetime. Both persisted, and 
 both suffered. Paul went his "way, and many a time, in the stormy and 
 agitated days which followed, must he have sorely missed, amid the provoking 
 of all men and the strife of tongues, the repose and generosity which breathed 
 through the life and character of the Son of Exhortation. Barnabas went his 
 way, and, dissevered from the grandeur and vehemence of Paul, passed into 
 comparative obscurity, in which, so far from sharing the immortal gratitude 
 which embalms the memory of his colleague, his name is never heard again, 
 except in the isolated allusions of the letters of his friend. 
 
 For their f riendship was not broken. Barnabas did not become a Judaiser, 
 or in any way discountenance the work of Paul. The Epistle which passed 
 by his name is spurious, 3 but its tendency is anti-Judaic, which would not 
 have been the case if, after the dispute at Antioch, he had permanently sided 
 with the anti-Pauline faction. In the Acts of the Apostles he is not again 
 mentioned. Whether he confined his mission-work to his native island, 
 whither he almost immediately sailed with Mark, or whether, as seems to be 
 implied by the allusion in the Epistle to the Corinthians, he extended it more 
 widely, he certainly continued to work on the same principles as before, taking 
 with him no female companion, and accepting nothing from the Churches to 
 <which he preached. 4 
 
 And though, so far as they erred, the Apostles suffered for their error, 
 
 1 'O nOXos I&TCI rb Stxatov, 4 Bapvo/So? rb QiXdvDpuirov (Chrya. ). * Prov. xxv. 19. 
 
 * It is examined and rejected, among others, by Hefele, Dot Sendschr. d. Ap. 
 iSarnabas (TUbingen, 1840). 
 
 4 1 Cor. ix. 6 ; Gal. ii. 9. It has been inferred from the mention of Mark as known 
 .-.to the Churches of Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia, Galatia (1 Pet. i. 1; v. 13), and 
 Colossse (Col. iv. 10), and his presence long afterwards in Asia Minor (2 Tim. iv. 11), 
 tthat, if he continued to accompany his cousin Barnabas, Asia Minor, and especially its 
 -eastern parts, may have been the scene of their labours (Lewin, i. 165). Tne allusion 
 .in Col. iv. 10 has been taken to imply that by that time (A.D. 63) Barnabas was no longer 
 f 1 living. Nothing certain is known about the place, manner, or time of his death. The 
 Acta ct Passio Barnaljae in Cypro is apocryphal. St. Mark is said to have been martyred 
 -t Alexandria.
 
 256 THE LIFE AND WORK O* ST. PAUL. 
 
 God overruled evil for good. Henceforth they were engaged in two spheres 
 of mission action instead of one, and henceforth also the bearing and the views 
 of Paul were more free and vigorous, lees shackled by associations, less liable 
 to reaction. Hitherto his position in the Church of Jerusalem had depended 
 much upon the countenance of Barnabas. Henceforth he had to stand alone, 
 to depend solely on himself and hia own Apostolic dignity, and to rely on no 
 favourable reception for his views, except such as ho won by the force of right 
 and reason, and by the large benefits which accrued to the Church of Jerusalem 
 from the alms which ho collected from Gentile Churches. 
 
 And Mark also profited by the difference of which he was the unhappy 
 cause. If the lenient partiality of one Apostle still kept open for him the 
 missionary career, the stern judgment of the other must have helped to make 
 him a more earnest man. All that we henceforth know of him shows alike 
 his great gifts and his self-denying energy. In his Gospel he has reflected 
 for us with admirable vividness the knowledge and experience of his friend 
 and master St. Peter, to whom, in his later years, he stood in the samo 
 relation that Timothy occupied towards St. Paul. 1 But even St. Paul saw 
 good cause not only to modify his unfavourable opinion, but to invite him 
 again as a fellow-labourer. 1 He urges the Colossians to give him a kindly 
 welcome, 3 and even writes to Timothy an express request that he would bring 
 him to Borne to solace his last imprisonment, because he had found him that 
 which he had once failed to be "profitable to him for ministry."* 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 ti t^n-t ttit n*v*i *v.M. 
 
 BEGINNING OP THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY: PAUL 
 IN GALATIA. 
 
 " Come, let us get up early to the vineyards ; let us see if the vines flourish." 
 CANT. vii. 12. 
 
 THE significant silence as to any public sympathy for Barnabas and Mark, 
 together with the prominent mention of it in the case of Paul, seems to show 
 that the Church of Antioch in general considered that St. Paul was in the 
 right. Another indication of the same fact is that Silas consented to become 
 his companion. Hitherto Silas had been so closely identified with the Church 
 of Jerusalem that ho had been one of the emissaries chosen to confirm the- 
 genuineness of the circular letter, and in the last notice of him which occurs- 
 in Scripture we find him still in the company of St. Peter, who sends him. 
 from Babylon with a letter to some of the very Churches which he had visited 
 with St. Paul. 5 His adhesion to the principles of St. Paul, iu spite of the 
 
 1 Pet. v. 13. Philem. 24. 
 
 Col. iv. 10. 2 Tim. ir. 11, l Scoria* 
 
 1 Pet. T. 12. The identity cannot, however, be regarded as certain.
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOUBNEY. 257 
 
 close bonds wliieh united him with the Jewish Christians, is a sufficient proof 
 that he was a man of large nature ; and as a recognised prophet of Jerusalem 
 and Antioch, his companionship went far to fill up the void left in the mission 
 by the departure of Barnabas. His name Silvanus, 1 and the fact that ho, 
 too, seems to have been a Eoman citizen, 2 may perhaps show that he had some 
 connexion with the Gentile world, to which, therefore, he would be a more 
 acceptable Evangelist. In every respect it was a happy Providence which 
 provided St. Paul with so valuable a companion. And as they started on a 
 second great journey, carrying with them the hopes and fortunes of Chris- 
 tianity, they were specially commended by the brethren to the grace of God. 
 
 St. Paul's first object was to confirm the Churches which he had already 
 founded. Such a confirmation of proselytes was an ordinary Jewish con- 
 ception, 3 and after the vacillations of opinion which had occurred even at 
 Antioch, Paul would be naturally anxious to know whether the infant com- 
 munities continued to prosper, though they were harassed by persecutions 
 from without, and liable to perversion from within. Accordingly he began 
 his mission by visiting the Churches of Syria and Cilicia. It is probable that 
 ho passed along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Issus, and through the 
 Syrian and Ainanid Gates to the towns of Alexandria and Issus. 4 There the 
 road turned westward, and led through Mopsuestia and Adana to Tarsus. 
 From Tarsus three routes were open to him one running along the shore of 
 the Mediterranean to the Cilician Seleucia, and then turning inland through 
 the Lycaonian Laranda to Derbo ; the other a narrow and unfrequented path 
 through the mountains of Isauria ; the third, which in all probability he chose 
 as the safest, the most frequented and the most expeditious, through the 
 famous Cilician Gates, 6 which led direct to Tyana, and then turning south- 
 westward ran to Cybistra, and so to Derbe, along the southern shore of Lake 
 Ak Ghieul. 8 And if, indeed, Paul and Silas took this route and passed 
 through the narrow gorge under its frowning cliffs of limestone, clothed here 
 and there with pine and cedar, which to the Crusaders presented an appear- 
 ance so terrible that they christened it the Gates of Judas, how far must they 
 have been from imagining, in their wildest dreams, that their footsteps the 
 footsteps of two obscure and persecuted Jews would lead to the traversing 
 of that pass centuries afterwards by kings and their armies. How little did they 
 dream that those warriors, representing the haughtiest chivalry of Europe, would 
 hold the name of Jews in utter execration, but would be sworn to rescue the 
 traditional tomb of that Christ whom they acknowledged as their Saviour, 
 
 1 Silas may be of Semitic origin. Josephus mentions four Orientals of the name 
 (Krenkel, p. 78). 
 
 3 Acts xvi. 20, 87. 3 See Schleusner, s.v. <mjpi'f. 
 
 4 The Syrian gates are now called the Paaa of Beylan ; the Amanid Gates are th 
 Kara-Kapu. 
 
 5 Now the Klilek-Boghaz. 
 
 8 For further geographical details, see Con. and Howson, ch. viil., and Lewin, ch. x. 
 It is humiliating to think that the roads in St. Paul's day were incomparably better, and 
 better kept, than they are at this moment, when the mere cUbrii of them suffice for 
 peoples languishing under the withering atrophy of Turkish rule.
 
 258 
 
 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 from the hands of a mighty people who also recognised Him as a Prophet, 
 though they did not believe Him to bo Divine ! 
 
 Whatever road was taken by Paul and Silas, they must have been their 
 own messengers, and announced their own arrival. And we can well hnngine 
 the surprise, the emotion, the delight of the Christians in the little Isauric 
 town, when they suddenly recognised the well-known figure of the missionary, 
 who, arriving in the opposite direction, with the wounds of the cruel stonings 
 fresh upon him, had first taught them the faith of Christ. Can we not also 
 imagine the uneasiness which, during this visitation of the Churches which he 
 loved so well, must often have invaded the heart of Paul, when almost the 
 first question with which he must have been greeted on all sides would be, 
 " And where is Barnabas ? " For Barnabas was a man born to be respected 
 
 THE COUNTRY ROUND TARSUS. 
 
 and loved; and since Silas great as may have been his gifts of utterance, 
 and high as were his credentials 1 would come among them as a perfect 
 stranger, whom they could not welcome with equal heartiness, we may be sure 
 that if Paul erred in that sad dissension, he must have been reminded of it, 
 and have had cause to regret it at every turn. 
 
 From Derbe once more they passed to Lystra. Only one incident of their 
 visit is told us, but it happily affected all the future of the great Apostle. In 
 his former visit he had converted the young Tiinothous, and it was in the 
 house of the boy's mother Eunice, 8 and his grandmother Lois, that he and 
 Silas were probaby received. These two pious women were Jewesses who 
 had now accepted the Christian faith. The marriage of Eunice with a Greek, 8 
 
 1 npofy-rfrtfi (Acts XV. 32). 
 
 3 The name Eunice being purely Greek might seem to indicate previous association 
 with Gentiles. 
 
 8 At the same time, mixed marriages were far less strictly forbidden to women than
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOUKNET. 259 
 
 and the non-circumcision of her son, indicate an absence of strict Judaism 
 which, since it was not inconsistent with " unfeigned faith," must have made 
 them more ready to receive the Gospel ; and Paul himself bears witness to 
 their earnest sincerity, and to the careful training in the Scriptures which 
 they had given to their child. 
 
 "We are led to suppose that Eunice was a widow, and if so she showed a 
 beautiful spirit of self-sacrifice in parting with her only son. The youthful 
 Timothy is one of the best known and most lovable of that little circle of 
 companions and followers chiefly Gentile converts who are henceforth 
 associated with the wanderings of St. Paul. Of the many whom Paul loved, 
 none were dearer to him than the young disciple of Lystra. Himself without 
 wife or child, he adopted Timothy, and regarded him as a son in all affec- 
 tionate nearness. "To Timothy, my son;" "my true son in the faith" such 
 are the terms in which he addresses him; 1 and he reminds the Philippians 
 how well they knew " that, as a son with a father, he had slaved with him for 
 the Gospel." 2 And slight as are the touches which enable us to realise the. 
 character of the young Lystrenian, they are all wonderfully graphic and con- 
 sistent. He was so blameless in character that both in his native Lystra and 
 in Iconium the brethren bore warm and willing testimony to his worth. 8 In 
 spite of a shyness and timidity which were increased by his youthfuluess, he 
 was so entirely united in heart and soul with the Apostle that among his 
 numerous friends and companions he found no one so genuine, so entirely un- 
 selfish, so sincerely devoted to the furtherance of the cause of Christ.* He 
 was, in fact, more than any other the alter ego of the Apostle. Their know- 
 ledge of each other was mutual ; 6 and one whose yearning and often lacerated 
 heart had such deep need of a kindred spirit on which to lean for sympathy, 
 and whose distressing infirmities rendered necessary to him the personal 
 services of some affectionate companion, must have regarded the devoted 
 tenderness of Timothy as a special gift of God to save him from being 
 crushed by overmuch sorrow. And yet, much as Paul loved him, he loved his 
 Churches more ; and if any Church needs warning or guidance, or Paul him- 
 eelf desires to know how it prospers, Timothy is required to overcome his 
 
 ko men. Brasilia and Berenice married Gentile princes, but compelled them first to 
 accept circumcision. The omission of the covenant rite in the case of Timothy may have 
 been owing to the veto of the child's Greek father. 
 
 1 1 Tim. i. 2, 18 ; 2 Tim. ii. 2. 2 PhiL ii 22, Wov'Aevow TO evayyAiof. 
 
 3 Whether Timothy belonged to Lystra or to Derbe is a matter of small importance, 
 but that in point of fact he did belong to Lystra seems so clear from a comparison of Acts 
 xvi. 1, 2 ; xr. 4 ; and 2 Tim. iii. 11, that it is strange there should have been so much 
 useless controversy on the subject. The notion that " Gaius " in Acts xx. 4 could not bo 
 " of Derbe," because there is a Gaius of Macedonia in xix. 29 (who may or may not be 
 the Gaius of Rom. xvi. 23 ; 1 Cor. i. 14), is like arguing that there could not be a Mr. 
 Smith of Monmouth and another Mr. Smith of Yorkshire ; and the transference on thia 
 ground of the epithet Asp/Solos to Ttj*60o in the absence of all evidence of MSS. is mere 
 frivolity. 
 
 4 Phil. ii. 20, ovStva. yap e\a> \.< 
 favTJpy '&frov(riv, ov TO ITJCTOU Xptorov. 
 
 |0 2 Tim. iii 10, 2i 8J irop
 
 260 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 shrinking modesty, 1 to console the persecuted Churches of Macedonia, 2 or 
 face the conceited turbulence of Corinth, 3 or to be the overseer of the Church 
 of Ephesus, 4 with its many troubles from without and from within. In fact, 
 no name is so closely associated with St. Paul's as that of Timothy. Not 
 only were two Epistles addressed to him, but he is associated with St. Paul in 
 the superscription of five ; 6 he was with the Apostle during great part of his 
 second missionary journey; 6 he was with him at Ephesus: 7 he accompanied 
 him in his last voyage to Jerusalem ; 8 he helped to comfort his first imprison- 
 ment at Borne ; 9 he is urged, in the Second Epistle addressed to him, to hasten 
 from Ephesus, to bring with him the cloak, books, and parchments which St. 
 Paul had left with Carpus at Troas, and to join him in his second imprison- 
 ment before it is too late to see him alive. 10 Some sixteen years had elapsed 
 between the days when Paul took Timothy as his companion at Lystra, 11 and 
 the days when, in the weary desolation of his imprisoned ago, he writes once 
 more to this beloved disciple. 12 Tet even at this latter date St. Paul addresses 
 him as though he were the same youth who had first accompanied him to the 
 hallowed work. " To him," says Hausrath, " as to the- Christian Achilles, the 
 Timotheus -legend attributes eternal youth;" this being, according to the 
 writer, one of the signs that the two pastoral Epistles addressed to Timothy 
 were the work of a writer in the second century. 13 But surely it is obvious 
 that if Timothy, when St. Paul first won him over to the faith of Christ, was 
 not more than sixteen or seventeen years old, he would be still far short of the 
 prime of life when the Second Epistle was addressed to him ; and that, even 
 if he were older, there is no more familiar experience than an old man's 
 momentary f orgetfulness that those whom he has known as boys have grown 
 up to full manhood. 14 
 
 This was the youth whose companionship Paul now secured. Young as 
 he was, the quick eye of Paul saw in him the spirit of loving and fearful 
 duty read the indications of one of those simple, faithful natures which 
 combine the glow of courage with the bloom of modesty. When Jesus had 
 sent forth His disciples He had sent them forth two and two ; but this was 
 only in their native land. It was a very different thing to travel in all 
 weathers, through the blinding dust and bnrniug heat of the plains of 
 Lycaonia, and over the black volcanic crags and shelterless mountain ranges 
 of Asia. He had suffered from the departure of Mark in Pisidia, and hence- 
 
 ,,.,., - "' ' juTJ - : ">- 
 
 1 1 Cor. iv. 17 ; xvi. 10, o<J><5<o. 
 
 2 Acts xix. 22 ; 1 Thoss. iii. 2 ; PliiL ii. 1820. 1 Cor. xvi 10. 
 1 Tim. i. 3. 5 1, 2 Thess., 2 Cor., PhiL, Col. 
 
 6 Acts xvi. 3 ; xvii. 14 ; xviil. 5. ? 1 Cor. iv. 17 ; xvi. 10. 
 
 s Acts xx. 4. Phil. ii. 1820. w 2 Tim. iv. 9, 13. 
 
 11 Circ. A.D. 51. 3 Circ. A.D. 66. 
 
 13 Hausrath, p. 259. He admits that they "contain important historic indications." 
 
 14 It has always been recognised as a most natural touch in Tennyson's poem, "The 
 Grandmother," that she speaks of her old sons as though they were still lads. But even 
 if Timotheua had reached the age of forty by the time he waa appointed "Bishop" of 
 Ephesus, there would be nothing incongruous in saying to him, M7jSe/j trov rfc j-eonp-ot 
 KaTa^poceiVco (1 Tim. iv. 12), or rac fie rewrepiKat t-.n0v/xi'as <f>Dye (2 Tim. ii. 22), especially as 
 these were written not many years after the ^ TH otv OVT&V tlovfa^vg of 1 Cor, xvi. 11.
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOUBNEY. 261 
 
 forth we never find him without at least two associates at this time 
 Silas and Timothy ; afterwards Titus and Timothy in Macedonia and Achaia, 
 and Luke and Aristarchus in his journey to Rome. 
 
 It may surprise us that the first step he took was to circumcise Timothy ; 
 and that since the rite might be performed by any Israelite, ho did it with hia 
 own hands. 1 Wo have, indeed, seen that he was in all probability driven to 
 circumcise tho Gentile Titus ; but we are not told of any pressure put upon 
 him to perform the same rite for Timothy, who, though the son of a Jewess, 
 had grown up without it. Nothing is more certain than that, in St. Paul's 
 opinion, circumcision was valueless. His conduct, therefore, can only be re- 
 garded as a second conces-sion to. or rather a prevention and anticipation of, 
 prejudices so strong that they might otherwise have rendered his work im- 
 possible. St. Luke says that it was done " on account of the Jews in those 
 regions j for they all knew that his father was a Greek." Now, if this was 
 generally known, whereas it was not so widely known that his mother was a 
 Jewess, St. Paul felt that Timothy would everywhere be looked upon as an 
 lincircumeised Gentile, and as such no Jew would eat with him, and it would 
 be hppeless to attempt to employ him as a preacher of tho Messiah in the 
 synagogues, which they always visited as the beginning of their labours. If, 
 on the other hand, it were known that he was by birth a Jewish boy since 
 the rule was that nationality wont by the mother's side 2 an uncir- 
 cuincised Jew would be in every Ghetto an object of execration. If, 
 then, Timothy was to bo ordained to tho work of the ministry, his circum- 
 cision was indispensable to his usefulness, and his Jewish parentage was suffi- 
 cient to deprive the act of the dangerous significance which might much moro 
 easily bo attached to it in the case of Titus. Obviously, too, it was better 
 that Paul should do it spontaneously than that it should receive a factitious 
 importance by being once more extorted from him in spite of protest. Ho 
 did it, not in order to please himself, but that ho might condescend to the 
 infirmities of the weak. 3 
 
 The circumcision was follovred by a formal ordination. Tiie whole Church 
 was a-^scinbled ; the youth niado tho public profession oi : his faith ; 4 tho elders 
 aud Paul htaiself solomuly laid their liands upon his head; 5 the prophetic 
 voices which had marked him out for a great work 6 were confirmed by 
 those who now charged him with the high duties vrhich lay before him, 
 and at the same time warned him of tho dangers wliich those duties 
 
 1 By none, however, except an Israelite (AlltAda Zara., f. 27, 1). 
 
 3 " Partus sequitur veutrem " is tho rule of the Talmud (echvroth, 1, 4, c. ; 
 \Vetst. ad. foe.). If the Jews knew that his moLher was a Jewess, aud yet that he had 
 uot received the "seal of the covenant," they would have treated hiui as a - 
 (See Ewald, AllcrUi. 257.) 
 
 'o Koia. xv. 1 ; 1 Cor. ix. 20. 
 
 * 1 Tini. vi. 12, ifioX&yijiTos rr)v KoXrji' <>ii.o\oyiav~_lv>&iriov iroXAii' ftop rupuv. 
 
 5 1 Tiin. iv. 14, rb x*P t<r / ia S0>) <roi Sia jrpo<f>T)Te'ias fieri ejri0e'<reu! rioy \tifiav TOV 
 piu. 2 Tim. i. 6, Jia rij; effiOe'cretoS rStv \i:pS>v pov. 
 
 6 ITiin. i. 18, KOTO rij Tpooyovo-a? irttre *po$v*k*' Compare the happy prognostica- 
 tions of Staupitz about the work of Luther,
 
 262 THE LIFE AND WOKE OF ST. TATTL. 
 
 involved ; l tho grace of the Holy Spirit descended like a flame into his heart,* 
 and the gentle boy of Lystra was henceforth the consecrated companion of 
 toils and wanderings, of which the issue was the destined conversion of the 
 world. 
 
 The mission opened with every circumstance of encouragement. The 
 threefold cord of this ministry was not quickly broken. At each city which 
 they visited they announced the decisions arrived at by the Apostles and 
 elders at Jerusalem, 3 and the Churches were strengthened in the faith, and 
 grew in number daily. 
 
 In this way they traversed " the Phrygian and Galatian district." * There 
 has been much speculation as to the towns of Phrygia at which they rested, 
 but in the absolute silence of St. Luke, and in the extreme looseness of the 
 term " Phrygian," we cannot be sure tliat St. Paul preached in a single town 
 of the region which is usually included under that term. That he did not 
 found any church seems clear from the absence of allusion to any Phrygian 
 community in the Now Testament. The coujecturo that he travelled on this 
 occasion to the far distant Colosste is most improbable, even if it be not ex- 
 cluded by the obvious inference from his own language. 6 All that we can 
 reasonably suppose is that after leaving Iconium he proceeded to Antioch in 
 Pisidia since there could be no reason why he should neglect to confirm the 
 Church which he had founded there and then crossed the ridge of the 
 Paroreia to Philomelium, from which it would have been possible for him 
 either to take the main road to the great Phrygian town of Synnada, and 
 then turn north-eastwards to Pessinus, or else to enter Galatia by a shorter 
 and less frequented route which did not run through any Phrygian town of 
 the slightest importance. It does not seem to have been any part of St. Paul's 
 plan to evangelise Phrygia. Perhaps he may have originally intended to make 
 his way by the road through Apamea, to Colossae and Laodicea, and to go 
 down the valley of the Maeandor to Ephesus. But if so, this intention was 
 hindered by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 8 Such providential hindrances 
 to a course which seemed so obvious may well have been mysterious to St. 
 Paul ; but they appear less so to us when, viewing them in tho light of history, 
 
 * 1 Tim. L 18, ii/a crrpaTevi} ft> ourai? TIJI' KO.)C>I%> trrparfiav ', cf. IV. 14 ', vi. 12. 
 
 3 2 Tim. i. 6, ava^u-rrupftv (= " to fan into fresh flame," xvpt'u? roii? avOpajctif 4>u<rac, Suid. ; 
 
 fftftoSportpov TO irvp fpydeffOai, Theophyl.) TO ^pia/na TOV 0eov, o t<mvev <roi, ic.T.X. 
 
 3 In a loose way even Antioch and Iconium might be regarded as Churches of Cilicia, 
 Tarsus (as appears from coins, Lewin, i. 171) being regarded as a capital of Lycaonia, 
 Isauria, and even of Caria. Further, the circular letter had been drawn up with more or 
 less express reference to what had taken place in these Churches (Acts xv. 12). 
 
 4 The true reading is rijv Qpvyiav K<U ToJwrtiaiv \<*>p<u> (w, A, B, C, D). 
 8 Col. i. 4,6,7; ii. 1. 
 
 6 It will be seen that I take the clause KuXv&Vrec, K.T.A. (Acts xvi. 6) retrospectively 
 i.e., as the reason assigned for their divergence into the Phrygian and Galatian district. 
 If they entertained the design of preaching in Asia-j-t.e., in Lydia the natural road to 
 it would have been from Antioch of Pisidia, and it is hardly likely that they would have 
 intentionally turned aside to the semi-barbarous regions of Phrygia and Galatia first ; 
 indeed, we have St. Paul's own express admission (Gal. iv. 13) that his evangelisation of 
 Galatia was tho result of an accidental sickpess. The permission to preach in Asia wag 
 only delayed (Acts xix. 10),
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY 263 
 
 we see that otherwise the Epistle to the Galatians might never have been 
 written, and that thus the whole course of Christian theology might have been 
 entirely changed. 
 
 Of any work in Phrygia, therefore, there was nothing to narrate ; l but we 
 may well deplore St. Luke's non-acquaintance with the details of that visit to 
 Galatia, which were deeply interesting and important, and of which we are 
 now left to discover the incidents by piecing the fragmentary notices and allu- 
 sions of the Epistle. 
 
 We may suppose that on finding it impossible to preach at this time in the 
 preat cities of Lydian Asia, 2 St. Paul and his companions next determined to 
 make their way to the numerous Jewish communities on the shores of the 
 Euxine. They seem to have had no intention to preach among a people so 
 new to them, and apparently so little promising, as the Galatians. But God 
 had other designs for them ; they were detained in Galatia, and their stay was 
 attended with very memorable results. 
 
 St. Luke, who uses the ordinary geographical term, must undoubtedly 
 have meant by the term Galatia that central district of the Asian peninsula* 
 which was inhabited by a people known to the ancient world under the names 
 of Celts, Galatians, Gauls, and (more recently) Gallo-Greeks. Their history 
 was briefly this. When the vast tide of Aryan migration began to set to the 
 westward from the valleys of the Oxus and the plains of Turkestan, the Celtic 
 family was among the earliest that streamed away from their native seats. 4 
 They gradually occupied a great part of the centre and west of Europe, and 
 various tribes of the family were swept hither and thither by different 
 currents, as they met with special obstacles to their unimpeded progress. One 
 of their Brennuses, 6 four centuries before the Christian era, inflicted on Rome 
 its deepest humiliation. Another, one hundred and eleven years later, 6 filled 
 Northern Greece with terror and rapine, and when his hordes were driven 
 back by the storms and portents which seconded the determined stand of the 
 Greeks at Delphi, they joined another body under Loonnorius and Lutarius,* 
 
 1 That some converts were made is implied by Acts xviii. 23. The absence of a 
 definite Phrygian Church is seen in the silence about any collection there. 
 
 2 ''Asia in the Acts (cf. Catull. xlvi. 5) seems always to mean the region round the 
 old "Asian meadow" of Homer (II. ii. 461) Le., the entire valley and plain of the 
 Cayster i.e., Lydia. Every one of " the seven churches which are in Asia " (Rev. i. iii.) 
 is Lydian. 
 
 3 The term Asia Minor is first used by Orosius in the fourth century (Oros. i. 2). 
 
 4 On the Celtic migrations, see the author's Families of Speech, 2nd ed. (reprinted in 
 Language and languages), p. 329. 
 
 5 B.C. 390. The word Brennus is a Latinised form of the title which is preserved in 
 the Welsh brenin, " king." 
 
 6 B.C. 279. 
 
 7 Liv. xxxviii. 16. These names Celtic words of obscure origin with Latin termina- 
 tions are eagerly seized on by German travellers and commentators, and identified with 
 Leonard and Lothair (Luther), in order to prove that the people of Galatia were not Celts, 
 but Teutons. Why both French and Germans should be so eager to claim affinities with 
 these not very creditable Galatians I cannot say ; but meanwhile it must be regarded aa 
 certain that the Galatae were Celts, and not only Celts, but Cymric Celts. The only 
 other arguments, besides these two names, adduced by Wieseler and other German 
 writers are (1) The name Gfermanopoli3& late and hideous hybrid which, at the beat,
 
 264 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 struggled across the Hellespont in the best way they could, and triumphantly 
 established themselves in the -western regions of Asia Minor. But their exactions 
 soon roused an opposition which led to an effectual curbing of their power, and 
 they were gradually confined in tho central region which is partly traversed by 
 the valleys of the Sangarius and the Halys. Here we find them in three tribes, 
 each of which had its own capital. Bordering on Phrygia were the Tolisto- 
 bogii, with their capital Pessinus ; in the centre tho Tectosages, with their 
 capital Ancyra ; and to the eastward, bordering on Pontus, were the Trocmi, 
 with their capital Tavium. 1 Originally the three tribes were each divided 
 into four tetrarchies, but at length they were united (B.C. 65) under Deiotarus, 
 tetrarch of the Tolistobogii, the Egbert of Galatian history. 2 The Romans 
 under Cn. Manlius Yulso had conquered them in B.C. 189, 3 but had left them 
 nominally independent ; and in B.C. 36 Mark Antony made Amyutas king. 
 On his death, in B.C. 25, Galatia was joined to Lycaouia and part of Pisidia, 
 and made a Roman province ; and since it was cno of the Imperial provinces, 
 it was governed by a Propraetor. This was its political condition when Paul 
 entered Pessinus, which, though one of the capitals, lies on the extreme 
 frontier, and at that time called itself Sebaste of the Tolistobogii.* 
 
 The providential cause which led to St. Paul's stay in the country was, as 
 he himself tells us, a severe attack of illness : and the manner in which ha 
 alludes to it gives us reason to infer that it was a fresh access of agony from 
 that " stake in the flesh " which 1 believe to have been acute ophthalmia, 
 accompanied, as it often is, by violent cerebral disturbance. 5 In his letter to 
 his Galatian converts he makes a touching appeal, which in modern phraseology 
 might run as follows : 6 " Become as I am, brethren, I beseech you " (i.e., free 
 
 only points to the settlement of some Teutonic community among the Gauls ; (2) the 
 tribe of Tsutobcdiaci, about whom we know too little to say what the name means ; and 
 (3) the assertion of St. Jerome that the Galatians (whom he had personally visited) 
 spoke a language like the people of Treves (Jer. in Ep. Gal. ii. praef.). This argument, 
 however, tells precisely in the opposite direction, since the expressions of Gusar and 
 Tacitus decisively prove that the Treveri wore Gauls (Tac. Ann. i. 43, II. iv. 71 ; Ca;s. 
 B. G. ii. 4, &c.), though they aped Teutonic peculiarities (Cojs. U. G. viii. 25; Tac. 
 Gcrni. 28). Every trait of their character, every certain, phenomenon of their language, 
 every proved fact of their history, shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Galat*, 
 or Gauls, were not Slavs, nor Teutons, but Celts ; and it is most probable that the names 
 Galatae and Celtse are etymologically identical. The ingenuity which elaborately sets 
 itself to overthrow accepted and demonstrated conclusions leads to endless waste of time 
 and space. Any who are curious to see more on the subject will find it in the Excursus 
 of Dr. Lightfoot's Galatians, pp. 229240. 
 
 1 Tolktobogii, or Tolosatcbogii, seems to combine the elements of Tolosa (Toulouse) 
 and Boii. The etymologies of Tectosages (who also occur in Aquitaine, Ca;s. B. G. vi. 24 ; 
 Strabo, p. 187) and Trocmi are uncertain. Other towns of the Galatte were Abrostola, 
 Amorium, Tolosochoriou, towns of the Tolistobogii ; Corbeus and Aspona, of the Tecto- 
 .sa^<'s ; Mithradatium and Danala, of the Trocmi. 
 
 - Strabo, p. 5G7. 
 
 3 Liv. xxxviii. 12. " Hi jam degeneres suiit ; inixti et Gallogracci vere, quod appel- 
 l.u;tur." 
 
 4 It is now a mere heap of ruins. 
 
 s On this subject see infra, Excursus XI., "The Stake in the Flesh." 
 6 Gal. iv. 12 14. This passage may serve to illustrate the necessity of a new English 
 version founded on better readings. Thus in verse 12, the " be " of our version should be
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY. 265 
 
 from the yoke of external and useless ordinances), " for I, too, made myself as 
 you are. 1 Jew that I was, I placed myself on the level of you Gentiles, and 
 now I want you to stand with me on that same level, instead of trying to 
 make yourselves Jews. I do not wish to speak by way of complaint about 
 you. Tou never did me any personal wrong. 8 Nay, you know that when I 
 preached the Gospel among you, on my first visit, it was in consequence of an 
 attack of sickness, which detained me in the midst of a journey; you could 
 not, therefore, feel any gratitude to me as though I had come with the express 
 purpose of preaching to you ; and besides, at that time weak, agonised with 
 pain, liable to fits of delirium, with my eyes red and ulcerated by that disease 
 by which it pleases God to let Satan buffet me, you might well have been 
 tempted to regard me as a deplorable object. My whole appearance must 
 have been a trial to you a temptation to you to reject me. But you did 
 not ; you were very kind to me. You might have treated me with con- 
 temptuous indifference ; 3 you might have regarded me with positive loathing ; * 
 but instead of this you honoured, you loved me, you received me as though 
 I was an angel nay, even as though I were the Lord of angels, as though I 
 wore even He whom I preached unto you. How glad you were to see me ! 
 How eagerly you congratulated yourselves and mo on the blessed accident- 
 nay, rather, on the blessed providence of God, which had detained me amongst 
 you! 5 So generous, so affectionate wore you towards me, that I bear 
 yon witness that to aid me as I sat in misery in the darkened rooms, 
 unable to bear even a ray of light without excruciating pain, yon would, 
 
 rendered "become;" and the "Jam as you are" should be "I became;" the "havenot 
 injured " should be " did not injure," since the tense is an aorist, not a perfect, and the 
 allusion is to some fact which we do not know. In verse 13 the S ought not to be left 
 unnoticed; "through infirmity of the flesh" is a positive mistake (since this would 
 require Ji' o<r0evet<w, per) for "on account of an attack of illness," as in Thuc. vi. 102; 
 
 > n *.^}inKl-n- man-no '* +>MS -fruTYinr +.iTYi " nnf *'nt f,"hft firfifc '* In vftrsfi 14 thfi best 
 
 TO irpdrepot- probably means " the former time," not "at the first." In verse 14 the best 
 reading is not T bc neipavrfv jiou, but TOV *. V/IWK (, A, B, C, D, F, G, &c., and " faciliori 
 lectioni praestat ardua") ; and e^TrrvVar* is stronger than " rejected." In verse 15, not, 
 not TIS, is probably the right reading, and fy should certainly be omitted and the mean- 
 ing is not "where is the blessedness ye spake of," but "your self-congratulation on my arrival 
 among you ; " the iv should certainly be omitted with efuou'faT*, as it makes the Greek 
 idiom far more vivid, although inadmissible in English (cf. John xv. 22 ; xbc. 11). In 
 verse 16 the wore draws a conclusion, "so that," which is suddenly and delicately changed 
 into a question, "have I?" instead of "I have." It is only by studying the intensely 
 characteristic Greek of St. Paul that we are ablo, as it were, to lay our hands oil his 
 breast and feel every beat of his heart. 
 
 i GaL ii. 17 ; 1 Cor. ix. 21. 
 
 8 Cf . 2 Cor. ii. 5, ov* 
 
 nobly careless expressions, .,-- , 
 
 means "You did not loathe," &c., "me, though my bodily aspect was a temptation to 
 you " " Grandia tentatio discipulis, si magister infirmetur " (Primas.). On the possible 
 'connexion of fVa T e with epilepsy see infra, p. 713. It would be most accurately ex- 
 -plained by ophthalmia. . . , . , 
 
 ' * The sufferings of St. Paul from travels when in a prostrate condition of body have 
 been aptly compared by Dean Howson to those of St. Chrysostom and Henry Mortyn in 
 Poufcus. They both lie buried at Tocat (Comana). (C. and H. i. 295.)
 
 266 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 if that could Lave helped me, have plucked out your eyes and given them 
 tome." 1 
 
 Nothing is more natural than that the traversing of vast distances over the 
 burning plains and freezing mountain passes of Asia Minor the constant 
 changes of climate, the severe bodily fatigue, the storms of fine and blinding 
 dust, the bites and stings of insects, the coarseness and scantnoss of daily 
 fare should have brought on a return of his malady to one whose health was 
 so shattered as that of Paul. And doubtless it was the anguish and despair 
 arising from the contemplation of his own heartrending condition, which 
 added to his teaching that intensity, that victorious earnestness, which made 
 it BO all-prevailing with the warm-hearted Gauls. 8 If they were ready to 
 receive him as Christ Jesus, it was because Christ Jesus was the Alpha and 
 the Omega, the beginning and the end of all his teaching to them. And 
 hence, in his appeal to thoir sense of shame, he uses one of his own inimitably 
 picturesque words to say, " Senseless Galatians, what evil eye bewitched 
 you ? 3 befoi-e whose eyes, to avert them from such evil glances, I painted as it 
 were visibly and large the picture of Jesus Christ crucified."* 
 
 But the zealous readiness of the Galatians, their impulsive affection, the 
 demonstrative delight with which they accepted the now teaching, was not 
 solely due to the pity which mingled with the admiration inspired by the new 
 teacher. It may liave been due, in some small measure, to the affinities 
 presented by the new religion to the loftiest and noblest parts of their old 
 beliefs ; and at any rate, being naturally of a religious turn of mind, 5 they may 
 have been in the first instance attracted by the hearing of a doctrine which 
 promised atonement in consequence of a shedding of blood. But far more 
 than this, the quick conversion of the Galatians was due to the mighty out- 
 
 1 No one disputes that this in itself may be a metaphorical expression for any severe 
 sacrifice, as in Cat. Isxxii. : 
 
 " Quinti si tibi vis oculos debere Catullum, 
 Aut aliuil si quid carius est oculls." 
 
 But how incomparably more vivid and striking, and how much more germane to th 
 occasion, does the expression become if it was an attack of ophthalmia from which Paul 
 was suffering ! I 
 
 3 No doubt the Galatians with whom he had to deal were not the Gallic peasants who 
 were despised and ignorant ("paene servorum loco habentur," Caes. B. G. vi. 13); but 
 the Gallo-grseci, the more cultivated and Hellenised Galli of the towns. (Long in Diet. 
 Gcogr. s.v.) 
 
 3 Gal. iii. 1. Omit rjj aA>)0t<f ^ *ti6t<rt<u. with , A, B, D, E, F, G, &o., and iv v^Iv 
 with M, A, B, C. 
 
 * GaL iii. 1, ots KO.T o^floAfiovs 'Ijj<ro0s XPKTTO? irporypa<J>) cVTavpu/xeyof. It is trU9 that 
 rrpoypa^eiy is elsewhere always used in the sense of " to write before " (Horn. xv. 5 ; 
 Eph. iii. 8), and not "to post" or "placard" (Ar. Av. 450), even in Hellenistic and late 
 Greek (1 Mace. x. 36 ; Jude 4 ; Justin, Apol. ii. 52, B) ; but the sense and the context 
 here seem to show that St. Paxil used it as we often find modern compounds used in 
 a different sense (rrpofwypo^rj0>j). The large picture of Jesus Christ crucified was set up 
 before the mental vision of these spiritual children of Galatia (" Dicitur fascinus proprie 
 infantibus nocere" Prinias.) to avert their wandering glances from the dangerous 
 witchery (T v/aos /3<x<rieai-v) of the evil eye(]'j?3Ti, Prov. x.viii. 6; Ecclus. xiv. 6, &c. ; 
 pd<nca.voi, JElian. H. A. i. 53). "We may be reminded of the huge emblazoned banner! 
 with which Augustine and his monks caught the eye of Ethelbert at Canterbury. 
 
 * "Natio est omnis Gallorum admodnm dedita religionibus " (Cses. B. G. vi. 16).
 
 BEGINNING O? THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOUBKET. 267 
 
 I ' 
 
 pouring of the Spirit which followed Paul's preaching, and to the now powers 1 
 which wore wrought in his converts by their admission into the Church. But 
 while these were the results among the truer converts, there must have also 
 boon many whose ready adhesion was due to that quick restlessness, that 
 eager longing for change, which characterised them, 8 as it characterised the 
 kindred family of Greeks with which they were at this time largely mingled. 
 It was the too quick springing of the good seed on poor and shallow soil ; it 
 was the sudden flaming of fire among natures as light, as brittle, as inflammable 
 as straw. The modification of an old religion, the hearty adoption of a new 
 one, the combination of an antique worship with one which was absolutely 
 recent, and as unlike it as is possible to conceive, had already been illustrated 
 in Galatian history. As Celts they had brought with them into Asia their 
 old Druidism, with its haughty priestcraft, and cruel expiations. 3 Yet they 
 had already incorporated with this the wild nature-worship of Agdistis or 
 Cybele, the mother of the gods. They believed that the black stone which 
 Lad fallen from heaven was her image, and for centuries after it had been 
 carried off to Borne 4 they continued to revere her venerable temple, to give 
 alms to her raving eunuchs, to tell of the vengeance which she had inflicted 
 on the hapless Atys, and to regard the pine groves of Dindymus with 
 awe. 5 But yet, while this Phrygian cult was flourishing at Pessinus, and 
 commanding the services of its hosts of mutilated priests, and while at 
 Tavium the main object of worship was a colossal bronze Zeus of the ordinary 
 Greek type, 6 at Ancyra, on the other hand, was established the Roman 
 deification of the Emperor Augustus, to whom a temple of white marble, 
 still existing in ruins, had been built by the common contributions of 
 Asia. 7 Paul must have seen, still fresh and unbroken, the celebrated 
 Monumcntum Ancyranum, the will of Augustus engraved ou the marble of 
 
 1 Gal. lii. 5, 6 smx*wyur (= abundantly supplying ; cf. Phil. L 19 ; 2 Pet. i. 5) 
 tVti> rb rrvtvfjLa. ica.1 tvepytav Swififit iv vfu-. The latter clause may undoubtedly mean 
 "working miracles among you ;" but the parallels of 1 Cor. xii. 10; Matt. xiv. 2, seem 
 to show that it means "working powers in you." See, too, Isa. xxvi. 12 ; Heb. xiii. 21. 
 ivipywa means, as Bishop Andrewes says, " a work inwrought in us." In 1 Cor. xii. 10 
 the " operations of powers" are distinguished from the " gifts of healings." 
 
 3 Caesar complains of their "mobifitas," "levitas," and "infirmitas animi,"and says, 
 "in consiliis capiendis mobiles et novis plerumque rebus studentes" (. G. ii. 1 ; iv. 5 ; 
 iii. 10 ; and Liv. x. 28). 
 
 3 Strabo, xii. 5, p. 567, who tells us that they met in council at Drynemetum, or 
 " Oak-shrine" (drw cf. pv?, and nemed, "temple ), as Vernemetum = "Great-shrine" 
 (Venant. Fortun. i. 9), and Augustonemetum = "Augustus-shrine." 
 
 4 B.C. 204. See Liv. wii, 10, 11. The name of the town was dubiously connected 
 with Tieaelv. (Herodian. i. 11.) 
 
 5 Liv. xxxviii. 18 : Strabo, p. 489 ; Diod. Sic. iii. 58. Jiilian found the worship of 
 Cybele still languishing on at Pessinus in A.D. 363, and made a futile attempt to 
 galvanise it into life (Amm. Marc. xxii. 9). The lucrative features in the worship ^of 
 Cybele the sale of oracles and collection of alms may have had their attraction for the 
 avaricious Gauls. 
 
 6 Strabo, xii. 5. The very site of Taviiim is unknown. 
 
 7 Ancyra then called Sebaste Tectosagum, in honour of Augustus is now th 
 flourishing commercial town of Angora. The Baulos-Dagh Paul-Mountain near Angora 
 still reminds the traveller of St. Paul's visit to these cities, which is also rendered more 
 probable by their having been early episcopal sees,
 
 268 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 the temple, and copied from the inscription set up by his own command upon 
 bronze tablets in front of his mausoleum ; but while ho may have glanced at it 
 with interest, and read with still deeper pleasure on one of the pillars the 
 decree in which the Emperor had rewarded the f riendlinesa of the Jews by a 
 grant of religious immunity, 1 he must have thought with some pity and indig- 
 nation of the frivolity of spirit which could thus readily combine the oldest 
 and the newest of idolatrous aberrations the sincere and savage orgies of 
 Dindymene with the debasing flattery of an astute intriguer the passionate 
 abandonment to maddening religious impulse, and the calculating adoration 
 of political success. In point of fact, the three capitals of the three tribes 
 furnished data for an epitome of their history, and of their character. In 
 passing from Pessinus to Ancyra and Tavium the Apostle saw specimens of 
 cults curiously obsolete side by side with others which wore ridiculously now. 
 He passed from Phrygian nature-worship through Greek mythology to 
 Roman conventionalism. He could not but have regarded this as a bad sign, 
 and he would have seen a sad illustration of the poorer qualities which led to 
 his own enthusiastic reception, if he could have read the description in a Greek 
 rhetorician long afterwards of the Galatians being so eager to seize upon what 
 was new, that if they did but get a glimpse of the cloak of a philosopher, 
 they caught hold of and clung to it at once, as steel filings do to a magnet. 1 
 In fact, as he had bitter cause to learn afterwards, the religious views of the 
 Gauls were more or less a reflex of the impressions of the moment, and their 
 favourite sentiments the echo of the language used by the last comer. But 
 on lus first visit their faults all seemed to be in the background. Their ten- 
 dencies to revelries and rivalries, to drunkenness and avarice, to vanity and 
 boasting, to cabals and fits of rage, were in abeyance, 3 checked if not mastered 
 by the powerful influence of their now faith, and in some instances, we may 
 hope, cured altogether by the grace of tho Holy Spirit of God. All that he 
 saw was their eagerness and affection, their absence of prejudice, and willing- 
 ness to learn all that vivacity and warmheartedness which wore redeeming 
 points in their Celtic character. 4 
 
 How long he was detained among them by his illness we are not told, but 
 it was long enough to found several churches, one perhaps in each of the three 
 capitals, and it may be in some of the minor towns. His success was clearly 
 
 1 Jos. Antt. xvi. 6, 2. On Caesar-worship see Tac. Ann. iv. 55, 66. 
 5 Tkemistius, Or. xxiii., p. 299 ; ap. Wetstein in Gal. i. 6. <c<u rpi^avCov iraotubaviimi 
 iKKpcp.a.vTo.1, evfli/s uirirep rij; \idov ra <7ii;pta. 
 
 3 GaL v. 7, 15, 21, 26. Diodonis Siculus says that they were BO excessively drunken 
 (xaroiroi Kaff vjrcpSoAijv) that they drenched themselves with the raw wine imported by 
 merchants, and drank with such violent eagerness as either to stupefy themselves to 
 sleep or enrage themselves to madness (v. 26 ; cf . Ammian. Marc. xv. 12). He also calls 
 them "extravagantly avaricious" (v. 27; Liv. xxxviii. 27) and testifies to their disorderly 
 and gesticulative fits of rage (v. 31; Ammian. Marc. I.e.). 
 
 4 The vitality of traits of character in many races is extraordinary, and every one 
 will recognise some of these Celtic peculiarities in the Welsh, and others in the Irish. 
 Ancient testimonies to their weaknesses and vices have often been collected, but the 
 brighter features which existed then, aa they do still, Are chiefly witnessed to by St. 
 Paul.
 
 BEGINNING Ol 1 THB SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY. 269 
 
 among the Gauls ; and in the absence of all personal salutations in his Epistle, 
 wo cannot tell whether any of the aboriginal Phrygians or Greek settlers, 
 or of the Koman governing class, embraced the faith. But though he is 
 avowedly writing to those who had been Gentiles and idolaters, 1 there must 
 have been a considerable number of converts from the large Jewish popu- 
 lation 2 which had been attracted to Galatia by its fertility, its thriving com- 
 merce, and the privileges which secured them the free exercise of their 
 religion. These Jews, and their visitors from Jerusalem, as we shall see here- 
 after, proved to be a dangerous element in the infant Church. 
 
 The success of this unintended mission may have detained St. Paul for a 
 little time even after his convalescence ; and as he retraced his journey from 
 Tavium to Pessiuus he would have had the opportunity which he always 
 desired of confirming his recent converts in the faith. From Pessinus the 
 missionaries went towards Mysia, and laid their plans to pass on to the 
 numerous and wealthy cities of western Bithynia, at that time a senatorial 
 province. But once more their plans, in some way unknown to us, were 
 divinely overruled. The "Spirit of Jesus" 3 did not suffer them to enter a 
 country which was destined indeed to be early converted, but not by them, 
 and which pkys a prominent part in the history of early Christianity.* Once 
 more divinely thwarted in the fulfilment of their designs, they made no 
 attempt to preach in Mysia, 6 which in its bleak and thinly populated uplands 
 offered but few opportunities for evangelisation, but pressed on directly to 
 Troas, where an event awaited them of immense importance, which was 
 sufficient to explain the purpose of Him who had shaped the ends which they 
 themselves had so differently rough-hewn. 
 \ From the slopes of Ida, 6 Paul and Silvanus with their young attendant 
 
 1 Gal. iv. 8; v. 2; vL 12, &c. On the other hand, iv. 9 has been quoted (Jowett, 
 I. 187) as "an almost explicit statement that they were Jews ; " this is not, however, 
 necessarily the case. Doubtless, writing to a church in which there were both Jews and 
 Gentiles, St. Paul may use expressions which are sometimes more appropriate to one 
 class, sometimes to the other, but "the weak and beggarly elements" to which the 
 converts are returning may include Gentile aa well as Jewish ritualisms ; and some of 
 them may have passed through both phases. 
 
 2 St. Peter in addressing the Diaspora of Galatia and other districts (1 Pet. i. 1) must 
 have had Jews as well as Gentiles in view. The frequency of Old Testament quotations 
 and illustrations in the Epistle to the Galatians is perhaps a proof that not a few of the 
 converts had been originally proselytes. Otherwise it would be impossible to account 
 for the fact that " in none of St. Paul's Epistles has the cast of the reasoning a more 
 Jewish character " (Jowett, L 186). GaL iii. 27, 28 may allude to the existence of con- 
 verts from both classes. 
 
 3 Acts ivi. 7. This ro Ayrf/'ov, which is the undoubtedly correct reading (, A, B, 
 C 2 , D, E, and many versions and Fathers), perhaps indicates that St. Luke is here using 
 some document which furnished him with brief notes of this part of Paul's journeys. 
 The remarkable fact that in the FUioque controversy neither side appealed to this expres- 
 sion shows how early the text had been altered by the copyists. 
 
 * See Pliny's letter to Trajan (x. 97), when he was Proconsul of Bithynia, asking 
 advice how to deal with the Christians. 
 
 8 This must be the meaning of irap\flon- (=o0Vre, "neglecting"). It cannot be 
 translated "passing through," which would be SieMoms, though a glance at the map will 
 how that they must have passed through Mysia without stopping. The absence of 
 ynagogues and the remote, unknown character of the region account for this. 
 
 * Acts xvi. 8.
 
 270 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 descended the ravino which separated the mountain from the port and colony. 
 They were on classic ground. Every step they took revealed scenes to which 
 the best and brightest poetry of Greece had given an immortal interest. As 
 they emerged from the pine groves of the many-fountained hill, with its 
 exquisite legend of (Enone and her love, they saw beneath them the 
 
 " Ringing plains of windy Troy," 
 where the great heroes of early legend had so often 
 
 " Drunk delight of battle with their peers.** 
 But if they had ever heard of 
 
 "The face that launched a thousand ships, 
 Or sacked the topmost towers of Ilion," 
 
 or looked with any interest on the Siniois and the Scamander, and the huge 
 barrows of Ajax and Achilles, they do not allude to them. Their minds were 
 full of other thoughts. 
 
 The town at which they now arrived had been founded by the successors of 
 Alexander, and had been elevated into a colony with the Jus Italicuin. This 
 privilege had been granted to the inhabitants solely because of the romantic 
 interest which the Romans took in tho legendary cradle of their greatness, an 
 interest which almost induced Constantino to fix there, instead of at Byzantium, 
 the capital of the Eastern Empire. Of any preaching in Alexandria Troas 
 nothing is told us. On threo separate occasions at least St. Paul visited it. 1 
 It was there that Carpus lived, who was probably his host, and he found it a 
 place peculiarly adapted for the favourable reception of tho Gospel. 9 On this 
 occasion, however, his stay was very short, 3 because he was divinely commanded 
 to other work. 
 
 St. Paul had now been labouring for many years among Syrians, Ciliciuns, 
 and the mingled races of Asia Minor ; but during that missionary activity he 
 had been at Roman colonies like Antioch in Pisidia, and must have been 
 thrown very frequently into the society of Greeks and Latins. He was himself 
 a Roman citizen, and the constant allusions of his Epistles show that he, like 
 St. Luke, must have been struck with admiration for the order, the discipline, 
 the dignity, the reverence for law which characterised the Romans, and 
 especially for the bravery, the determination, the hardy spirit of self-denial 
 which actuated the Roman soldier. 4 He tells us, later in his life, how 
 frequently his thoughts had turned towards Rome itself,* and as he brooded 
 
 1 Acts XX. 1, 2, compared with 2 Cor. 11. 12; 1 Cor. rvi. 5 9; and Acts rx. 6; and 
 2 Tim. iv. 13. 
 
 3 2 Cor. ii. 12. 
 
 * Acts xvi. 10, tiCt'ws e7)ri$crap' implies that they took the first ship which they could 
 find for a voyage to Macedonia. 
 
 4 This is shown by the many military and agonistic metaphors in his Epistles. 
 
 * Acts xix. 21; cf. Rom. i. 13 "Oftentimes I purposed to come to you ;" xv. 23 
 "I have had a great desire these many years to come to you." These passagea were 
 writ ten from Achaia probably from Corinth six or seven years after this date.
 
 BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOUBNET. 271 
 
 on the divinely indicated future of Christianity, we cannot doubt that whilo 
 Wandering round the then busy but now land-locked and desolate harbour of 
 Troas, he had thrown many a wistful glance towards the hills of Imbroa and 
 Samothrace ; and perhaps when on some clear evening the colossal peak of Athos 
 was visible, it seemed like some vast angel who beckoned him to carry the 
 good tidings to the west. The Spirit of Jesus had guided him hitherto in his 
 journey, had prevented him from preaching in the old and famous cities of 
 Asia, had forbidden him to enter Bithynia, had driven the stake deeper into 
 his flesh, that he might preach the word among the Gauls. Anxiously must 
 he have awaited further guidance ; and it came. In the night a Macedonian 
 soldier 1 stood before him, exhorting him with those words, " Cross over into 
 Macedonia and help us." When morning dawned, Paul narrated the vision to 
 his companions, 2 " and immediately we sought," says the narrator, who here, 
 for the first time, appears as the companion of the Apostle, " to go forth into 
 Macedonia, inferring that the Lord has called us to preach tho Gospel to 
 them." With such brevity and simplicity is the incident related which of &11 
 others was the most important in introducing the Gospel of Christ to the most 
 advanced and active races of the world, and among them to those races in 
 whose hands its future destinies must inevitably rest. 
 
 The other incident of this visit to the Troas is the meeting of Paul with 
 Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel. This 
 mooting is indicated with profound modesty by the sudden use of tho 
 pronoun " we ; " but even without this the vivid accuracy of detail in tha 
 narrative which immediately ensues, is in such striking contrast with tho 
 meagreness of much that has gone before, that we should have been driven to 
 conjecture the presence of the writer on board the little vessel that now 
 slipped its hawsers from one of the granite columns which wo still see lying 
 prostrate on the lonely shores of the harbour of Troas. 
 
 And this meeting was a happy ono for Paul ; for, of all the follow- workers 
 with whom he was thrown, Timothens alone was dearer to him than Luke. 
 From the appearance and disappearance of the first personal pronoun in the 
 subsequent chapters of the Acts,* we see that he accompanied St. Paul to 
 Philippi, and rejoined him there some seven years afterwards, never again to 
 part with him so long as we are able to pursue his history. How deeply St. 
 Paul was attached to liim appears in tho title " the beloved physician ; " how 
 entire was his fidelity is seen in the touching notice, " Only Luke is with me." 
 
 1 The o-i)p and the <TT*K, and the Instant recognition that it was a Macedonian, 
 perhaps imply this. It fa called an opa.ua, which ia used of impressions more distinct 
 than those of dreams. Acts x. 3, h> ipa^on <J.ai/pi*. Malt. xvii. 9 (the Transfigura- 
 tion). 
 
 3 D, SirvtpSelt oZv 8ujyi)<roTo TO opaij-a. iifiiv (Acta xvl, 10). 
 
 The ''we " begins in Acts xvi. 10 ; it ends when Paul leaves Philippi, xvii. 1. ] 
 resumed at Philippi at the close of the third missionary journey, xx. 5, and continues till 
 the arrival at Jerusalem, xxi. IS. It again appears in xxvii. 1, and continues throughout 
 the journey to Rome. Luke was also with the Apostle during his first (Col. iv. 14 ; 
 Philem. 24) and second imprisonments (2 Tim. Iv, 11). It ia La from certain thai 
 2 Cor. viii. 18 refers to him.
 
 272 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PA01. 
 
 He shared his journeys, his dangers, his shipwreck; he shared and cheered 
 his long imprisonments, first at Csesarea, then at Rome. More than all, he 
 became the biographer of the Great Apostle, and to his allegiance, to his 
 ability, to his accurate preservation of facts, is due nearly all that we know of 
 one who laboured more abundantly than all the Apostles, and to whom, more 
 than to any of them, the cause of Christ is indebted for its stability and its 
 dissemination. 
 
 Of Luke himself, beyond what we learn of his movements and of his cha- 
 racter from his own writings, we know but little. There is no reason to reject 
 the unanimous tradition that he was by birth an Antiochene, 1 and it is clear 
 from St. Paul's allusions that he was a Gentile convert, and that he had not 
 been circumcised. 2 That he was a close observer, a careful narrator, a man of 
 cultivated intellect, and possessed of a good Greek style, 3 we see from his two 
 books ; and they also reveal to us a character gentle and manly, sympathetic 
 and self-denying. The incidental allusion of St. Paul shows us that he was a 
 physician, and this allusion is singularly confirmed by his own turns of phrase. 1 
 The rank of a physician in those days was not in any respect so high as now 
 it is, and does not at all exclude the possibility that St. Luke may have been a 
 f reedman ; but on this and all else which concerns him Scripture and tradition 
 leave us entirely uninformed. That he was familiar with naval matters ia 
 strikingly shown in his account of the shipwreck, and it has even been con- 
 jectured that he exercised his art in the huge and crowded merchant vessels 
 which were incessantly coasting from point to point of the Mediterranean. 5 
 Two inferences, at any rate, arise from the way in which his name is intro- 
 duced : one that he had already made the acquaintance of St. Paul, perhaps 
 at Antioch ; the other that, thmigh he had some special connexion with 
 Philippi and Troas, his subsequent close attachment to the Apostle in his 
 
 1 Euseb. H. E. iii. 4; Jcr. De Virr. Illustr. Such allusions as "Nicolas, a proselyte 
 of Antioch," and the mention of Christians important there, but otherwise anknown, 
 lend probability to this tradition (cf. xi. 20; xiii. 1, &c.). If we could attach any im- 
 portance to the reading of D in Acts xi. 28 ((rwearpa/j^ti/wv < w>v), it would show that 
 Luke had been at Antioch during the year when Paul and Barnabas were working there 
 before the famine. The name Lucas is an abbreviation of Lucaiius, as Silas of Silvanus ; 
 but the notion that they were the same person is preposterous. 
 
 2 Col. iv. 10, 11, 14. 
 
 3 As an incidental confirmation that he was a Gentile, Bishop "Wordsworth (on 
 1 Thess. ii. 9) notices that he says "day and night" (Acts ix. 24), whereas when he is 
 reporting the speeches of St. Paul (Acts xx. 31 ; xxvi. 7, in the Greek) he, like St. Paul 
 himself (1 Thess. iii. 10 ; 2 Thess. iii. 8 ; 1 Tim. v. 5, &c.), always says " night and day," 
 in accordance with the Jewish notion that the night preceded the day. A more decisive 
 indication that Luke was a Gentile ia Acts i. 19, rfj iS(a Sut\tKT<f avruv, slipped into St. 
 Peter's speech. "Lucas, medicus Antiochensis, ut scripta ejus indicant" (Jer.). 
 
 4 See a highly ingenious paper by Dr. Plumptre on St. Luke and St. Paul (The 
 Expositor, No. xx., Aug., 1876). He quotes the following indications of medical know- 
 ledge : The combination of feverish attacks with dysentery (Acts xxviii. 8), and the 
 use of rifxtj in the sense (?) of honorarium ; pda-eis and afyvpa. in Acts iii. 7 (cf. Hippocrates, 
 p. 637) ; the incrustation caused by ophthalmia (Acts ix. 18) ; ic<rra<yi? (Acts x. 9, 10) ; 
 oxwArjKo/JfxoTos (Acts xii. 23); "Physician, heal thyself," only In Luke iv. 23; tponfrx. 
 (Luke xiii. 44), &c. 
 
 6 Smith, Voy. and Shipwreck, p. 15, who shows that St. Luke's nautical knowledge is 
 at once accurate and unprofessional.
 
 273 
 
 journeys aiid imprisonments may have arisen from a dosire to give him the 
 benefit of medical skill and attention in Ms frequent attacks of sickness. 1 Tlie 
 lingering remains of that illness which prostrated St. Paul in Galatia may 
 have furnished the first reason why it became necessary for Luke to accom- 
 pany him, and so to begin the fraternal companionship which must have bcon 
 one of the richest blessings of a sorely troubled life. 
 
 833. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN MACEDONIA. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 PHILIPPI. 
 
 " The day is short ; the work abundant ; the labourers are remiss ; the reward is 
 great ; the master presses." PIRKB ABH^TH, ii. 
 
 So with their hearts full of the high hopes inspired by the consciousness that they 
 were being led by the Spirit of God, the two Apostles, with Luke and Timo- 
 theus, set sail from the port of Troas. As the south wind sped them fast upon 
 their destined course, they may have seen a fresh sign that He was with them 
 who causes the east wind to blow in the heavens, and by His power brings in 
 the south wind. 2 Owing to this favourable breeze, they traversed in two days 
 the distance which occupied five days when they returned. 3 On the first day 
 they ran past Tonedos and Imbros straight for Samothraco, and anchored for 
 the night to leeward of it. Did Paul as he gazed by starlight, or at early 
 dawn, on the towering peak which overshadows that ancient island, think at 
 all of its immemorial mysteries, or talk to his companions about the Cabiri, or 
 question any of the Greek or Roman sailors about .the strange names of 
 Axiochoros, Axiochersos, and Axiochersa p We would gladly know, but wo 
 have no data to help us, and it is strongly probable that to all such secondary 
 incidents he was habitually indifferent. 
 
 1 Dr. Plumptre (ubi supra) tries to show that the intercourse of Luke, the Physician, 
 left its traces on St. Paul's own language and tone of thought e.g., the frequent use of 
 
 (1 Tim. i. 10 ; vi. 3, &c., in eight places), which is found three times in St. Luke, 
 ; voo-w (1 Tim. vi. 4) ; yayypa.iva. (2 Tim. ii. 17) ; TV</>OO> (1 Tim. 
 rruVot (1 Tim. iv. 2) ; Kvr,e6^o<. (2 Tim. iv. 3) ; Hippocr., p. 
 444 ; yv/avao-ia (1 Tim. iv. 8) ; ordfiaxos (1 Tim. v. 23) ; the anti-ascetic advico of Col. ii. 23 
 
 (which means that "ascetic rules have no value in relation to bodily fulness " i.e., are 
 no remedy against its consequences in disordered passions) ; Kararo^ (Phil. iii. 2) ; 
 o-Ku'jSaAa (Phil. iii. 8, &c.). The facts are curious and noticeable, even if they will not 
 fully bear out the inference. 
 
 2 See Con. and Hows. i. 305. The description of the voyage by St. Luke, however 
 brief, is, as usual, demonstrably accurate In the minutest particular*. 
 
 * Acts xx. 6 
 
 10*
 
 274 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAITI* 
 
 On the next day, still scudding before the wind, 1 they passed the mouth of 
 the famous Nestus ; sailed northward of Thasos amid the scenes so full to us 
 of the memory of Thucydides ; gazed for the first time on the " gold-veined 
 crags " of Pangaeus ; saw a rocky promontory, and on it a busy seaport, over 
 which towered the marble Maiden Chamber of Diana ; and so, anchoring in 
 the roadstead, set foot three of them for the first time on European soil. 
 The town was Noapolis, in Thrace the modern Kavala which served as the 
 port of the Macedonian Philippi. Here St. Paul did not linger. As at 
 Scleueia, and Attaleia, and Perga, and Peiraeus, and Cenchreie, he seemed to 
 regard the port as being merely a starting-point for the inland town. 2 Accord- 
 ingly, ho at once left Neapolis by the western gate and took the Egnatian road, 
 which, after skirting the shore for a short distance, turns northward over a 
 narrow pass of Mount Pangaeus, and so winds down into a green delicious 
 plain, with a marsh on one side where herds of largo-horned buffaloes wallowed 
 among the reeds, and with meadows on the other side, which repaid the snowa 
 of Hsemus, gathered in the freshening waters of the Zygactes, with the bloom 
 and odour of the hundred-petal rose. At a distance of about seven miles they 
 would begin to pass through the tombs that bordered the roadsides in the 
 neighbourhood of all ancient cities, and one inilo further brought them to 
 Philippi, whose Acropolis had long been visible on the summit of its pre- 
 cipitous and towering hill. 3 
 
 The city of Philippi was a monumental record of two vast empires. It had 
 once been an obscure place, called Krenides from its streams and springs ; but 
 Philip, the father of Alexander, had made it a frontier town, to protect Mace- 
 donia from the Thracians, and had helped to establish his power by the 
 extremely profitable working of its neighbouring gold mines. Augustus, proud 
 of the victory over Brutus and Cassius, won at the foot of the hill on which 
 it stands, and on the summit of which Cassius had committed suicide, elevated 
 it to the rank of a colony, which made it, as St. Luke calls it, if not the first 
 yet certainly " a first city of that district of Macedonia." * And this, probably, 
 was why St. Paul went directly to it. When Perseus, the last successor of 
 Alexander, had been routed at Pydna (June 22, B.C. 168), Macedonia had 
 been reduced to a Roman province in four divisions. These, in accordance 
 
 1 St. Luke most accurately orcita ei0uSpo;j(ra/iei> of the second day's voyage; a S.S.K. 
 wind and such are prevalent at times in this part of the ^Egean Avould speed them 
 direct to Samothrace. but not quite in so straight a course from Samothrace to Neapclia. 
 
 2 V. supra, p. 219. 
 
 8 Appian, iv. 105. On the site of it is a small Turkish village, called Filibedjik. 
 
 4 The full title, "Colonia Augusta Julia Victrix Philippensium," is found on inscrip- 
 tions (Miss. ArcMol., p. 18). A great deal has been written about f,ns for! ir/xinj ITJ* 
 ppi'2oc rfc MoucfSoioas JT&UJ Ko\tvia. A favourite explanation is that it means "the first 
 city of Macedonia they came to," regarding Neapolis as being technically in Thrace. 
 Both parts of the explanation are most improbable : if irp^n) only meant " the first 
 they came to," it would be a frivolous remark, and would require the article and the 
 imperfect tense; and Neapolis, as the port of Philippi, was certainly regarded as a 
 Macedonian town. TJpun) is justifiable politically for Philippi, though not the capital of 
 Macedonia Prima, was certainly more important than Amphipolis. Bp. Wordsworth, 
 makes it mean " the chief city of the frontier of Macedonia" (of. Ezek. xlv. 7).
 
 PHILIPPI. 275 
 
 with the astute and machiavellic policy of Rome, were kept distinct from each 
 other by differences of privilege and isolation of interests which tended to 
 foster mutual jealousies. Beginning eastwards at the river Nestus, Macedonia 
 Prima reached to the Strymon ; Macedonia Secunda, to the Axius ; Macedonia 
 Tertia, to the Peueus ; and Macedonia Quavta, to Illyricum and Epirus. 1 The 
 capitals of these divisions respectively were Amphipolis, Thessalonica, at 
 which the Proconsul of the entire province fixed his residence, Pella, ami 
 Pekgouia. It is a very reasonable conjecture that Paul, in answer to tho 
 appeal of the Vision, had originally intended to visit as, perhaps, ho ultimately 
 did visit all four capitals. But Araphipolis, in spite of its historic celebrity 
 had sunk into comparative insignificance, and the proud colonial privileges of 
 Philippi made it in reality the more important town. 
 
 On the insignia of Roman citizenship which hero met his gaze on every 
 side the S.P.Q.R., the far-fainod legionary eagles, the panoply of the Roman 
 soldiers which ho was hereafter so closely to describe, the two statues of 
 Augustus, one in the paludament of an Imperator, one in the seini-nude 
 cincture of a divinity Paul could not have failed to gaze with curiosity ; and 
 as they passed up the Egnatian road which divided the city, they must havo 
 looked at the figures of tutelary deities rudely scratched upon the rock, which 
 showed that the old mythology was still nominally accepted. Can we suppose 
 that they were elevated so far above the sense of humour as not to aniile with 
 their comrade Silvanus as they passed the temple dedicated to the rustic god 
 whose name ho bore, and saw the images of the old man, 
 
 " So surfeit-swollen, BO old, and so profane,** 
 
 whom the rural population of Italy, from whom these colonists had been drawn, 
 worshipped with offerings of fruit and wine P 
 
 They had arrived in the middle of the week, and their first care, as usual, 
 was to provide for their own lodging and independent maintenance, to which 
 Luke would doubtless be able to contribute by the exercise of his art. They 
 might have expected to find a Jewish community sheltering itself under the 
 wings of the Roman eagle ; but if so they wore disappointed. Philippi was a 
 military and agricultural, not a commercial town, and the Jews were so fow 
 tliat they did not even possess a synagogue. If during those days they made 
 any attempt to preach, it could only have been in the privacy of their rooms, 
 for when the Sabbath came they were not even sure that the town could boast 
 of a proseucha, or prayer-house. 2 They know enough, however, of the habits 
 of the Jews to feel sure that if there wore one, it would be on the river-bank, 
 outside the city. So they made their way through the gate 3 along the ancient 
 causeway which led directly to the Gangites, 4 and under the triumphal arch 
 
 1 Liv. xlv. 1829. We cannot be sure that these divisions were still retained. 
 
 2 Acts xvi. 13. This is the sense which I extract from the various readings of , A, 
 B (?), C, D, and from the versions. 
 
 3 Acts xvi. 13, irv'Xr*, , A, B, C, D, &c. 
 
 4 Perl-ays from the same root as Ganges (Renan, p.
 
 276 THE LIFE AtfD WORK OF ST. PAtJL. 
 
 -jhich commemorated the great victory of Philippi ninety-four years before. 1 
 That victory had finally decided the prevalence of the imperial system, which 
 was f raught with such vast consequences for the world. In passing to the 
 banks of the river the missionaries were on the very ground on which tb> 
 battle had been fought, and near which the camps of Brutus and Cassius had 
 stood, separated by the river from the army of Octavianus and Antony. 
 
 But when they reached the poor open-air proseucha* strange to say, they 
 only found a few women assembled there. It was clearly no time for formal 
 orations. They simply sat down, and entered into conversation with the little 
 group. 8 Their words were blessed. Among the women sat a Lydian 
 proselytess, a native of the city of Thyatira, who had there belonged to the 
 guild of dyers. 4 The luxurious extravagance of the age created a large demand 
 for purple in the market of Rome, and Lydia found room for her profitable 
 trade among the citizens of Philippi. As she sat listening, the arrow of con- 
 viction pierced her heart. She accepted the faith, and was baptised with her 
 slaves and children. 6 One happy fruit her conversion at once bore, for she 
 used hospitality without grudging. " If you have judged me," she said, " to 
 be faithful to the Lord, come to my house, and stay there." To accede to the 
 request, modestly as it was urged, was not in accordance with the principles 
 which the great Apostle had laid down to guide his conduct. Fully acknow- 
 ledging the right of every missionary of the faith to be maintained by those 
 to whom he ministered, and even to travel about with a wife, or an attendant 
 deaconess, he had yet not only foregone this right, but begged as a personal 
 favour that it might not be pressed upon him, because he valued that proof of 
 his sincerity which was furnished by the gratuitous character of his ministry. 
 Lydia, however, would not be refused, and she was so evidently one of those 
 generous natures who have learnt how far more blessed it is to give than to 
 receive, that Paul did not feel it right to persist in his refusal. The trade of 
 Lydia was a profitable one, and in her wealth, joined to the affection which he 
 cherished for the Church of Philippi beyond all other Churches, we see the 
 probable reason why he made other Churches jealous by accepting pecuniary 
 aid from his Philippian converts, and from them alone. 6 
 
 There is some evidence that, among the Macedonians, women occupied a 
 more independent position, and were held in higher honour, than in other 
 
 1 Called Kiemer (Miss. ArcfiM. t p. 118). 
 
 2 Proseuchae were circular-shaped enclosures open to the air (Epiphan. Haer. TXTT, 1), 
 often built on the sea-shore or by rivers (Phil, in Flacc. 14 ; Jos. Antt. xiv. 10, 23; Tert. 
 ad Nat. i. 13 ; Juv. Sat. iii. 12), for the facility of the frequent ablutions which Jewish 
 worship required. 
 
 3 Acts Xvi. 13, (\u\ovfiev ', 14, TOIS XoAov/xei'Oif. 
 
 4 The province of Lydia was famous for the art of dyeing in purple (Horn. H. vi. 14^ ? 
 Claud. Rapt. Proserp. i. 270 ; Strabo, xiii. 4, 14). Sir G. Wheler found an inscription at 
 Thyatira mentioning " the dyers" (oi /3a^e). 
 
 s Acts xvi. 14, jjKove-y . . . Strjvoigev. How unlike invention is the narrative that, mim- 
 jnoned by a vision to Macedonia, his first and most important convert is a woman of the 
 Asia in which the Spirit had forbidden him to preach ! 
 
 6 1 Thess. ii. 5, 7, 9 ; twice in Thessalonica, Phil. iv. 16 ; once ia Athens, 2 C. xi. 9 j 
 once in Hume, Phil. iv. 10,
 
 PHILIPPI. 277 
 
 parts of the world. 1 In his Epistle to the Philippians St. Paul makes promi- 
 nent mention of two ladies, Euodia and Syntychc, who were well known hi the 
 Christian community, although unhappily they could not agree with each other. 2 
 The part that women played in the dissemination of the Gospel can hardly be 
 exaggerated, and unless it was a mere accident that only women were assembled 
 in the proseucha on the first Sabbath at Philippi, we must suppose that not a 
 few of the male converts mentioned shortly afterwards 3 were originally won 
 over by their influence. The only converts who are mentioned by name are 
 Epaphroditus, for whom both Paul and the Philippian Church seem to have 
 felt a deep regard; Clemens, and Syzygos, or "yokefellow,"* whom Paul 
 addresses in a playful paronomasia, and entreats him to help the evangelising 
 toils the joint wrestlings for the Gospel of Euodia and Syntyche. But 
 besides those there were other unnamed fellow-workers to whom St. Paul 
 bears the high testimony that " their names were in the book of life." 
 
 Yery encouraging and very happy must these weeks at Philippi have 
 been, resulting, as they did, in the founding of a Church, to whose members 
 he finds it needful to give but few warnings, and against whom ho does 
 not utter a word of blame. The almost total absence of Jews meant an 
 almost total absence of persecution. The Philippians were heart-whole in 
 their Christian faith. St. Paul's entire Epistle to them breathes of joy, 
 affection, and gratitude. He seems to remember that he is writing to a 
 colony, and a military colony a colony of Roman " athletes." Ho reminds 
 them of a citizenship loftier and more ennobling than that of Rome; 6 ho calls 
 Epaphroditus not only his fellow-worker, but also his fellow-soldier, one who 
 had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in the now Macedonian phalanx, 
 which was to join as of old in an advance to the conquest of the world. He 
 derives his metaphorical expressions from the wrestling-ground and the race. 8 
 Alike St. Paul and St. Luke seem to rejoice in the strong, manly Roman 
 nature of these converts, of whom many were slaves and f reedmen, but 
 of whom a large number had been soldiers, drawn from various parts of 
 Italy in the civil wars men of the hardy Marsian and Pelignian stock- 
 trained in the stem, strong discipline of the Roman legions, and un- 
 sophisticated by the debilitating Hellenism of a mongrel population. St. Paul 
 loved them more and honoured them more than he did the dreamy, super- 
 stitious Ephesians, the fickle, impulsive Gauls, or the conceited, factious 
 Achaians. In writing to Thessalonica and Philippi he had to deal with men 
 of a larger mould and manlier mind more true and more tender than the men 
 
 M r 
 l See Lightfoot, Philip., p. 55. J Phil. iv. 2. s Acts xvi. 40. 
 
 4 It is true that the name does not occur elsewhere, but I cannot for a moment believe 
 with Clemens Alex. (Strom, iii. 6, 53) and Epiphanius (H. E. iii. 30) that the word 
 2uvye means "wife." Lydia is not mentioned in the Epistle, unless the name of this 
 Lydian lady was Euodia or Syntyche. She may have died, or have returned to her native 
 city in the intervening years. She most assuredly would have been named if the Epistle 
 had been a forgery. 
 
 5 Phil. i. 27, woAiTev'cotfe ; iii. 20, iroXirevfio. I 
 
 6 Phil. i. 27, oT^Ktr*; iii. 12, Ju>; 14, iv\ ro 8pa0u>i>j Iv. 3, <n>nj0A>|<rw'} L 27, 
 
 UJ. 16, TV OVT* <rr<n\t~,v>
 
 273 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of Corinth, with their boastful ignorance which took itself for knowledge, 01 
 tho men of Asia, with their voluptuous mysticisms and ceremonial pettiness. 
 He was now thrown for the first time among a race which has been called the 
 soundest p&rt of the ancient world, 1 a race which shone forth like torches in 
 narrow and winding streets, like stars that beamed their light and life in the 
 dark firmament blameless children of God amid the dwarfed and tortuous 
 meanness of a degenerate race. 8 
 
 Their stay in this fruitful field of labour was cut short by an unforeseen 
 circumstance, which thwarted the greed of a few interested persons, and 
 enlisted against Paul and Silas the passions of the mob. For there is this 
 characteristic difference between the persecutions of Jews and Gentiles that 
 the former were always stirred up by religious fanaticism, the latter by 
 personal and political interests which were accidentally involved in religions 
 questions. Hitherto the Apostles had laboured without interruption, chiefly 
 because the Jews in the place, if there wore any at all, were few and un- 
 influential ; but one day, as they were on their way to the proseucha, they 
 were mot by a slave-girl, who, having that excitable, perhaps epileptic diathesis 
 which was the qualification of tho Pythonesses of Delphi, waa announced to 
 bo possessed by a Python spirit. 3 Nothing was less understood in antiquity 
 than these obscure phases of mental excitation, and the strange flashes of 
 sense, and even sometimes of genius, out of the gloom of a perturbed intellect, 
 were regarded as inspired and prophetic utterances. As a fortune-teller and 
 diviner, this poor girl was held in high esteem by the credulous vulgar of the 
 town.* A slave could possess no property, except such peculium as his master 
 allowed him, and tho foe for consulting this unofficial Pythoness was a 
 lucrative source of income to tho people who owned her. To a poor afflicted 
 girl like this, whose infirmities had encircled her with superstitions reverence, 
 more freedom would be allowed than would have been granted, even in 
 Philippi, to ordinary females in the little town ; and she would bo likely 
 especially if she were of Jewish birth to hear fragments of information about 
 
 1 See the excellent remarks of Hansrath, p. 281, stqq, Phil. ii. 15. 
 
 8 Acts zvi. 16, irvevti-a. UvOiava. (, A, B, 0, D, &c.). The corresponding Old Testament 
 expression is 3i olh (Lev. xx. 6). It points to the use of ventriloquism, as I have 
 shown, s.v. " Divination," in Smith, Bill. Diet. A* this period, and long before, people 
 ..f this class usually women were regarded as prophetesses, inspired by the Pythian 
 Apollo (irvOotaprroi). Hence they were called nuftwe?, and Ei'pvK\cr, from an ancient 
 .soothsayer named Eurycles and fyymrrpfpitfot, from the convulsive heavings, aad the 
 speaking as out of the depths of the stomach, which accompanied their fits (Sophocles, 
 Fr. oTfpvdjieurif). See Plutarch, De Defect. Orac. 9; Galen, Qloss. Hippocr. ('Eyya<rrp.>u0ot' 
 01 KexAcKr/icVov TOU <rro/.iaTos ^>(?eyydf/toi Si TO SoKtiv CK TT-S yiurTpbc $0eyyc(rCai. ) Hesych, S.V. 
 Schol. ad Ar. Vcsp. 1019, and Tertullian, Apd. 23, who distinctly defines them & 
 people "qui de Deo pati existimantur, qui anhclando pracfantur." Neander quotes 
 from Ellis the interesting fact that the priest of Obo, in the Society Isles, found himself 
 unable to reproduce his former convulsive ecstasies of supposed inspiration, after his 
 conversion to Christianity (Planfy,, p. 176). 
 
 4 "We know that "an idol is nothing in the world," and therefore the expression that 
 this girl had "a Python spirit" 1 is only an adoption of the current Pagan phraseology 
 about her. Hippocrates attributed epileptic diseases to possession by Apollo, Cybcle, 
 Poseidon, &c., De Morbo Sacr. (C. and H. i. 321).
 
 PHILIPPL 279 
 
 Paul and his teaching. They impressed themselves on hor imagination, and 
 on meeting the men of whom she had heard snch solemn things, she turnod 
 round l and followed them towards the river, repeatedly calling out perhaps 
 in the very phrases which she had heard used of them " These people are 
 slaves of the Most High God, and they are announcing to us the way of 
 salvation." 2 This might ho tolerated once or twice, but at last it hccame too 
 serious a hindrance of their sacred duties to be any longer endured in silence. 
 
 In an outburst of pity and indignation 3 pity for the sufferer, indignation 
 at this daily annoyance Paul suddenly turned round, and addressing the 
 Pytho by whom the girl was believed to be possessed, said, " I enjoin thee, in 
 *,hc name of Jesus Christ, to go out of her." The effect was instantaneous. 
 The calm authoritative exorcism restored the broken harmony of her being. 
 'No more paroxysms could bo expected of her ; nor the wild unnatural scream- 
 ing utterances, so shrill and unearthly that they might very naturally be taken 
 for Sibylline frenzies. Her masters ceased to expect anything from her oracles. 
 Their hope of further gain " went out " with the spirit. 4 A piece of property 
 so rare that it could only be possessed by a sort of joint ownership wag 
 rendered entirely valueless. 
 
 Thus the slave-masters were touched in their pockets, and it filled them 
 with fury. They could hardly, indeed, go before the magistrates and tell 
 them that Paul by a single word had exorcised a powerful demon ; but they 
 were determined to have vengeance somehow or other, and, in a Roman 
 colony composed originally of discharged Antonian soldiers, and now occupied 
 partly by their descendants, partly by enfranchised freodmen from Italy, 5 
 it was easy to raise a clamour against one or two isolated Jews. It 
 was the more easy because the Philippians might have heard the news of 
 disturbances and riots at Rome, which provoked the decree of Claudius 
 banishing all Jews from the city. 8 They determined to seize this opportunity, 
 and avail themselves of a similar plea. 7 They suddenly arrested Paul and 
 Silas, and dragged them before the sitting magistrates. 8 Those seem to have 
 relegated the matter to the duumviri, 6 who were the chief authorities of the 
 
 1 Acts xvi. 16, diratT>j<r<u ; 17, jcarcucoXovfl/jaaera. 
 
 8 Slaves ; cf. Acts iv. 29 ; Horn. i. 1 ; Tit. i. 1. 
 
 8 Acts xvi. 18, Sioirovrjec-is. Tho same word is used of the strong threats of the priests 
 at the teaching of the Apostles in Jerusalem (Acts iv. 2). 
 
 4 Acts xvi. 19, ir>\B(v r) eAwlj rfc c>ya<r<'ac OVTUV. The use of the same word after the 
 iffjAScv (TO irvJujLio) oirn rfj >p<f is perhaps intentional. 
 
 6 This is proved by the inscriptions found at Philippi, which record the donors to the 
 Temple of Suvanus, nearly all of whom are slaves or freedmen (Miss. ArcMol., p. 7i>). 
 
 6 Acts xviii. 2 ; Suet. Claud. 25. See Ewald, vi. 488. 
 
 7 Judaism was a rdigio licita, but anything like active proselytism was liable to stern 
 suppression. See Paul. Scntent., 21; Scrv. Virg. jEn. viii. 187: and the remarkable 
 advice of Maecenas to Augustus to dislike and punish all religious innovators (TOUT &< 
 
 fevifoird? TI irtpi curb [TO Cetov] icai jilVet Kai icoXafe. Dio. Cass. vii. 36). "Quoties," says 
 
 Livy, " hoc patrum avorumque aetate negotium est ut sacra extorna fieri vetarent, sac: i- 
 ficulos vatesque foro, circo, urbe prohiberent " (Liv. xxxix. 16). 
 
 8 Possibly the aediles (Miss. Archto?., p. 71). 
 
 ' Actsivi. 19. tiAicvo-avjrpbs n)i> iyopav TTI TOV S.p\ovTas: 20, KOU vpoirn.yn.'farTts avrovt 
 
 rtt <TTpoT>,yol9. The different verbs of which the second is so much milder and the 
 different titles surely imply what is said in the text.
 
 280 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 colony, and who, aping the manners and the titles of Imperial Rome, had the 
 impertinence to call themselves "Praetors." 1 Leading their prisoners into 
 the presence of these " Praetors," they exclaimed, " These fellows are utterly 
 troubling our city, being mere Jews ; and they are preaching customs which 
 it is not lawful for us, who are Romans, to accept or to practise." 2 The mob 
 knew the real state of the case, and sympathised with the owners of the slave 
 girl, feeling much as the Gadarenos felt towards One whose healing of a 
 demoniac had interfered with their gains. In tho minds of the Greeks and 
 Romans there was always, as we have seen, a latent spark of abhorrence 
 against the Jews. These sweepings of tho Agora vehemently sided with the 
 accusers, and the provincial duumvirs, all the more dangerous from being 
 pranked out in tho usurped peacock-plumes of " praetorian " dignity, assumed 
 that tho mob must be right, or at any rate that people who were Jews must be 
 so far wrong as to deserve whatever they might got. They were not sorry at 
 so cheap a cost to gratify tho Roman conceit of a city which could boast that 
 its citizens belonged to tho Yoltiuian tribe. 3 It was another proof that 
 
 " Man, proud man, 
 Dressed in a little brief authority, 
 Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 
 As makes the angels weep, who, with our spleens, 
 Would all themselves laugh mortal." 
 
 Paul and Silas had not here to do with the haughty impartiality and super- 
 cilious knowledge which guided the decisions of a Gallic, but with the 
 " justice's justice " of the Vibiuses and Floruses who at this time fretted 
 their little hour on the narrow stage of Philippi. Conscious of their Roman 
 citizenship, they could not have expected so astounding a result of their act of 
 mercy, as that their political franchise should bo ignored, and they themselves, 
 after condemnation without trial, ignominiously hurried off into the punish- 
 ments reserved for the very meanest malefactors. 4 Such, however, was the 
 issue of the hearing. Their Prretorships would imitate the divine Claudius, 
 and wreak on these wandering Israelites a s^iare of the punishment which the 
 
 1 Acts xvi. 20. orpaTTjyb? is the Greek version of the originally military title ' ' Prsetor ;" 
 and it was also a Greek title in vogue for the chief magistrates in little cities (Ar. Polit. 
 vii. 8). The fashion seems to have been set in Italy, where Cicero, a hundred years 
 before this time, notices with amusement the " cupiditas " which had led the Capuan 
 Duumviri to arrogate to themselves the title of "Pne tors," and he supposes that they 
 will soon have the impudence to call themselves " Consuls." He notices also that their 
 "lictors" carried not mere staves (bacilli), but actual bundles of rods with axes inside 
 them (fasces) as at Rome (De Leg, Agrar. 34). The name stradigo lingered on in some 
 cities till modern days ("Wetst. in loc.). 
 
 2 Acts xvi. 20, 'lovSaioi ujrapxovrs ', 21, Pwfiaioi* o5<ri. Since neither "exorcism" nor 
 "Judaism " (though they regarded Judaea as a " suspiciosa et maledica civitas," Cic. pro 
 Flacc. 28, and generally teterrima, Tac. H. v. 8) were cognisable offences, tho slave-owners 
 have to take refuge in an undefined charge of innovating proselytism. 
 
 J Miss. ArcMol. t p. 40. 
 
 4 The Jews, who were so infamously treated by Flaccus, felt this, as Paul himself did 
 (1 Thess. ii. 2, vfipi(r6(VTtt, olSaTt, iv *<Ai7nroiv), to be a severe aggravation of their 
 Bufferings (Philo, in Flacc, 10, iitur^vj* p*<miv a*t oj mvs xiucfvpy^v onj<x>T(Tovf
 
 PHILIPPL 281 
 
 misdeeds of their countrymen had brought upon them at Rome. As the pro- 
 ceedings wore doubtless in Latin, with which Paul and Silas had littlo or 
 no acquaintance, and in legal formulae and procedures of which they were 
 ignorant, they either had no time to plead their citizenship until they wore 
 actually in the hands of the lictors, or, if they had, their voices wore drowned 
 in the cries of the colonists. Before they could utter one word in their own 
 defence, the sentence " summovet e, lictores, despoliate, verberate" was 
 uttered ; the Apostles wore seized ; their garments were rudely torn off their 
 backs ; 1 they were hurried off and tied by their hands to the palus, or whip- 
 ping-post in the forum ; and whether they vainly called out in Greek to their 
 infuriated enemies, " Wo are Roman citizens," or, which is far more likely, 
 bore their frightful punishment in that grand silence which, in moments of 
 high spiritual rapture, makes pain itself seem painless 2 in that forum of 
 which ruins still remain, in the sight of the lowest dregs of a provincial out- 
 post, and of their own pitying friends, they endured, at the hands of these 
 low lictors, those outrages, blows, strokes, weals, the pangs and butchery, the 
 extreme disgrace and infamy, the unjust infliction of which even a hard- 
 headed and hard-hearted Gentile could not describe without something of 
 pathos and indignation. 3 It was the first of three such scourgings with the 
 rods of Roman lictors which Paul endured, and it is needless to dwell even 
 for one moment on its dangerous and lacerating anguish. We, in those 
 modern days, cannot read without a shudder even of the flogging of some 
 brutal garottor, and our blood would run cold with unspeakable horror if one 
 such incident, or anything which remotely resembled it, had occurred in the 
 life of a Henry Martyn or a Coleridge Patteson. But such horrors occurred 
 eight times at least in the story of one whose frame was more frail with years 
 of suffering than that of our English missionaries, and in whose life these 
 pangs were but such a drop in the ocean of his endurance, that, of the eight 
 occasions on which he underwent these horrible scourgings, this alone has 
 been deemed worthy of even passing commemoration. 4 
 
 1 On this tearing off of the garments see Liv. viii. 32 ; Tac. H. iv. 27 ; Val. Max. il. 
 7, 8; Dion. Halic. ix. 39. The verbs used are scindcre, spoliare, lacerare (also the 
 technical word for the laceration of the back by the rods), TrepixoTopp^ai, showing that it 
 was done with violence and contumely. 
 
 2 A much lower exaltation than that of the Apostle's would rob anguish of half its 
 sting (cf. Cic. in Verr. ii. v. 62, " Hac se commemoratione civitatis omnia verbera depul- 
 surum, cruciatumque a corpore dejecturum arbitrabatur "). 
 
 3 Cato ap. Aul. Gell. x. 3. 
 
 The five Jewish scourgings were probably submitted to without any protest (v. supra, 
 p. 24). From a fourth nearly consummated beating with thongs (?) he did protect him- 
 self by his political privilege (Acts xxii. 25). Both that case and this show how easily, 
 in the midst of a tumult, a Roman citizen might fail to make his claim heard or under- 
 stood ; and the instance mentioned by Cicero, who tells how remorselessly Verres scourged 
 a citizen of Messana, though "inter dolorem crepitumque plagarum," he kept exclaiming 
 " Civis Itomanus mm," shows that in the provinces the insolence of power would some- 
 times deride the claim of those who were little likely to find an opportunity of enforcing 
 it (Cic. in Verr. L 47 ; v. 62, &c.). Moreover, the reverence for the privilege must have been 
 ronph weakened by the shameless sale of it to freedmen and others by the infamous Blessa-
 
 282 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 Nor was this all. After seeing that a scourging of extreme severity had 
 been inflicted, the duumvirs, with the same monstrous violation of aU law, 
 flung Paul and Silas into prison, and gave the jailer special orders to keep 
 them safely. Impressed by this injunction with the belief that his prisoners 
 must have been guilty of something very heinous, and determined to make 
 assurance doubly sure, the jailer not only thrust them, into the dank, dark, 
 loathsome recesses of the inner prison, but also secured their feet into " the 
 wood." " The wood " was an instrument of torture used in many countries, 
 wad resembling our " stocks," or rather the happily obsolete " pillory," in 
 having five holes four for the wrists and ankles, and one for the nock. 1 The 
 jailer in this instance only secured their feet; but we cannot be surprised 
 that the memoiy of this suffering lingered long years afterwards in the mind 
 of St. Paul, when we try to imagine what a poor sufferer, with the rankling 
 sense of gross injustice in his soul, would feel who having but recently 
 recovered from a trying sickness after receiving a long and frightful flagel- 
 lation as the sequel of a violent and agitated scone, was thrust away out of 
 the jeers of the mob into a stifling and lightless prison, and sat there through 
 the long hours of the night with his feet in such durance as to render it- 
 impossible except in some constrained position to find sleep on the foul bare 
 floor. 8 
 
 Yet over all this complication of miseries the souls of Paul and Silas rose 
 m triumph. With heroic cheerfulness they solaced the long black hours of 
 midnight with prayer and hymns. 3 To every Jew as to every Christian, the 
 Psalms of David furnished an inexhaustible storehouse of sacred song. That 
 night the prison was wakeful. It may be that, as is usually the case, there 
 was some awful hush and heat in the air a premonition of the coming catas- 
 trophe ; but, be that as it may, the criminals of the^Philippian prison were 
 listening to the sacred songs of the two among them, who deserving nothing 
 had suffered most. " The prison," it has been said, " became an Odeum ;" 
 
 lina (Diou Gass. Ix. 676). Further than this, it would be quite easy to stretch the law so 
 far as to make it appear that they had forfeited the privilege by crime. At any rate it 
 
 endured the inevitable trials which canio before him in the performance of duty (2 Cor. 
 xi. 23). I do not believe that he would have accepted anguish or injustice which he had t 
 perfect right to escape. 
 
 8 If by the Tullianum at Rome we may judge of other prisons and it seems that the 
 name was generic for the lowest or inmost prison, even of provincial towns (Appul. Met. 
 ix. 183 ; C. and H. i. 326) there is reason to fear that it must have been a very horrible 
 place. And, indeed, what must ancient Pagan provincial prisons have been at the best, 
 when we bear in mind what English and Christian and London prisons were not fifty 
 years ago ? 
 
 8 "The log feels nothing in the stocks,"says Tertnllian, "when thesoul is in heaven; 
 though the body is held fast, to the spirit all is open. " Christian endurance was sneered 
 at as "sheer obstinacy." ID a Pagan it would have been extolled as magnificent heroism.
 
 and the guilty listened with envy and admiration to the " songs in the night " 
 with which God inspired the innocent. Never, probably, had such a scene 
 occui'rcd before in the world's history, and this perfect triumph of the spirit of 
 peace and joy over shame and agony was an omen of what Christianity would 
 afterwards effect. And while they sang, and while the prisoners listened, 
 perhaps to verses which " out of the deeps " called on Jehovah, or " fled to Him 
 before the morning watch," or sang 
 
 " The plowers plowed upon my back and made long furrows, 
 But the righteous Lord hath hewn the snares of the ungodly hi pieces " 
 
 or triumphantly told how God had " burst the gates of brass, and smitten 
 the bars of iron in sunder" suddenly there was felt a great shock of 
 earthquake, which rocked the very foundations of the prison. The prison 
 doors were burst open; the prisoners' chains were loosed from the staples 
 in the wall. 1 Star! led from sleep, and catching sight of the prison doors 
 standing open, the jailor instantly drew his sword, and was on the point of 
 killing himself, thinking that his prisoners had escaped, and knowing that 
 he would have to answer for their production with his life. 2 Suicide was 
 the common refuge of the day against disaster, and might have been re- 
 garded at Philippi as an act not only natural but heroic. 3 Paul, however, 
 observed his purpose, and, always perfectly self-possessed oven in the midst 
 of danger, called out to him in a loud voice, "Do thyself no harm, for we 
 are all hero." The entire combination of circumstances the earthquake, 
 the shock of sudden terror, the revulsion of joy] which diverted his intention 
 of suicido, tho serene endurance and calm forgiveness of his prisoners 
 all melted the man's heart. Demanding lights, he sprang into tho inner 
 prison, and flung himself, in a tremor of agitation, at tho feet of Paul and 
 Silas. Then, releasing their feet from tho stocks, and leading them out of 
 their dark recess, he exclaimed, " Lords (Kvpioi), what must I do to be 
 saved ? " His mode of address showed deep reverence. His question 
 echoed the expression of tho demoniac. 4 And the Apostles answered him 
 partly in the terms which he had used. *' Believe," they said, "on the Lord 
 (Kvpiov) Jesus Christ, and thon shalt be saved, and thy house." Deeply im- 
 pressed, the man at once assembled his household in a little congregation, 
 and, worn and weary and suffering as they were, Paul and Silas spoke to them 
 of Him by whom they wero to find salvation. 6 Then the jailor, pitying their 
 condition, washed their bruised backs, and immediately afterwards was, with 
 his whole house, baptised in tho faith. 9 All this seems to have taken place in 
 
 Acts xvi. 26. 
 
 * See tlis Dig. De custodia ct exhibition* rcorum, xlriil., iii. 12 and 16. 
 
 3 Sen. De Prov. ii. 6 ; Ep. 58 ; Diog. Laert. vii. 130 ; Cic. DC Fin. i. 15, &o, 
 
 * Acts xvi. 17, bSov trwTTipias ; ver. 30, iva. <n>65>. 
 
 s "E\ovow KOI eAoitfij, " he washed and was washed," says Chrysostom. JFor the hearing 
 of the expression oi OVTOV iravrn (Acts xvi. 83), and 5 O"KO avrijs (ver. 15), cf. xviii. 8 ; 
 1 Cor. i. 16. On infant baptism, see Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, The Church of England 
 wisely makes no direct use of this argument in Art. xxrii. But though Bengal's remark,
 
 284 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 the prison precincts. Not till then did they think of food or rest. Leading 
 them upstairs into hia house, he set a table before them, and in that high 
 hour of visitation from the Living God, though he had but heard words and 
 been told of a hope to come, he and his whole house felt that flow of elevated 
 joy which sprang naturally from a new and inspiring faith. 1 
 
 Day dawned, and the duumvirs were troubled. Whether they had felt 
 the earthquake, 2 and been alarmed lest these " slaves of the Most High God " 
 should be something more than the poor Jewish wanderers that they seemed 
 to bo, or whether the startling events of the night had reached their ears- 
 they had at any rate become heartily ashamed of their tumultuary injustice. 
 They felt it incumbent on them to hush up the whole matter, and get rid as 
 quickly as possible of these awkward prisoners. Accordingly, they sent their 
 lictors, no longer to use their rods in outrageous violation of justice, but to 
 " set those people free." The jailer hurried to Paul with the message of 
 peaceful liberation, which no doubt he thought would be heartily welcomed. 
 But Paul felt that at least some reparation must be offered for an intolerable 
 wrong, and that, for the sake of others if not for his own, these provincial 
 justices must bo taught a lesson not to be so ready to prostitute their autho- 
 rity at the howling of a mob. Sending for the lictors themselves, he sternly 
 said, in a sentence of which every word was telling, " After beating us 
 pxiblicly un condemned, Romans though we are by right, they flung us into 
 prison ; and now they are for casting us out secretly. No such thing. Let 
 them come in person, and conduct us out." 3 The lictors took back the 
 message to the " Praetors," and it filled them with no small alarm. They 
 had been hurried by ignorance, prejudice, and pride of office into glaring 
 offences against the Roman law. 4 They had condemned two Roman citizens 
 without giving them their chartered right to a fair trial ; 6 and, on condemning 
 them, had further outraged the birthright and privilege of citizenship by 
 having them bound and scourged ; and they had thus violated the Porcian 
 law 6 in the presence of the entire mob of the forum, and in sight of some at 
 least who would be perfectly able to take the matter up and report their con- 
 duct in high quarters. Their worships had simply flagellated in public the law 
 
 "Quis credat in tot familiis nullum fuisse infantem?" is not decisive, the rest of his 
 observation, " Et Judaeos circumcidendis, Gentiles lustnuidis illis nssuetos, non etium 
 obtnlisse illos baptismo? " has much weight. 
 
 1 Acts xvi. 34, tjyoAAtaro, impf. C, D various versions, &c. K<UT<H ovStv ty oAAa p>juaT 
 liovov KOJ. i\rri5(S xpyjcrrai. 
 
 2 In Acts Xvi. 35, D adds a.v<niv^<r6ivrt<: TOV <rio>ibv TOV yeyovora. 
 
 3 Acts xvi. 37. The 'Pw/xo/ov? vva.pxovra^ is perhaps an allusion to the insolent 'lovSoroi 
 \>r<ip\oi>w and PwfiouW o5<nx of the accusers (ver. 21). See the Lex Cornelia, Diet, of 
 A nit., p. 638 ; Paulus, Instt., let. iv. ; X>e incuriis, 8. 
 
 * ZeUer starts (Hilgenfdd? Ztitsch. 1864, p. 103) the amazing theory that this is a 
 reproduction of the story found in Lucian's Toxaris (27 34), about a Greek medical 
 student named Antiphilus, who is imprisoned in Egypt with his servant on a false charge 
 of theft from a temple. Krenkel (p. 221) characterises it as "a subtle conjecture " that 
 the narrative of the Acts is an imitation of this story. And this is criticism 1 
 
 Cic. in Verr. ii. 1, 9; TJaut. (7t<raZ. v. 3, 16; Tac. #. j, & 
 
 Cic. pro Rabir, 3,
 
 THESSALONICA. AND BEfiCEA. 285 
 
 and majesty of Ilome. 1 They did not at all like the notion of being them- 
 selves summoned before the Proconsul's court to answer for their flagrant 
 illegality ; so, trusting to the placability of the Jewish character as regards 
 mere personal wrongs, they came in person, accompanied, says one manu- 
 script, by many friends. 2 Entreating the pardon of their prisoners, they 
 urged them, with reiterated requests, to leave the city, excusing themselves 
 on the plea that they had mistaken their true character, and pleading that, 
 if they stayed, there might be another ebullition of public anger. 3 Paul and 
 Silas, however, were courageous men, and had no intention to give any colour 
 of justice to the treatment they had received by sneaking out of the city. 
 From the prison they went straight to the house of Lydia ; nor was it till 
 they had seen the assembled brethren, and given them their last exhortation, 
 that they turned their backs on the beautiful scenes where a hopeful work 
 had been rudely ended by their first experience of Gentile persecution. But, 
 in accordance with a frequent custom of St. Paul,* they left Luke behind 
 them. 6 Perhaps at Philippi he had found favourable opportunities for the 
 exercise of his art, and he could at the same time guide and strengthen 
 the little band of Philippian converts, before whom days and years of bitter 
 persecution were still in store. 8 
 
 CHAPTER XXVL 
 
 THESSALONICA AND BEKffiA. 
 
 yap aSA^>ol rdv ic6irov ijfiiav KA\ rbv (i.6xOov. 1 TIIESS. ii. 9. 
 ".In oppidum devium Berocam profugisti." Cic. in Pis. 36. 
 
 LEAVING Philippi, with its mingled memories of suffering and happiness, 
 Paul and Silvanus and Timotheus took an easy day's journey of about thrce- 
 and-thirty miles to the beautiful town of Amphipolis. It lies to the south of 
 a splendid lake, under sheltering hills, three miles from the sea, and on (ho 
 edge of a plain of boundless fertility. The strength of its natural position, 
 
 1 "Facinus cat vinciri civem Romanum, scclua verberari," Cic. in Vtrr. v. 66. 
 
 * Acts XVI. 39, L), jrapayevo/xeVot jucra iX<av iroAAjoK ei? Ti)P ^ivAaiojP. 
 
 ' All this is intrinsically probable, otherwise I would not, of course, insert it on the 
 Bole and fantastic authority of D, eiirdtres 'Hyvojjcraiiiei' ra naff vfiaii Sri <<rr< av&ptf Juuuot, &c., 
 and fiijirdre jroA.iv <7V0Tpa<J>u><rii> ^>ui> cirtxpa^oprc? Koff vpiav. 
 
 * Cf. xvii. 14 ; xviii. 19 ; Titus i. 5 ; 2 Tim. iv. 20. 
 
 6 The third person is resumed in Acts xvii. 1, and the first person only recurs in 
 Acts xx. 5. 
 
 * Phil. i. 28 30. Although here and there the Apostles won a convert of higher rank, 
 it was their glory that their followers were mainly the babes and sucklings of human 
 'intellect not many wise, not many noble, not many rich, but the weak things of the 
 world. "Philosophy," says Voltaire, "was never meant for the people. The canaille of 
 to-day resembles in everything the canaille of the last 4,000 years. We have never cared 
 to enlighten cobblers and maid-servants. That is the work of Apostles." Yes ; and it wa* 
 the work of Christ.
 
 236 THE LIIfE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 nearly eucirclod by a great bend of the river, tho mines which wero near it, and 
 the neighbouring forests, wliich furnished to the Athenian navy 90 man? 
 pines, fit 
 
 " To be the mast 
 Of some groat ammiral," 
 
 made it a position of high importance during the Peloponnosian wars. If St. 
 Paul had ever read Herodotus he may have thought with horror of the human 
 sacrifice of Xerxes 1 the burial alive at this place of nine youths and nine 
 maidens; and if he had read Thucydides which is excessively doubtful, in 
 spite of a curtain analogy between their forms of expression he would have 
 gazed with peculiar interest on tho sepulchral mound of Brasidas, and the 
 hollowing of the stones in tho way-worn city street which showed tho feet of 
 men and horses under the gate, and warned Kloon that a sally was intended. 1 
 If he could read Livy, which is by no means probable, ho would recall tho fact 
 that in this town Paulas JEmilius 3 one of tho family from whom his own 
 father or grandfather may have derived his name had hero proclaimed, in 
 the name of Rome, that Macedonia should be free. But all this was little or 
 nothing to tho Jewish missionaries. At Amphipolis there was no synagogue, 
 and therefore no ready means of addressing either Jews or Gentiles.* They 
 therefore proceeded the next day thirty miles farther, through scenery of sur- 
 passing loveliness, along the Strymonic Gulf, through the wooded pass of 
 Aulon, where St. Paul may have looked at the tomb of Euripides, and along 
 the shores of Lake Bolbe to Apollonia. Here again they rested for a night, 
 and the next day, pursuing their journey across tho neck of the promontory of 
 Chalcidice, and leaving Olynthus and Potidaea, with their heart-stirring 
 memories, far to the south, they advanced nearly forty miles farther to tho 
 far-famed town of Thessalonica, the capital of all Macedonia, and though a 
 free city, 5 tho residence of the Roman Proconsul 
 
 Its position on the Egnatian road, commanding the entrance to two great 
 inland districts, and at the head of the Thermaic Gulf, had made it an 
 important seat of commerce. Since the days when Cassander had re-founded 
 it, and changed its name from Therina to Thessalonica in honour o* his wife, 
 who was a daughter of Philip of Macedon, it had always been a flourishing 
 city, with many historic associations. Here Cicero had spent his days of 
 melancholy exile. 8 Here a triumphal arch, still standing, commemorates tho 
 victory of Octavianus and Antony at Philippi. From hence, as with the blast 
 of a trumpet, not only in St. Paul's days, 7 but for centuries afterwards, the 
 Word of God sounded forth among tho neighbouring tribes. Here Theodosius 
 was guilty of that cruel massacre, for which St. Ambrose, with heroic faith- 
 fulness, kept him for eight months from tho cathedral of Milan. Hero its 
 good and learned Bishop Eustathius wroto those scholia on Homer, which 
 
 i Hdt. vii. 114. 8 Thuc. iv. 103107, v. 611. lav. xly. 30. 
 
 4 The town had become so insignificant that Strabo does not even mention it. 
 
 1 Plin. H. N. iv. 17. Cic. Pro. Plane. 41. 1 1 Thess. i. 8, itfatfn*
 
 THESSALO3TICA AND BERCEA, 287 
 
 place him in tlio first rank of ancient commentators. It received the title of 
 " the orthodox city," because it was for centuries a bulwark of Christendom, 
 but it was taken by Amurath IE. in 1430. Salouiki is still a great commercial 
 port of 70,000 inhabitants, of whom nearly one-third are Jews; and the 
 outrage of Mohammedan fanaticism which has brought its name into recent 
 prominence is but the beginning of events which will yet change the map and 
 the destinies of Southern Europe. 
 
 At this city blighted now by the curse of Ishm, but still beautiful on the 
 slopes of its vine-clad hills, with Pelion and Olympus full in view the 
 missionaries rested, for hero was the one Jewish synagogue which sufficed for 
 the entire district. 1 After securing the means of earning their daily bread, 
 wliich was no easy matter, they found a lodging in the house of a Jew, who 
 had Gracised tho common name of Jesus into Jason. 2 Even if their quarters 
 were gratuitously allowed them, St. Paul, accepting no further aid, was forced 
 to daily and nightly labour of tho severest description 3 to provide himself 
 with the small pittance which alone sufficed his wants. Even this was not 
 sufficient. Poor as ho was for if ho ever possessed any private means ho had 
 now lost them all 4 the expenses of the journey from Philippi had probably left 
 him and his companions nearly penniless, and but for the timely liberality of 
 the Philippians it would have fared hardly with the Apostle, and he might 
 even have boon loft without means to pursue his further journeys. 5 There 
 is no contradiction between the two contributions from Philippi and the 
 Apostle's account of his manual labours ; for there is nothing to show that he 
 only stayed in Thessalouica a little more than three weeks. 6 In addition to the 
 fact that the second contribution would be partly wanted for his new journeys, 
 we find that at this time a famine was raging, which caused the price of wheat 
 to rise to six times its usual rate. 7 However much this famine may have 
 enhanced the difficulties of St. Paul and his companions, it must have confirmed 
 him in the purpose of placing the motives of his ministry above suspicion by 
 making it absolutely gratuitous. Such disinterestedness added much to tho 
 strength of his position, especially in the " deep poverty " which must have 
 prevailed in such times among tho low-born proselytes of a despised religiou. 
 If St. Paul did not refuse the contributions from Philippi, it was because they 
 came spontaneously, at an hour of bitter need, from those who could spare the 
 money, and who, as ho well knew, would bo pained by any refusal of their 
 
 1 Acts xvii. 1. 4 mva-po-rf is probably the'right reading, though the ij ia wanting in 
 , A, B, D. In any case it is evidently meant that there was but one synagogue, and 
 tradition still points out the mosque once the Church of St. Demetrius, which Li sup- 
 posed to stand upon its site. There are now nearly forty Jewish synagogues in 
 Baloniki. 
 
 2 Kom. xvi. 21. 
 
 8 1 Thess. ii. 9, j/vsris yap <cai i}/sipa pyafd/icvoi, irpos Tb f| ri/3apr'j<r<u Tiva vfitay, K.T.A. 
 < Phil. iii. 8, ra .rawa i^i^O^. 5 *Ml iv - 15 16 - 
 
 He can hardly have failed to stay much longer, for Philippi was a hundred miles 
 from Thessalonica, and it would taka time for news to travel and the to-and-fro journey 
 to be made. 
 
 1 Pointed out by Mr. Lewin, Fasti Sacri, p. 290; St. Paid, i. 231.
 
 288 *Hfi LifE ANto wofcK of st. PAtfL. 
 
 proffered aid. Tefc all who knew him knew well that the aid canie unsought, 
 and that, asjfar as Paul's own personal life was concerned, he was utterly 
 indifferent to privations, and set the example of an unflinching endurance 
 rendered easy by a perfect trust in God. 1 
 
 For three Sabbaths in succession he went to the synagogue, and argued 
 with the Jews. It might well have been that the outrage at Philippi, and its 
 still lingering effects, would have damped] his zeal, and niado him shrink from 
 another persecution. But, fresh as he was from such pain and peril, he 
 earned on his discussions with undiminished force and courage, 5 explaining 
 the prophecies, and proving from them that the Messiah was to suffer, and to 
 rise from the dead, and that " this is the Messiah, Jesus, whom I am preaching 
 to you." 3 The synagogue audience was mainly composed of Jews, and of 
 these some wore convinced and joined the Church. 4 Conspicuous among 
 them for his subsequent devotion, and all the more conspicuous as being 
 almost the only warmly-attached convert whom St. Paul won from the ranks 
 of "the circumcision," was Aristarchus, the sharer of St. Paul's perils 5 from 
 mob-violence at Ephesus, of his visit to Jerusalem, of his voyage and ship. 
 wreck, and of his last imprisonment. A larger number, however, of proselytes 
 and of Greeks accepted the faith, 8 and not a few women, of whom some were 
 in a leading position. This inveterate obstinacy of the Jews, contrasting 
 sadly with the ready conversion of the Gentiles, and especially of women, who 
 in all ages have been more remarkable than men for religious earnestness, is a 
 phenomenon which constantly recurs in the early history of Christianity. 
 Nor is this wholly to be wondered at. The Jew was at least in possession of 
 a religion, which had raised him to a height of moral superiority above his 
 Gentile contemporaries ; but the Gentile of this day had no religion at all 
 worth speaking of. If the Jew had more and more mistaken the shell of 
 ceremonialism for the precious truths of which that ceremoaialism was but the 
 integument, he was at least conscious that there were deep truths which lay 
 enshrined behind the rites and observances which | he so fanatically cherished. 
 But on what deep truths could the Greek woman rest, if her life were pure, 
 and if her thoughts had been elevated above the ignorant domesticisrn which 
 was the only recognised virtue of her sex P What comfort was there for her 
 in the cold grey eyes of Athene, or the stereotyped smile of the voluptuous 
 Aphrodite? And when the Thossalonian Greek raised his eyes to the 
 
 1 Phil. iv. 11, 12. 
 
 2 1 Thess. ii. 2, en-appqa-iacrdfXTji/ ; Acts xvii. 2, SieAcVeTo avrotf. The teaching of the syna- 
 gogue admitted of discussions and replies (John vi. 25, &c.) : as it does to this day in the 
 Rabbinic synagogues. 
 
 * Acts Xvii. 3, Sicu'Otycoi' ical irapariBfucvos. 
 
 4 One of these was Secundus (Acts xx. 4), and, perhaps, a Gaius (xix. 29). The names 
 are common enough, but it is a curious coincidence to find them, as well as the name 
 Sosipater, inscribed among the Tolitarchs on the triumphal arch of Thessalonica. 
 
 6 Acts six. 29 ; xx. 4 ; Col. iv. 10, <rvvaixn<i\toTos ; Philem. 24. 
 
 6 In Acts xvii. 4, even if there be insufficient MSS. evidence in favour of the reading 
 Tirre (refto^tvuv K ol 'EAAijwoi- (A, D, Vulg., Copt.), yet tke Epistles prove decidedly that 
 Gentiles predominated among the converts",
 
 XHE3SALONICA AJtD BEBCEA, 289 
 
 dispeopled heaven of the Olympus, which towered over the blue gulf on which 
 his city stood when his imagination could no longer place the throne of 
 Zeus, and the session of his mighty deities, on that dazzling summit where 
 Cicero had remarked with pathetic irony that he saw nothing but snow and 
 ice what compensation could he find for the void left in his heart by a dead 
 religion P l By adopting circumcision he might become, as it were, a Helot of 
 Judaism ; and to such a sacrifice he was not tempted. But the Gospel which 
 Paul preached had no esoteric doctrines, and no supercilious exclusions, and 
 no repellent ceremonials; it came with a Divine Example and a free gift 
 to all, and that free gift involved all that was most precious to the troubled 
 and despondent soul. No wonder, then, that the Church of Thessalonica was 
 mainly Gentile, as is proved by the distinct language of St. Paul, 2 and the 
 total absence of any Old Testament allusion in the two Epistles. In the 
 three weeks of synagogue preaching, St. Paul had confined his argument to 
 Scripture; but to Gentile converts of only a few months' standing such 
 arguments would have been unintelligible, and they wore needless to those 
 who had believed on the personal testimony to a risen Christ. 
 
 After mentioning the first three Sabbaths, St. Luke furnishes us with no 
 further details of the stay at Thessalonica. But we can trace several interest- 
 ing facts about their further residence from the personal allusions of St. Paul's 
 Epistles. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians the earliest of all his 
 letters which have come down to us was written within a month or two 
 of his departure. We trace in it the tone of sadness and the yearning for 
 a brighter future which were natural to one whose habitual life at this time 
 was that of a hated and hunted outcast. We see that the infant Church was 
 remarkable for a faithfulness, love, and patience which made it famous as 
 a model church in all Macedonia and Achaia. 3 It shone all the more brightly 
 from the fierce afflictions which from the first encompassed the brethren, but 
 failed either to quench their constancy or dim their joy. 4 St. Paul dwells 
 much on his own bearing and example among them; the boldness which 
 he showed in spite of present opposition and past persecutions; the total 
 absence of all delusive promises in a teaching w4iich plainly warned them that 
 to be near Christ was to be near the fire ; 6 the conviction wrought by the 
 present power of the Holy Spirit testifying to his words ; 6 the simplicity and 
 sincerity which enabled him to appeal to them as witnesses that his Gospel 
 was not stained by the faintest touch of deceitful flattery, or guilty motive, or 
 vain-glorious self-seeking; 7 the independence which he had maintained ; 8 the 
 self-sacrificing tenderness which he had showed ; the incessant severity of his 
 industry; 9 the blameless purity of his life; the individual solicitude of his 
 
 1 " Subversae Deorum arae, lares a quibusdam in publicum abjecti " (Suet. Calig. 5). 
 " Plures nusquam jam Deos ullos interpretabantur " (Plin. Epp. vi 20 ; supra, p. 17). 
 
 2 1 Thesa. i. 9 ; ii. 14. 1 Thess. i. 2, 3, &-8. 
 * 2 Thess. L 4, 5 ; 1 Thess. ii. 14 ; i. 6. 
 
 s 1 Thess. iii. 4, "We told you before that we should suffer tribulation. b fyyifc ftoS 
 TOU iru/xfc (saying of our Lord. Orig. Horn, in Jerem. iii. 778). 
 Id. ii 1, 2. ' Id. L 5. 8 Id. ii. 36. Id. ii. 9 ; 2 Thess. iii. 810.
 
 290 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PATTX. 
 
 instructions. 1 And this high example had produced its natural effects, for 
 they had embraced his teaching with passionate wholo-hoartedness as a divine 
 message, 2 and inspired him with an affection which made their image ever 
 present to his imagination, though untoward hindrances had foiled a twice- 
 repeated attempt to visit them again. 
 
 The Epistle also throws light on that special feature of St. Paul's teaching 
 which was ultimately made the ground for the attack upon him. His suffer- 
 ings had naturally turned his thoughts to the future ; tho cruelty of man had 
 tended to fix his faith yet more fervently on the help of God ; the wickedness 
 of earthly rulers, and the prevalence of earthly wrongs, had combined with 
 circumstances on which we shall touch hereafter, to fill his teaching with the 
 hopes and prophecies of a new kingdom and a returning King. His expec- 
 tation of the rapid revelation of that Second Advent had boon a theme of 
 encouragement under incessant afflictions. 
 
 Few indeed wore the untroubled periods of ministry in the life of St. Paul, 
 The jealousy and hatred which had chased him from city to city of Pisidia and 
 Lycaonia pursued him here. The Jews from first to last the Jews for whom 
 ho felt in his inmost heart so tender an affection were destined to be the plague 
 and misery of his" suffering life. At Antioch and Jerusalem, Jews nominally 
 within the fold of Christ opposed his teaching and embittered his days ; in all 
 other cities it was the Jews who contradicted and blasphemed the holy name 
 which he was preaching. In the planting of his Churches he had to fear their 
 deadly opposition ; in the .watering of them, their yet more deadly fraternity. 
 The Jews who hated Christ sought his life ; tho Jews who professed to love 
 Him undermined his efforts. The one faction endangered his existence, the 
 other ruined his peace. Never, till death released him, was he wholly free 
 from their violent conspiracies or their insidious calumnies. Without, they 
 sprang upon him at every opportunity like a pack of wolves ; within, they hid 
 themselves in sheep's clothing to worry and tear his flocks. And at Thossalonica 
 he had yet a now form of persecution against which to contend. It was not 
 purely Jewish as in Palestine, or purely Gentile as at Philippi, or combined as 
 at Iconium, but was simply a brutal assault of the mob, hounded on by Jews in 
 the background. Jealous, 3 as usual, that the abhorred preaching of a crucified 
 Messiah should in a few weeks have won a greater multitude of adherents than 
 they had won during many years to the doctrines of Moses furious, above 
 all, to see themselves deprived of the resources, the reverence, and the adhesion 
 of leading women they formed an unholy alliance with the lowest dregs of 
 the Thossalonian populace. wing to the dishonour in which manual pursuits 
 were held in aucient days, 4 every largo city had a superfluous popiilation of 
 worthless idlers clients who lived on the doles of the wealthy, flattei-ers who 
 
 1 Thess. it. 11. s Id. U. 13. 
 
 8 This is sufficiently obvious, whether we read ^KMramtt la Aots xvil. 5 (A, B, E, and 
 many versions) or not. 
 
 * " llliberales autem et sordidi quacstus mercenariorum omniumqne quorum opcrae 
 non ortea sunt ; est enim ipsa mercca auetoramcutum servi^itia " (Cic-, De Off. i. 42).
 
 THESSALONICA AND BEROSA, 291 
 
 fawned at the feet of the influential, the lazzaroui of streets, more loafers and 
 loiterers, the hangers-oa of forum, 1 the claqueurs of law-courts, the scum that 
 gathered about the shallowest outmost waves of civilisation. Hiring the 
 assistance of theso roughs and scoundrels, 2 the Jews disturbed the peace of 
 the city by a fanatical riot, and incited the mob to attack the house of Jason. 
 in order to bring the Apostles before the popular Assembly. But Paul had 
 received timely warning, and he and his companions were in safe concealment. 
 Foiled in this object, they seized Jason and one or two others whom they 
 recognised as Christians, and dragged them before the Poiitarchs, 3 or pre- 
 siding magistrates of the free city of Thessalonica. " Theso fellows," they 
 shouted, ' these seditions agitators of the civilised world* have found thoir 
 way here also. Jason has received them. The whole set of them ought to 
 be punished on a crimen majcstatis, for they go in the teeth of Caesar's 
 decrees, and say that there is a different king, namely Jesus." 6 But the mob 
 did not altogether succeed in carrying thoir point. In dealing with the seven 
 Poiitarchs, under the very shadow of the proconsular residence, they were 
 dealing with people of much higher position, and much more imbued with the 
 Roman sense of law, than the provincial duumviri of Philippi. Neither the 
 magistrates nor the general multitude of the city liked the aspect of affairs. 
 It was on the face of it too ludicrous to suppose that hard-working artisans 
 like Jason and his friends could bo seriously contemplating revolutionary 
 measures, or could be really guilty of laesa majestas. 6 A very short hearing 
 sufficed to show them that this was some religious opinion entertained by a 
 few poor people, and so far from taking strong measures or inflicting any 
 punishment, they contented themselves with making Jason and the others give 
 some pecuniary security J that they would keep the peace, and so dismissed 
 
 1 Sulrostrani (Cic. Epp. Fam. viii. 1, 2), Sulbasilicani (Plant. Capt. Iv. 2, 35), turba 
 fwftaii. "Lewd" (A.S. Ixwede) means (1) lay, (2) ignorant, (3) bad. 
 
 2 Acts xvii. 5, TWV iyopaiwv av&pas nyAs jroKTjpou?. Cf. AT. Eg. 181 ; Sen. De Sencf. 7. 
 
 3 This name is unknown to classical literature. It would have furnished tine scope 
 for the suspicious ingenuity of Baur and Zeller, had it not been fortunately preserved as 
 the title of the Thessalonian magistrates on a still legible inscription over the triumphal 
 arch at Thessalonica, known as the Vardar gate (Bockh. Inscr. 19G7). This arch was 
 recently destroyed, but the fragments were saved by our Consul, and were brought to tha 
 British Museum in 1876. There are seven, and among them the names of Sosipater, 
 Giiius, and Secundus. There are no soi-disant orpanfyol or pa5oOx<" In tho Urla Libert 
 Thessalonica, as there were at the colony Philippi, but there was a Srjufn and n-o,\iT4px-ai. 
 
 4 The expression shows how widely Christianity was spreading, and perhaps alludes 
 to the recent events at Rome, which may have been a sufficient reason for the Jews 
 themselves to keep rather in the background, and incite the Gentiles to get the Apostles 
 expelled. 
 
 5 The half truth, which made this accusation all the more of a lie, is seen in St. 
 Paul's preaching of the Second Advent (1, 2 Thess. pasthn.) and the kingdom of Christ 
 (1 Thes.s. ii. 12 ; 2 Thess. i. 5), and not impossibly in some distortion of what he hail toll 
 them of i KaTe'xw!' and TO *o.nxov (2 Thess. ii. 6, 7). The " nee Caeaar&us honor " is one of 
 the complaints of Tacitus against the Jews (Hist. v. 5). ., " h 
 
 6 "We see in tho pages of Tacitus that it was the endless elasticity of this charge the 
 cnmcn r/wy'esiatw which made it so terrible an engine of tyranny (Ann. iii. 38). Tho 
 facts hero mentioned strikingly illustrate this. Any one who chose to turn delator might 
 thus crush an obscure Jew as easily as he could crush a powerful noble. 
 
 7 Acts xvii. 9, \ai'jT TO i/faroc sounds like a translation of the Latin phrase "Satis-
 
 292 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 thorn. But this was a sufficient sign that for the present further mission work 
 would be impossible. No magistrates like the presence of even an innocently 
 disturbing element in their jurisdiction, and if Paul and Silas were brought 
 in person before them, they might not escape so easily. Nor, in the defective 
 police regulations of antiquity, was it at all certain that the moderation of the 
 magistrates would be an efficient protection to two poor Jews from the hatred 
 and violence of a mob. In any case it is probable that they would be unwilling 
 to run the risk of impoverishing Jason and their other friends by causing a 
 forfeiture of the scant and mnch-needed earnings which they had been obliged 
 to pledge. The brethren, therefore, devised means to secure the escape of 
 Paul and Silas by night. It is not impossible that Timotheus stayed among 
 them for a time, to teach and organise the Church, and to add those last 
 exhortations which should nerve them to bear up against the persecutions of 
 many years. 1 For in the Church of the Thessalonians, wliich was in some 
 respects the fairest gain of his mission, St. Paul felt an intense solicitude, 
 manifested by the watchful care with which he guarded its interests. 2 
 
 When night had fallen over the tumult which had been surging through 
 the streets of Thessalouica, news of the issue of the trial before the Politarohs 
 was brought to Paul and Silas in their concealment. The dawn might easily 
 witness a still more dangerous outbreak, and they therefore planned an 
 immediate escape. They gathered together their few poor possessions, and 
 under the cover of darkness stole through the silent and deserted streets 
 under the triumphal Arch of Augustus, and through the western gate. 
 Whither should they now turn? From Philippi, the virtual capital of 
 Macedonia Prima, they had been driven to Thessalonica, the capital of Mace- 
 donia Secunda. An accidental collision with Gentile interests had cost them 
 flagellation, outrage, and imprisonment in the colony; the fury of Jewish 
 hatred had imperilled their lives, and caused trouble and loss to their friends 
 in the free city. Should they now make their way to Pella, the famous birth- 
 place of the young Greek who had subdued the world, and whose genius had 
 left an indelible impress on the social and political conditions which they 
 everywhere encountered? To do this would be obviously useless. The 
 Jewish synagogues of the dispersion were in close connexion with each other, 
 and the watchword would now be evidently given to hound the fugitives from 
 place to place, and especially to silence Paul as the arch-apostate who was 
 persuading all men everywhere, as they calumniously asserted, to forsake the 
 Law of Moses. Another and loss frequented road would lead them to a com- 
 paratively unimportant town, which lay off the main route, in which their pre- 
 
 datione accepta." Cf. Lev. xrv. 26 (LXX.). It was the Jewish sense that the Romans 
 loved justice which made them all the more readily accept their yoke (Jos. Anit. xvii. 9, 
 4, and 13, 2 ; B. J. vi. 6, 2 ; Dion Cass. aounri. 37). Titus upbraided them with 
 all the generous favours which they had received from Rome (Jos. B. J. vi. 2, 4). 
 
 1 I agree with Alford in thinking that the mention of Timothy in the superscription 
 of both Epistles, and his mission to them from Athens, prove that he was with St. Paul 
 during this visit. 
 
 ' Thcss. ii. 18.
 
 TKESSALONICA AND BERCEA. 293 
 
 senco might, for a time at any rate, remain unsuspected. Striking off from the 
 great Via Egnatia to one which took a more southerly direction, the two f ugitivea 
 mado their way through the darkness. A night escape of at least fifty miles, along 1 
 an unknown road, involving the dangers of pursuit and the crossing of large and 
 frequently flooded rivers like the Axius, the Echidorus, the Lydias, and some 
 of the numerous affluents of the Haliacmon, is passed over with a single word. 
 Can we wonder at the absence of all allusion to the beauties, delights, and 
 associations of travel in the case of one whose travels were not only the 
 laborious journeys, beset with incessant hardships, of a sickly Jewish artisan, 
 but also those of one whoso life in its endless trials was a spectacle unto the 
 universe, to angels and to men ? l 
 
 The town which they had in view as a place of refuge was Borcea, 1 and 
 their motive in going there receives striking and unexpected illustration from 
 a passage of Cicero. In his passionate philippic against Piso he says to him 
 that after his gross maladministration of Macedonia, ho was so unpopular that 
 he had to slink into Thossalonica incognito, and by night; 3 and that from 
 thence, unable to boar the concert of wailers, and the hurricane of complaints, 
 he left the main road and fled to the out-of-the-way town of Bercea. We 
 cannot doubt that this comparatively secluded position was the reason why 
 Paul and Silas chose it as safer than the more famous and frequented Pella. 
 
 And as they traversed the pleasant streets of the town " dewy," like 
 those of Tivoli, " with twinkling rivulets " it must have been with sinking 
 hearts, in spite of all their courage and constancy, that Paul and Silas onca 
 more made their way, as their first duty, into the synagogue of the Jews. 
 But if tho life of the Christian missionary has its own breadths of gloom, it 
 also has its lights, and after all the storms which they had encountered they 
 were cheered in their heaviness by a most encouraging reception. The Jews 
 of this synagogue were loss obstinate, less sophisticated, than those whom St. 
 Paul ever found elsewhere. When he had urged upon them those arguments 
 from the Psalms, and from Isaiah, and from Habakkuk, about a Messiah who 
 was to die, and suffer, and rise again, and about faith as the sole means of 
 justification, the Jews, instead of turning upon him as soon as they under- 
 stood tho full scope and logical conclusions of his arguments, proved them- 
 selves to be "nobler" 4 than those of Thessalonica more generous, more 
 simple, more sincere and truth-loving. Instead of angrily rejecting this new 
 Gospel, they daily and diligently searched the Scriptures to judge Paul's 
 arguments and references by the word and the testimony. The result was 
 that many Jews believed, as well as Greeks men and women of the more 
 respectable classes. They must have spout some weeks of calm among these 
 
 1 Cor. lv. 9. 
 
 * Bercea is perhaps a Macedonian corruption for Pheroea (cf. BtXmroc for tAunro). 
 It is now called Kara Pheria. 
 
 3 Cic. in Pis. 36. Adduced by "Wetstein ad loc. 
 
 4 Acts xvii. 11, tvyevtmepoi. The expression is interesting as an instance of tvyeify, 
 used (as in modern times) in a secondary and moral sense. The best comment on it u 
 the " Nobilitas solo, eat atqne unica virtus."
 
 294 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. 
 
 open-minded Berceans, for twice during the stay St. Paul conceived the design 
 of going back to his beloved Thessalonians. Untoward obstacles prevented 
 this, 1 and so heavily did the interests of the persecuted Church rest on hia 
 mind that either from Bercea, or subsequently from Athens, ho sent Timothy 
 to inquire into and report their state. One permanent friend, both to St. 
 Paul and to Christianity, was gained in the person of Sopater, of Bercea. 
 
 But it would have been too much to hope that all should be thus open to 
 conviction, and the news was soon unfavourably reported to the Synagogue of 
 Thossalonica. The hated name of Paul acted like a spark on their inflam- 
 mable rage, and they instantly despatched emissaries to stir up storms among 
 the mob of Bercea. 2 Once more Paul received timely notice from some faith- 
 ful friend. It was impossible to face this persistent and organised outburst 
 of hatred which was now pursuing him from city to city. And since it was 
 clear that Paul, and not Silas, was the main object of persecution, it was 
 arranged that, while Paul made good his escape, Silas and Timothy who 
 may have joined his companions during their residence at Bercea should 
 stay to set in order all that was wanting, and water the good seed which had 
 begun to spring. 
 
 And so once more in his normal condition of a fugitive St. Paul loft 
 Bercea. He was not alone, and either from the weakness of his eyesight or 
 from 3iis liability to epilepsy, all his movements were guided by others. " The 
 brethren " sent him away to go seawards, 3 and there can be little doubt that 
 they led him sixteen miles to the colony of Dium, 4 whence he sailed fro 
 Athens. That he did not proceed by land seems certain. It was the longer, 
 the more expensive, the more dangerous, and the more fatiguing route. If 
 St. Paul was so little able to make his way alone that, even by the sea 
 route, some of the Beroean brethren were obliged to accompany him till 
 they left him safe in lodgings at Athens, it is clear that by the land route their 
 difficulties, to say nothing of the danger of pursuit, would have been much 
 increased. The silence of St. Luke as to any single town visited on the journey 
 is conclusive, 6 and we must suppose that some time in autumn, St. Paul em- 
 barked on the stormy waves of the Mediterranean, and saw the multitudinous 
 and snowy peaks of Olympus melt into the distant blue. He sailed along 
 shores of which every hill and promontory is voiceful with heroic memories ; 
 past Ossa and Pelion, past the coast of Thermopylae, along the shores of Eubcea, 6 
 
 1 1 Thess. ii. 18. * Acts xyii. 13, <roAevoi'T TOWS 5x\ow. 
 
 3 Acts xvii. 14, w? firl TV 6*\a.o-ffa.v is a mere pleonastic phrase for "in the direction of 
 the sea " (Strabo, xvi. 2, &c.). *Es, the reading of N, A, B, F, and other variations of the 
 text, seem to have arisen from the comparative rarity of the expression. The notion that 
 he only made a feint of going to the sea, and then turned landwards to foil pursuit, arises 
 from an erroneous interpretation of tho phrase. 
 
 4 Perhaps to Alorus or Methone. (Renan, St. Paul, p. 166, quoting Strabo, vii., pp. 
 20, 22 ; Leake, iii. 435.) 
 
 s The addition of D, jrapTJXfov < TIJV 6e<r<raAi<u' *Ku\v8ii yap lj avrovt mjpvfai rov Xoyor, 
 throws no light on the question. 
 
 Whether St. Paul sailed down the Euripua or to the eaet of Eubcea is uncertafaj, 
 The former route was the more common.
 
 ST. PA.XTL AT ATHENS. 295 
 
 round the " marbled steep " of Suniuin, where the white Temple still stood 
 entire, until his eye caught the well-known glimpse of the crest and spear- 
 head of Athene Promaehos on tho Acropolis, 1 the helm was turned, and, 
 entering a lovely harbour, his ship dropped anchor in full sight of the Par- 
 thenon and the Propylsea. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN ACHAIA, 
 
 'A TO! \twapal KU\ ioffrttjxiyoi iced. kolStuot 
 
 !per/ta, xActral 'ABu.va.1, OM/J.OVIOV irro\lfOoov. Pnn>. fr. 47 
 
 Totourov airots 'Apeoj eC/JouXoi' irdyov 
 
 4yw ffvvri$7) %Q6viov tv&, 8s OVK t$ 
 
 ToioDo-5' oA^To* T j?8' Sfiov voieiv iroAei. SOPH. (Ed. Col. 947. 
 
 IIoO vvv TTJJ 'EA \a5oj 6 rv<pos ; irov riav 'A8r t v<av r}> 6fOfj.a ; wov recv (piXocrAcpwy 4 
 ; & 6.irj FoXiXafar, 6 aiirb 'BrjOffaiSa, 6 &ypoiKos RO.VTWV littlvwv irepieyfi>tro. 
 
 CHBYS. Horn. iv. in Act. iii. (Opp. ix. 38, ed. Montfaucon). 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIL 
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 
 
 " Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays, 
 Lo, here the Unknown God of thine unconscious praise." KEBLE. 
 
 ATHENS ! with what a thrill of delight has many a modern traveller been 
 filled as, for the first time, he stepped upon that classic land ! With what an 
 eager gaze has he scanned the scenery and outline of that city 
 
 -" on the .5Sgean shore, 
 
 Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil, 
 Athens, tlie eye of Greece, mother of arts 
 And eloquence." 
 
 As he approached the Acropolis what a throng of brilliant scenes has passed 
 across his memory; what processions of grand and heroic and beautiful 
 figures have swept across the stage of his imagination ! As he treads upon 
 Attic ground he is in " the Holy Land of the Ideal; " he has reached the most 
 sacred shrine of the " fair humanities " of Paganism. It was at Athens that 
 the human form, sedulously trained, attained its most exquisite and winning 
 beauty ; there that human freedom put forth its most splendid power ; there 
 that human intellect displayed its utmost subtlety and grace ; there that Art 
 reached to its most consummate perfection ; there that Poetry uttered alike 
 its sweetest and its sublimest strains; there that Philosophy attuned to tho most 
 
 Pausan. Attic. 1.28,2; Herod, v. 77.
 
 296 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 perfect music of human expression its loftiest and deepest thoughts. Had it 
 been possible for the world by its own wisdom to know God ; had Jit been in 
 the power of man to turn into bread the stones of the wilderness ; had perma- 
 nent happiness lain within the grasp of sense, or been among the rewards of 
 culture ; had it been granted to man's unaided power to win salvation by the 
 gifts and qualities of his own nature, and to make for himself a new Paradise 
 in lieu of that lost Eden, before whose gate still waves the fiery sword of the 
 Cherubim, then such ends would have been achieved at Athens in the day of 
 her glory. No one who has been nurtured in the glorious lore of that gay and 
 radiant city, and has owed some of his best training to the hours spent in 
 reading the history and mastering the literature of its many noble sons, can ever 
 yisit it without deep emotions of gratitude, interest, and love. 1 
 
 And St. Paul must have known at least something of the city in whose 
 language he spoke, and with whose writers he was not wholly unfamiliar. 
 The notion that he was a finished classical scholar is, indeed, as we have shown 
 already, a mere delusion ; and the absence from his Epistles of every historical 
 reference proves that, like the vast mass of his countrymen, he was indifferent 
 to the history of the heathen, though profoundly versed in the history of 
 Israel. He was, indeed, no less liberal and cosmopolitan nay, in the best 
 sense, far more so than the most advanced Hellenist, the most cultivated 
 Hagadist of his day. Yet he looked at " the wisdom of Javan" as something 
 altogether evanescent and subsidiary an outcome of very partial enlighten- 
 ment, far from pure, and yet graciously conceded to the ages of ignorance. It 
 was with no thrill of rapture, no loyal recognition of grace and greatness, that 
 Paul landed at Phalerum or Peiraeus, and saw the crowning edifices of the 
 Acropolis, as it towered over the wilderness of meaner temples, stand out in 
 their white lustre against the clear blue sky. On the contrary, a feeling of 
 depression, a fainting of the heart, an inward unrest and agitation, seems at 
 once to have taken possession of his susceptible and ardent temperament; 
 above all, a sense of loneliness which imperiously claimed the solace of that 
 beloved companionship which alone rendered his labours possible, or sustained 
 him amid the daily infirmities of his troubled life. As he bade farewell to the 
 faithful Bercean brethren who had watched over his journey, and had been to 
 him in the place of eyes, the one message that he impresses on them is 
 urgently to enjoin Silas and Timotheus to come to him at once with all possible 
 speed. In the words of St. Luke we still seem to catch an echo of the yearning 
 earnestness which shows us that solitude 8 and above all solitude in such a 
 place was the one trial which he found it the most difficult to bear. 
 
 But even if his two friends were able instantly to set out for Athens, a full 
 week must, at the lowest computation, inevitably elapse before Silas could reach 
 
 1 We read the sentiments of Cicero, Sulpicius, Germanicus, Pliny, Apollonius, &c., in 
 Cic. Ep. ad Quint, jratr. i. 1 ; Epp. Fam, iv. 5 ; ad Att. v. 10 ; vi. 1 ; Tao. Ann. ii. 53 ; 
 Plin. Ep. viii. 24 ; Pliilostr. Vit. ApoU. v. 41 ; Renaii, St. Paul, 1G7 ; but, aa he adds, 
 "Paul belonged to another world ; his Holy Land was elsewhere." 
 
 2 Acts Xvii. 15, \af6yrn * r\ix irp&s rw St'Aav at -rbv Tinedtov Iv* s Taxiwra fAflwaw irpof 
 
 Mk
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 297 
 
 him from Boroea, and a still longer period before Timothy could come from 
 Thessalonica ; and during those days of weary and restless longing there was 
 little that he could do. It is probable that, when first he was guided by his 
 friends to his humble lodging, he would have had little heart to notice the 
 sights and sounds of those heathen streets, though, as he walked through the 
 ruins of the long walls of Themistocles to the Peiraic gate, one of the brethren, 
 more quick-eyed than himself, may have pointed out to him the altars bearing 
 the inscription, 'AFNnSTOlS 0EOI2, 1 which about the same time attracted the 
 notice of Apollonius of Tyana, and were observed fifty years afterwards by 
 the traveller Pausanias, as he followed the same road. 2 But when the brethren 
 had left him having no opportunity during that brief stay to labour with his 
 own hands he relieved his melancholy tedium by wandering hither and 
 thither, with a curiosity 3 largely mingled with grief and indignation.* 
 
 The country had been desolated by the Eoman dominion, but the city still 
 retained some of its ancient glories. No Secundus Carinas had as yet laid his 
 greedy and tainted hand on the unrivalled statues of the Athens of Phidias. 
 It was the multitude of these statues in a city where, as Petronius says, 5 it 
 was more easy to meet a god than a man, which chiefly absorbed St. Paul's 
 attention. He might glance with passing interest at the long colonnades of 
 shops glittering with wares from every port in the j3Egean ; but similar scenes 
 had not been unfamiliar to him in Tarsus, and Antioch, and Thessalonica. 
 He might stroll into the Stoa Poecilo, and there peer at the paintings, 
 still bright and fresh, of Homeric councils of which he probably knew 
 nothing, and of those Athenian battles about which, not even excepting 
 Marathon, 6 there is no evidence that he felt any interest. The vast 
 enlargement of his spiritual horizon would not have brought with it 
 any increase of secular knowledge, and if Paul stood in these respects 
 on the level of even the Gamaliels of his day, he knew little or 
 nothing of Hellenic story. 7 And for the same reason he would have been 
 indifferent to the innumerable busts of Greeks of every degree of emin- 
 ence, from Solon and Epimenides down to recent Sophists and Cosmetae, 
 
 1 Pausan. I. i. 4 ; Hesych. s, v. , 'Ayvwr** fleet : v. infra, p. 301). 
 
 2 They lay on the road between the Phaleric port and the city, and St. Paul may 
 possibly have landed at Phalerum, the nearest though not the most frequented harbour 
 for vessels sailing from Macedonia. 
 
 * Acts xvii. 23, Sitp\oi^fvot u ivaffaapuv ra (Te^atrfj-ara viiaJv. 
 
 4 Id. 16, Tropwfvi/tfTO TO Tri/eOfia O.VTOV. Cf. 1 Cor. Xlii. 5, mi n-apo^vVtrat, "is not 
 
 exasperated." 
 
 5 Petron. Sat. 17. 
 
 Mr. Martineau, after remarking that modern lives of St. Paul have been too much 
 of the nature of " illustrative guide-books, so instructive, that by far the greatest part of 
 their information would have been new to St. Paul himself," adds that "in the_ vicinity 
 of Salamis or Marathon he would probably recall the past no more than a Brahmin would 
 in travelling over the fields of Edgehill or Marston Moor" (Studies in Christianity, 
 p. 417). 
 
 7 Nothing in the Talmud is more amazing than the total absence of the geographic, 
 chronological, and historic spirit. A genuine Jew of that Pharisaic class in the midst of 
 which St. Paul had been trained, cared more for some pedantically minute halacha, about 
 the threads in a tsttstth, than for all the Pagan history in the world. 
 
 11
 
 298 THE LIFE AND WOBK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 and still more indifferent to the renal intrusions which Athenian servility 
 had conceded to Roman self-importance. A glance would have boon more 
 than enough for Greek statues decapitated to furnish figures for Roman 
 heads, or pedestals from which the original hero had been displaced to 
 make room for the portly bulk and bloated physiognomy of some modern 
 Proconsul. Some Jew might take a certain pride in pointing out to him 
 the statues of Hyrcanus, the Asmonaean High Priest, and of that beautiful 
 Berenice before whom he little thought that he should one day plead his 
 cause. 1 But his chief notice would be directed to the bewildering multipli- 
 city of temples, and to the numberless " idols " which rose on every side. 
 Athens was the city of statues. There were statues by Phidias, and Myron, 
 and Lysicles, and statues without number of the tasteless and mechanical 
 copyists of that dead period of the Empire ; statues of antiquity as vene- 
 rable as the olive-wood Athene which had fallen from heaven, and statues 
 of yesterday ; statues colossal and diminutive ; statues equestrian, and erect, 
 and seated; statues agonistic and contemplative, solitary and combined, 
 plain and coloured ; statues of wood, and earthenware, and stone, and mar- 
 ble, and bronze, and ivory, and gold, in every attitude, and in all possible 
 combinations ; statues starting from every cave, and standing like lines of 
 .sentinels in every street. 2 There were more statues in Athens, says Pau- 
 sanias, than in all the rest of Greece put together, and their number would 
 be all the more startling, and even shocking, to St. Paul, because, during 
 the long youthful years of his study at Jerusalem, he had never seen so 
 much as one representation of the human form, and had been trained to 
 regard it as apostasy to give the faintest sanction to such violations of God's 
 express command. His earlier Hellenistic training, his natural large-hearted- 
 ness, his subsequent familiarity with Gentile life, above all, the entire 
 change of his views respecting the universality and permanence of the Mosaic 
 Law, had indeed indefinitely widened for him the shrunken horizon of Jewish 
 intolerance. But any sense of the dignity and beauty of Pagan art was im- 
 possible to one who had been trained in the schools of the Rabbis. 3 There was 
 nothing in his education which enabled him to admire the simple grandeur of 
 the Propylsea, the severe beauty of the Parthenon, the massive proportions of 
 the Theseum, the exquisite elegance of the Temple of the Wingless Victory. 
 From the nude grace and sinewy strength of the youthful processions por- 
 trayed on frieze or entablature, he would have turned away with something 
 of impatience, if not with something even of disgust. When the tutor of 
 Charles the Fifth, the good Cardinal of Tortosa, ascended the Papal throne 
 Under the title of Adrian the Sixth, and his attendants conducted him to the 
 Vatican to show him its splendid treasures of matchless statuary, his sole 
 
 1 Jos. Antt. xix. 8, 5. 
 
 2 "Athenae simulacra Dcorum hominumque habcntes omul genere et materiae et 
 artium insignia " (Liv. xlv. 27). 
 
 3 The reader will recall the censure passed on Gamaliel for having merely entered a 
 bath in which was a statue of Aphrodite (in/ra, p. 705).
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 299 
 
 remark, in those uncouth accents which excited so much hatred and ridicule 
 in his worthless subjects, was 
 
 "SUNT IDOLA ANTIQUOBUM!" 1 
 
 It was made a scoff and a jest against him, and doubtless, in a Pontiff of the 
 sixteenth century, it shows an intensity of the Hebraising spirit singularly 
 unsoftened by any tinge of Hellenic culture. But, as has been admitted even 
 by writers of the most refined aesthetic sympathies, the old German Pope was 
 more than half right. At any rate, the sort of repugnance which dictated his 
 disparaging remark would have been not only natural, but inevitable, hi a 
 Pharisee in the capital of Judaism and under the very shadow of the Temple 
 of the Most High. "We who have learnt to see God in all that is refined and 
 beautiful; whom His love has lifted above the perils of an extinct paganism; 
 whom His own word has taught to recognise sunbeams from the Fountain of 
 Light in every grace of true art and every glow of poetic inspiration, may 
 thankfully admire the exquisite creations of ancient genius; but had Paul 
 done so he could not have been the Paul he was. " The prejudices of the 
 iconoclastic Jew," says lienan, with bitter injustice, " blinded him ; he took 
 these incomparable images for idols. ' His spirit,' says his biographer, ' was 
 embittered within him when he saw the city filled with idols.' Ah, beautiful 
 and chaste images ; true gods and true goddesses, tremble ! See the man 
 who will raise the hammer against yon. The fatal word has been pronounced : 
 you are idoh. The mistake of this ugly little Jew will be your death-warrant." J 
 Yes, their death-warrant as false gods and false goddesses, as " gods of the 
 heathen " which " are but idols," 3 but not their death-warrant to us as worka 
 of art; not their death-warrant as the imaginative creations of a divinely- 
 given faculty ; not their death-warrant as echoes from within of that outward 
 beauty which is a gift of God ; not in any sense their death-warrant as stand- 
 ing for anything which is valuable to mankind. Christianity only discouraged 
 Art so long as Art was the handmaid of idolatry and vice ; the moment this 
 danger ceased she inspired and ennobled Art. It is all very well for senti. 
 mentalists to sigh over " the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was 
 Rome ;" but Paganism had a very ragged edge, and it was this that Paul daily 
 witnessed. Paganism, at its best, was a form assumed by natural religion, 
 and had a power and life of its own ; but, alas ! it had not in it enough salt of 
 solid morality to save its own power and life from corruption. St. Paul 
 needed no mere historical induction to convince him that the loftiest heights 
 of culture are compatible with the lowest abysses of depravity, and that a 
 shrine of consummate beauty could be a sink of utter infamy. Nay, more, he 
 
 1 He walled up, and never entered, the Belvedere (Symonds, Renaissance, p. 377). 
 
 3 St. Paul, p. 172. The word KardSvUov is, however, St. Luke's, not St. Paul's. 
 
 3 "The pagan worship of beauty . . . had ennobled art and corrupted nature; 
 extracted wonders from the quarries of Pentelicus, and horrors from the populace of 
 Rome and Corinth ; perfected the marbles of the temple, and degraded the humanity of 
 the worshipper. Heathenism had wrought into monstrous ^combination plrf sical beauty 
 Wid moral deformity ): (Martineau, Hourt of Thoitght, p. 306),
 
 300 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 knew by personal observation, what we may only be led to conjecture by 
 thoughtful comparison, that there was no slight connexion between the super- 
 ficial brightness and the hidden putrescence ; that the flowers which yielded 
 the intoxicating honey of ancient art were poisoned flowers ; that the perfect- 
 ness of sculpture might have been impossible without the nude athleticism 
 which ministered to vice. For one who placed the sublime of manhood in 
 perfect obedience to the moral law, for one to whom purity and self-control 
 were elements of the only supreme ideal, it was, in that age, impossible to 
 love, impossible to regard even with complacence, an Art which was avowedly 
 the handmaid of Idolatry, and covertly the patroness of shame. Our regret 
 for the extinguished brilliancy of Athens will be less keen when we bear in 
 mind that, more than any other city, she has been the corruptress of the world. 
 She kindled the altars of her genius with unhallowed incense, and fed them 
 with strange fires. Better by far the sacred Philistinism if Philistinism it 
 were for which this beautiful harlot had no interest, and no charm, than the 
 veiled apostasy which longs to recall her witchcraft and to replenish the cup 
 of her abomination. Better the uncompromising Hebraism which asks what 
 concord hath Christ with Belial and the Temple of God with idols, than the 
 corrupt Hellenism which, under pretence of artistic sensibility or archaeological 
 information, has left its deep taint on modern literature, and seems to be never 
 happy unless it is raking amid the embers of forgotten lusts. 
 
 Nor was Paul likely to be overpowered by the sense of Athenian greatness. 
 Even if his knowledge of past history were more profound than we imagine 
 it to have been, yet the Greece that he now saw was but a shadow and a 
 corpse " Greece, but living Greece no more." 1 She was but trading on the 
 memory of achievements not her own ; she was but repeating with dead lips 
 the echo of old philosophies which had never been sufficient to satisfy the 
 yearnings of the world. Her splendour was no longer an innate effulgence, 
 but a lingering reflex. Centuries had elapsed since all that was grand and 
 heroic in her history had " gone glimmering down the dream of things that 
 were ;" and now she was the weak and contemptuously tolerated dependent of 
 an alien barbarism, 2 puffed up by the empty recollection of a fame to which 
 she contributed nothing, and retaining no heritage of the past except its 
 monuments, its decrepitude, and its corruption. Among the things which he 
 saw at Athens there were few which Paul could naturally admire. He would 
 
 1 See Apollonius, Ep. Ixx. (uli supr.). 'EAAijm o'ecrdc 2et? ivopaftvAuT. . . <L\A vy-Stv y< ovie 
 i bvofiara fievei ro's TroAAots, aAA' v b vtas ravnjc riijatpoi'iat (the patronage of Rome), 
 ciroAtoAexaurt ra rtov irpo^6v<av 0Vfi/3oAa. 
 
 2 The nominal freedom of Athens had been spared by successive conquerors. Though 
 she had always been on the defeated side with Mithridates, Pompey, Brutus and Cassius, 
 and Anthony, yet the Roman Emperors left her the contemptuous -boon of an unfettered 
 loquacity. This was her lowest period. " She was no longer tha city of Theseus; she 
 was not yet the city of Hadrian " (Renan, p. 178). About this very time the city was 
 visited by the thaumaturgist Apollonius, and, according to Philostratus, the estimate 
 which he formed of the city was most unfavourable . . . oJ pcWiret *EAA7)vt am* Se o 
 
 fttfovrtt ry* fypiiata, Teptav <ro<f>of ovfietf 'Aftptuot ... 6 K<5Aa irapa Tats nv'Aaif , 6 avKCaJMvnjf jrp_b 
 ii-v TniAwv, 6 (icurrpoirbs trpb T!OV fiaicplav rt<.\!av, o iropa<rtTos irpb TTJS Movvvgnp cat trpb rov Ile 
 
 W* W ovto SouViov e"x (0|pp. Philos^r. ed. Clear, ii. 406).
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 301 
 
 indeed have read with interest the moral inscriptions on the Henna which 
 were presented to her citizens by the tyrant Hipparchus, 1 and would have 
 looked with something of sympathy on such altars as those to Modesty and 
 to Piety. But, among the many altars visible in every street, there was one 
 by which he lingered with special attention, and of which he read with the 
 deepest emotion the ancient inscription 
 
 "To the unknown God." 
 
 The better-known altars, of which the inscriptions were in the plural, and 
 which merely bore witness to the catholicity of Paganism, would have had less 
 interest for him. It is merely one of the self-confident assertions which are 
 too characteristic of 'Jerome 3 that St. Paul misquoted the singular for the 
 plural. The inscription to which he called attention on the Areopagus was 
 evidently an ancient one, and one which he had observed on a single altar. 4 
 Whether that altar was one of those which Epimeuides had advised the 
 Athenians to build to whatever god it might be rf rpoffriKorrt e< wherever 
 the black and white sheep lay down, which he told them to loose from the 
 Areopagus ; or one dedicated to some god whose name had in course of time 
 become obliterated and forgotten ; * or one which the Athenians had erected 
 under some visitation of which they could not identify the source 6 was to 
 St. Paul a matter of indifference. It is not in the least likely that he sup- 
 posed the altar to have been intended as a recognition of that Jehovah 7 who 
 seemed so mysterious to the Gentile world. He regarded it as a proof of the 
 confessed inadequacy, the unsatisfied aspirations, of heathendom. He saw in 
 it, or liked to read into it, the acknowledgment of some divinity after whom 
 they yearned, but to the knowledge of whom they had been unable to attain ; 
 and this was He whom he felt it to be his own mission to make known. It 
 was with this thought that he consoled his restless loneliness in that uncon- 
 genial city; it was this thought which rekindled his natural ardour as he 
 wandered through its idol-crowded streets. 8 
 
 1 Such as MI/T; ua roj "Imrapxov 1 <rmx Socaia QpovSiv, Or Mcijjia roS "Imrapxow ' pi) ^lAor (fairara. 
 
 3 This, and not " to an unknown God," is the right rendering. 
 
 8 " Inscriptio arae non ita erat ul Paulus cuaeru.it Ignoto Dei ; sed ita ; Diis Asiae et 
 Europae et Africae, Diis ignotis et peregrinia. Verum quia Paulas non pluribus Diis 
 ignotis indigebat sed uno tantum ignoto Deo, singulari verbo us us eat." Jer. ad Tit. i. 12 
 (-see Biscoe, p. 210). 
 
 4 Acts xvii. 23, po,^ ejreyeypoirro. The fact that Pausanias (Attic. 1. 1), Philostratus 
 (Vit. Apotton. vi. 3), and others (Diog. Laert. i. x. 100, &c.), mentions altars, ifi#rr<a 
 2<ujuu>i>wt<, does not 01 course prove that there was no altar with the singular inscription ; 
 nor, indeed, is it certain that these words may not mean altars on each of which was an 
 inscription, 'Ayviicrry 0ecp, as Winer understands them. Dr. Plumptre favours the view that 
 it means " to the Unknowable God;" and compares it with the famous inscription on the 
 veil of Isis, and the Mithraic inscription found on an altar at Ostia, "Signum indeprehen- 
 sibili* Dei," and 1 Cor. i. 21. 
 
 6 Eichhorn. * Chrysostom. 
 
 1 Called by the Gentilea & ravcpvAot (Just. Mart. Paraenet ad. Graceos, 38 ; Apol. U. 
 10; Philo, Leg. 44). 
 
 8 Acts xvii. 16. And yet his high originality was shown In the fact that he did not, 
 like his race in general, vent his indignation in insults, "Gens contumelia numinum 
 insignia " (Plin. H. N. xiii. 9 ; Cio. p. Flacc. 67). Claudius, In confirming theii privi-
 
 302 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 His work among the Jews was slight. He discoursed, 1 indeed, not unfre- 
 qnently with them and their proselytes in the synagogue or meeting-room* 
 which they frequented ; but it is probable that they were few hi number, and 
 we find no traces either of the teaching which he addressed to them or of the 
 manner in which they received it. It was in the market-place of Athens the 
 very Agora in which Socrates had adopted the same conversational method of 
 instruction four centuries 3 before him that he displayed his chief activity in 
 a manner which he seems nowhere else to have adopted, by conversing daily 
 and publicly with all comers. His presence and his message soon attracted 
 attention. Athens had been in all ages a city of idlers, and even in her 
 prime her citizens had been nicknamed Gapenians, 4 from the mixture of eager 
 curiosity and inveterate loquacity which even then had been their conspicuous 
 characteristics. Their greatest orator had kurled at them the reproach that, 
 instead of flinging themselves into timely and vigorous action in defence of 
 their endangered liberties, they were for ever gadding about asking for the 
 very latest news;' and St. Luke every incidental allusion of whose brief 
 narrative bears the mark of truthfulness and knowledge repeats the same 
 characteristic under the altered circumstances of their present adversity. 
 Even the foreign residents caught the infection, and the Agora buzzed with 
 inquiring chatter at this late aud decadent epoch no less loudly than in the 
 days of Pericles or of Plato. 
 
 Among the throng of curious listeners, some of the Athenian philosophers 
 were sure, sooner or later, to be seen. The Stoa Pceeile, which Zeno had 
 made his school, and from which the Stoics derived their name, ran along one 
 side of the Agora, and not far distant were the gardens of Epicurus. Besides 
 the adherents of these two philosophical schools, there were Academics who 
 followed Plato, and Peripatetics who claimed the authority of Aristotle, and 
 Eclectics of every shade. 6 The whole city, indeed, was not unlike one of our 
 
 leges, warned 
 
 means 
 
 them, fuf rat tvv oAAwv iQvCiv jeKrtSat.uocuif eov6eviet.>i (Jos. Antt. XJX, 5. S). 
 is "full of idols," not as in the E. V., "wholly given to idolatry;" "noc 
 
 ________ , ________ ___ __ _____ ____ _ _ ______ , 
 
 timulacris dedita, Bed simulacris refcrta " (Henn. ad Vig. p. 638) of. Kardfin-eAoc, K*T&Sfv&pos. 
 The word receives most interesting illustration from Wetstein, from whom all succeeding 
 commentators have freely borrowed. 
 
 1 Acts xvii. 17, tA'yrro, not " disputed," but " conversed." 
 
 2 No trace of any building which could have been a synagogue has been found at 
 Athens. It has been inferred from passages in the Talmud that Jews were numerous in 
 Athens ; but these passages apply to a much later period, and in any case the Talmud is 
 perfectly worthless as a direct historic guide. 
 
 3 Socrates died B.C. 399. 
 
 4 Kt\riva.loi, AT. Eg., 1262. Demades said that the crest of Athens ought to be a great 
 tongue. " Alexander qui quod cuique optimum est eripuit Lacedaemona tervire jubet, 
 Atxheuas facerc" (Sen. Ep. 94; see Demosth. Phil, iv.) njv v6\iv ivavrt\ ruv 'EAA^i- 
 viro\a.fiftavovariv tut AcAdXoydv T itrriv K<U roAv> 'y;* (Plat. Lcgg. i. 11). 
 
 * Kaivortpov (ci. Matt. xiii. 52). "hi ova statim sordebant, novivra quaerebantur " 
 (Bengel). Gill says that a similar question Nmn TO was common in the Rabbinic schools 
 (Bammidbar Italia, f. 212, 4). 
 
 ' " From whooe mouth i.-.aued forth 
 
 Mellifluous strenrr.s that watered all the achooli 
 
 Of Academics old and new, with those 
 
 Surnamed Peripatetics, and the school 
 
 Epicurean, and the Stoic severe." (Milton, Par. Btg,)
 
 8T. PAUL AT ATHENS. 303 
 
 University towns at the deadest and least productive epochs of their past. It 
 was full of professors, rhetors, tutors, arguers, discoursers, lecturers, gram- 
 marians, pedagogues, and gymnasts of every description ; and among all these 
 Sophists and Sophronists there was not one who displayed the least particle of 
 originality or force. Conforming sceptics lived in hypocritical union with 
 atheist priests, and there was not even sufficient earnestness to arouse any 
 antagonism between the empty negations of a verbal philosophy and the 
 hollow professions of a dead religion. 1 And of this undistinguished throng 
 of dilettanti pretenders to wisdom, not a single name emerges out of the 
 obscurity. Their so-called philosophy had become little better than a jingle 
 of phrases 2 the languid repetition of effete watchwords the unintelligent 
 echo of empty formulae. It was in a condition of even deeper decadence than 
 it had been when Ciearo, on visiting Athens, declared its philosophy to be all 
 a mere chaos &vu K&rw upside down. 3 Epicureans there were, still main- 
 taining the dictum of their master that the highest good was pleasure ; and 
 Stoics asserting that the highest good was virtue; but of these Epicureans 
 some had forgotten the belief that the best source of pleasure lay in virtue, 
 and of these Stoics some contented themselves with their theoretic opinion 
 with little care for its practical illustration. With the bettor side of both 
 systems Paul would have felt much sympathy, but the defects and degene- 
 racies of the two systems rose from the two evil sources to which all man's 
 sins and miseries are mainly due namely, sensuality and pride. It is true 
 indeed that 
 
 M When Epicurus to the world had taught 
 
 That pleasure was the chiefest good, 
 
 His life he to his doctrines brought, 
 
 And in a garden's shade that sovran pleasure sought ; 
 
 Whoever a true Epicure would be, 
 
 May there find cheap and virtuous luxury." 
 
 Bat the famous garden where Epicurus himself lived in modest abstinence * 
 soon degenerated into a scene of profligacy, and his definition of pleasure, as 
 consisting in the absence of physical pain or mental perturbation (arapa^a), had 
 led to an ideal of life which was at once effeminate and selfish. He had mis- 
 placed the centre of gravity of the moral system, and his degenerate followers, 
 
 1 See Eenan, St. Paid, p. 186, who refers to Cio. ad Fan. xvi. 21 ; Lucian, Dial. 
 Mori. xx. 5 ; Philostr. Apollon. iv. 17. 
 
 2 SiAoero^iafEXAjjixuv Adycuv </>6<o?. Terttillian asks, "Quid simile philosophus et Chria- 
 tianus ?" (Tert. Apol. 46) ; but Paul, catholic and liberal to all truth, would have hailed 
 the truths which it was given to Greek philosophers to see (Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 8, 
 65, and passim). xPiaifU} trpbs 0<fO<r<-'0eiov yiveroi trpojraifiei'a TI* oCaa (Id. i. 5, 28 ; Aug. Dt 
 Civ. Dei, ii. 7). 
 
 8 We can the better estimate this after reading such a book as Schneider's Christtiche 
 flange aits dem Oriech. und Rom. Classikern (1865). The independence, cheerfulness, 
 royalty, wealth of the true Christian recall the Stoic "kingliness," ai T opta the very 
 word which St. Paul often uses (2 Cor. ix. 8; Phil. iv. 1118; 1 Cor. iv. 810, &c., 
 compared with Cio. De Mn. iii. 22 ; Hor. Sat. L iii. 124 136 ; Sen. Ep. Mor. ix.). 
 But what a difference is there between these apparent resemolances when we look at the 
 Stoic and Christian doctrines i. in their real significance ; and ii. in their gurrounrlinga. 
 Juv. Sat. xiii. 172 : xiv. 319.
 
 804 THE LIFE AND WOEK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 while they agreed with him in avowing that pleasure should be the aim of 
 mortal existence, selected the nearer and coarser pleasures of the senses in 
 preference to the pleasures of the intellect or the approval of the conscience. 
 The sterner and loftier Epicureans of the type of Lucretius and Cassius were 
 rare; the school was more commonly represented by the base and vulgar 
 Hedonists who took as their motto, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
 die." l On the other hand, their great Stoic rivals had little reason to boast 
 the efficacy of their nobler theory. Aiming at the attainment of a complete 
 supremacy not only over their passions, but even over their?circumstances 
 professing fictitious indifference to every influence of pain or sorrow, 8 
 standing proudly alone in their unaided independence and self-asserted 
 strength, the Stoics, with their vaunted apathy, had stretched the power 
 of the will until it cracked and shrivelled tinder the unnatural strain ; and 
 this gave to their lives a consciousness of insincerity which, in the worse 
 sort of them, degraded their philosophy into a cloak for every form of am- 
 bition and iniquity, and which made the nobler souls among them melancholy 
 with a morbid egotism and an intense despair. In their worst degeneracies 
 Stoicism became the apotheosis of suicide, and Epicureanism the glorification 
 of lust. 8 
 
 How Paul dealt with the views and arguments of these rival sects- 
 respectively the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the pagan world* we do not 
 know. Perhaps these philosophers considered it useless to discuss philo- 
 sophical distinctions with one whose formal logic was as unlike that of 
 Aristotle as it is possible to imagine who had not the least acquaintance 
 with the technicalities of philosophy, and whom they would despise as a mere 
 barbarous and untrained Jew. Perhaps he was himself so eager to introduce 
 to their notice the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven, that with him all 
 questions as to the moral standpoint were subordinate to the religious truth 
 from which he was convinced that morality alone could spring. They may 
 have wanted to argue about the swrnmum bonum ; but he wanted to preach 
 Christ. At any rate, when he came to address them he makes no allusion to 
 the more popularly known points of contrast between the schools of philosophy, 
 but is entirely occupied with the differences between their views and his own 
 as to the nature and attributes of the Divine. Even to the philosophers who 
 
 Cf . Eccles. v. 18 ; Wisd. ii. 79. 
 
 * "For there was never yet philosopher 
 
 That could endure the toothache patiently." (Shakespeare.) 
 
 8 The ancient philosophers in the days of the Roman Empire ( mayunxx cro^oi, 
 Fhoenicides ap. Heineke, Com. Fr. iv. 511 ; Lucian, Eun. 8 ; Lact. Instt. iii. 25 ; 
 Bactroperitae, Jer. in Matt. xi. 10, &c.) had as a body sunk to much the same position 
 as the lazy monks and begging friars of the Middle Ages (see Sen. Ep. Mor. v. 
 1, 2 ; Tac. Ann. xvi 32 ; Juv. iii. 116 ; Hor. Sat. I 3, 35, 133). The reproaches ad- 
 dressed to them by the Roman satirists bear a close resemblance to those with which 
 Chaucer lashed the mendicant preachers, and Ulrie von Hutten scathed the degenerate 
 monks. 
 
 4 Josephus evidently saw the analogy between the Pharisees and the Stoics (Jos. 
 Antt. xiii. 1, 5 ; xviii. 1, 2 ; B. J. ii. 8, 214) ; and " Epicureans " is a constant name 
 for heretics, &c., in the Talmud.
 
 8*. PAUL AT ATHSN8. 305 
 
 talked with him in the market-place 1 the subject-matter of his conversation 
 had been neither pleasure nor virtue, but Jesus and the Resurrection.* The 
 only result had been to create a certain amount of curiosity a desire to hear 
 a more connected statement of what he had to say. But this curiosity barely 
 emerged beyond the stage of contempt. To some he was "apparently a 
 proclaimer of strange deities;" 8 to others he was a mere "sparrow," a mere 
 "seed-pecker"* "a picker-up of learning's crumbs," a victim of unoriginal 
 hallucinations, a retailer of second-hand scraps. The view of the majority of 
 these frivolous sciolists respecting one whose significance for the world 
 transcended that of all their schools would have coincided nearly with that of 
 
 " Cleon the poet from the sprinkled isles," 
 which our poet gives in the following words : 
 
 " And for the rest 
 I cannot tell thy messenger aright, 
 Where to deliver what he hears of thine, 
 To one called Faulua we have heard his fame 
 Indeed, if Christus be not one with him 
 I know not nor am troubled much to know. 
 Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
 As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised, 
 Hath access to a secret shut from us ? 
 Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King, 
 In stooping to inquire of such an one, 
 As if his answer could impose at all. 
 He writeth, doth he ? well, and he may write ! 
 O, the Jew findeth scholars ! certain slaves, 
 Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ ; 
 And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
 Their doctrines could be held by no sane man." * 
 
 1 When Apollonius landed at the Peiraeus he is represented as finding Athens very 
 crowded and intensely hot. On his way to the city he met many philosophers, some 
 reading, spine perorating, and some arguing, all of whom greeted him. rrap;/i Si ovS*k 
 
 O.VTOV, aAA.0. TeK/iTjpo/xevoi iriiirT*? lift tin 'AiroAAwpioC avvavea-rpi&wro ft Hal q<rirao>TO xaiporTcc 
 
 (Philostr. Vit. iv. 17). 
 
 2 Acts xvii. 18. The word "virtue" occurs but once in St. Paul (Phil. iv. 8), and 
 f,Soi')j, in the classic sense only in Tit. iii. 3. The notion that the philosophers took 
 ' ' the Resurrection " to be a new goddess Anastasis, though adopted- by Chrysostom, 
 Theophylact, CEcumenius, &c., and even in modern times by Renan ("Plusieurs a ce 
 qu'il paraifc, prirent Anastasi* pour un nom de deesse, et crurent quo Jesus et Anastasis 
 e talent quelque nouveau couple divin quo ces reveurs orientaux venaient prficher," St. 
 Paul, p. 190), seems to me almost absurd. It would argue, as has been well said, either 
 utter obscurity in the preaching of St. Paul, or the most incredible stupidity in hia 
 hearers. 
 
 3 It is almost impossible to suppose that St. Luke is not mentally referring to the 
 charge against Socrates, iSncr SujKparin . . . luuva. ftaipdrta curfc'pwp (Xen. Mem. I. i.). 
 
 4 2irp/ioAdyo?, a seed-pecking bird, applied as a contemptuous nickname to Athenian 
 shoplifters and area sneaks (Eustath. ad Od. v. 490), and then to babblers who talked of 
 things which they did not understand. It was the very opprobrium which Demosthenes 
 iad launched against Jischines (Pro {7wv<S, p. 269, td faiskt}. Compare the terms 
 gobemouche, engouleveut, &c. 
 
 * Browning, Men and Women, 
 11
 
 806 THE LIFE AND -WORK OF ST. 
 
 With some heavers, however, amusement and curiosity won the (lay. So 
 far as they could understand him ho seemed to be announcing a new religion. 
 The crowd on the level space of the Agora rendered it difficult for all to hear 
 him, and as the Areopagus would both furnish a convenient area for an 
 harangue, and as it was there that the court met which had the cognizance of; 
 all matters affecting the State religion, it was perhaps with some sense ofj 
 burlesque that they led him up the rock-hewn steps which still exist to the. 
 level summit, and placed him on the " Stone of Impudence," from which the 
 defendants before the Areopagus were wont to plead their cause. 1 Then, with; 
 a politeness that sounds ironical, and was, perhaps, meant by the volatile ring-; 
 leaders of the scene as a sort of parody of the judicial preliminaries, they 
 began to question him as ia old days their ancestors had tried and condemned' 
 Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates, on similar accusations.* 
 They said to him, " May we ascertain from you what is this new doctrine 
 about which you have been talking P You are introducing some strange topic 
 to our hearing. We should like, then, to ascertain what these things mighti 
 mean P" And so the audience, keenly curious, but brimming over with ill- 
 suppressed contempt and mirth, arranged themselves on the stone steps, and 
 wherever they could best hear what sort of novelties could be announced by 
 this strange preacher of a new faith. : 
 
 But it was in no answering mood of levity that St. Paul met their light 
 inquiries. The " ugly little Jew," who was the noblest of all Jews, was, 
 perhaps, standing on the very stone where had once stood the ugly Greek who 
 was the noblest of all Greeks, and was answering the very same charge. And; 
 Socrates could jest even in immediate poril of his life ; but St. Paul, though 
 secure in the tolerance of indifference, had all the solemnity of his race, and 
 was little inclined to share in any jest. His was one of those temperaments 
 which are too sad and too serious for light humour ; one of those characters 
 which are always and overwhelmingly in earnest. To meet badinage by 
 badinage was for him a thing impossible. A modern writer is probably correct 
 when he says that in ordinary society St. Paul would certainly not have beeu 
 regarded as an interesting companion. Ou the other hand, he was too deeply 
 convinced of his own position as one to which he had been called by the very 
 voice and vision of his Saviour to be in the least wounded by frivolous 
 innuendos or disdainful sneers. He was not overawed by the dignity of 
 his judicial listeners, or by the reputation of his philosophic critics, or 
 by the stern associations of the scene in the midst of which he stood. 
 
 1 Acts xvii. 19, ciriA.ajSofxci'oi av-rov. It Is quite a mistake to suppose that any violence ia 
 Intended. Cf. ix. 27. Pausaniaa (Attic, i. 28, 5) is our authority for the \C8os ' Ai-atfo/oj. 
 
 3 It was the express function of the Areopagus to take cognizance of the introduction 
 of iri0rra Upa. Many writers hold that this waa a judicial proceeding, and Wordsworth 
 that it might have been an Anakrisia ; and our translators, from their marginal note, 
 " it was the highest court in Athens," probably shared the same view. The narrative, 
 however, gives a very different impression. The Athenians were far less in earnest aboui 
 their religion than Anytus and Meletus had been in the days of Socrates, and if this was 
 exeaut for a trial it could only have been by way of conscious parody, as I have suggested,
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHEKS. 307 
 
 Above him, to the height of ono hundred foot, towered the rock of the 
 Acropolis like the vast altar of Hellas that Acropolis which was to the 
 Greek what Mount Sion was to the Hebrew, the splendid boss of the shield 
 ringed by the concentric circles of Athens, Attica, Hellas, and the world. 1 
 Beneath him was that temple of the awful goddesses whose presence was 
 specially supposed to overshadow this solemn spot, and the dread of whose 
 name had been sufficient to prevent Nero, stained as he was with the guilt of 
 matricide, from setting foot within the famous city. 2 But Paul was as little 
 daunted by the terrors and splendour of Polytheism in the scat of its grandest 
 memorials and the court of its most imposing jurisdiction, as he was by the 
 fame of the intellectual philosophy by whose living representatives he was 
 encompassed. He know, and his listeners knew, that their faith in these gay 
 idolatries had vanished. 3 He knew, and his listeners knew, that their yearn- 
 ing after the unseen was not to bo satisfied either by the foreign superstitions 
 which looked for thoir votaries in the ignorance of the gynaeceum, or by those 
 hollow systems which wholly failed to give peace even to the few. He was 
 standing under the blue dome of heaven, 4 a vaster and diviner temple than 
 any which man could rear. And, therefore, it was with the deepest serious- 
 ness, as well as with the most undaunted composure, that he addressed them : 
 "Athenians! " 5 he said, standing forth amongst them, with the earnest gaze 
 and outstretched hand which was his attitude when addressing a multitude, 
 " I observe that in every respect you are unusually religious." 8 Their atten- 
 tion would naturally be won, and even a certain amount of personal kindliness 
 towards the orator be enlisted, by an exordium so courteous and so entirely in 
 accordance with the favourable testimony which many writers had borne to 
 their city as the common altar and shrine of Greece/ " For," he continued, 
 
 i Aristid. Panatken. i. 99 ; 0. and H. i. 383. 
 8 The Semnae, or Eumenides. (Suet. Net: 34.) 
 
 8 It is Lard to conceive the reality of a devotion which laughed at the Infamous gibea 
 of Aristophanes against the national religion (Lysintr. 750). 
 
 4 "Yircufipioi fSiieaoTo (Pollux, viii. 118). 
 
 8 *Av8p 'Afrprcuot, &c. It was the ordinary mode of beginning a speech, and it seems 
 to be strangely regarded by the author of Supernatural Religion, iii. 82, aa a sign that 
 these speeches are not genuine. 
 
 8 Acts xvii. 22, S(i<riSatnove<rrepovt. "Quasi BUperstitiores,"|Vulg. ; "someway religious," 
 Hooker; "very devout,"Lardner; "very much disposed to the worship of divine Ecings," 
 Whateley; "Le plus religieux des peuples," Renan; " exceedingly scrupulous in your 
 religion," Humphry. The word is used five times by Josephus, and always in a respectful 
 sense, as it is in Acts xxv. 19. Of the many unfortunate translations in this chapter 
 " too superstitious " (allzu dberglaubisch, Luth.) is the most to be regretted. It at once 
 alters the key-note of the speech, which is one of entire conciliatoriness. The value of 
 it as a model for courteous polemics a model quite as necessary in these days as at any 
 past period is greatly impaired in the E. V. It is possible to be "uncompromising" 
 
 (Philostr. Vit, vi. 3). 
 
 5A>| pup.*, 6to, flvjia en (tai iva^a (Xen. De Sep. Athcn. ; Alcib. ii. p. 97 ; Pausan. 
 Attic. 24). TOW cio-^eoraTovr v 'EAA^ (Jos. c. Ap. ii. 12; Isocr. Paneg. 33 ; Thuc. u. 
 88 ; j3lian, Far. Hist. v. 17 ; Pausan. xxiv. 3). When Apollonius landed at Athens 
 Philostratus says, -n t v tiiv 5) wpurqv S<.a\e<.v iatiSr, <f>iAoWT TOVJ 'A.ftji'oiovr ettev, vrff ufmr 
 (Vit. vi. 2), $0o3<ot fA<&wrTa tturw tlffi (JuL
 
 308 THE Lira AND wpfiX o? si. 
 
 " in wandering through your city, and gazing about me on the objects of 
 devotion, 1 1 found among them 2 an altar on which had been carved an inscrip- 
 tion, "To THE UNKNOWN Goo." 3 That, then, which ye unconsciously* 
 adore, that am I declaring unto yon. The God who made the universe and all 
 things in it, He being the natural 6 Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in 
 temples made with hands, 6 nor is He in need of anything 7 so as to receive 
 service 8 from human hands, seeing that He is Himself the giver to all of life 
 and breath and all things; and He made of one blood 9 every nation of men 
 to dwell on the whole face of the earth, ordaining the immutable limits to the 
 times and extents of their habitation, 10 inspiring thorn thereby to seek God, if 
 after all they might grope in thoir darkness u and find Him, though, in 
 reality, 12 He is not far from each one of us ; for in Him we live, and move, and 
 are, as some 13 also of your own poets have said 
 
 (We need Him all,) 
 For we are e'en His offspring." 
 
 1 Not, as in E.V., " your devotions " (cf. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. iv. 19, p. 156). 
 
 * KOI. For avaOeupuv D reads Suvropuw, perspiciens, d. The jireyrypairro implies per* 
 manence, and perhaps antiquity. 
 
 * 5 ... TOUTO, N, A, B, D, with Origen and Jerome. Cf. Hor. Epod. v. 1. " At O 
 Deorum quicquid in caelo regit;" and the frequent piacular inscription, "Soi Deo Sei 
 Deae." The vague expression " the Divine " is common in Greek writers. 
 
 4 Ver. 23, iyvood/ref, not "ignorautly," which would have been unlike Paul's urbanity, 
 but " without knowing Who He is," with reference to iyvuxmf (cf. Horn. i. 20). The word 
 nvfptln also implies genuine piety. 
 
 * virapvwv. 
 
 8 An obvious reminiscence of the speech of Stephen (viL 48 ; of. Eurip. Fragm. ap 
 Clem. Alex. Strom. V. ii. 76). 
 
 1 A proposition to which the Epicureans would heartily assent. 
 
 8 eepajmiereu, "is served," not "is worshipped," which is meaningless when applied 
 to "hands." It means by off erings at the altar, &o. (cf. II. i. 39, el ITOT TOI \apUyr' itrl 
 
 Vnov fpc\ff<x). 
 
 * ai/uiTot is, to say the least, dubious, being omitted in N, A, B, the Coptic, and Sahi die 
 Versions, &c. On the other hand, as Meyer truly observes, ive^vnu would have been a 
 more natural gloss than at/xaro* ; and the Jews used to say that Adam was D^S te Nm, 
 "the blood of the world." 
 
 Job xii. 23. 
 
 11 ^TjXa<{>Si>, to fumble, like a blind man, or one hi the dark (Arist. Pax. 691 ; Gen. 
 jcxvii. 21 ; Isa. lix. 10 ; cf. Rom. i. 21, x. 68) : 
 
 ' I stretch lame hands of faith, and gropt 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what 1 feel is Lord of all, 
 And faintly trust the larger hope." Tennyson. 
 
 12 He means to imply that the necessity for this groping was their own fault wan 
 due to their withdrawal to a distance from God, not His withdrawal from them. 
 
 13 The poet actually quoted is Aratus of Cilicia, perhaps of Tarsus, and thejhie come* 
 from the beginning of his 4><uco^eva : 
 
 vdvrg 8 Aif K 
 Tou yap *ai yivot 
 
 But he Bays nw, because the same sentiment, in almost the Bame words, is found in 
 Kleanthes, Hymn in Jov. 5, V trov yp yeW <r>V, and it was, not improbably, a noble 
 common-place of other sacred and liturgical poems. Cf. Virg. Oeorg. iv. 221220. 
 Bentley remarked that this chapter alone proves "that St. Paul was a great master in all 
 the learning of the Greeks " (Boyle Lecturet, iii.). This u very great exaggeration, 
 Bee Excursus III., p. 696, seq.
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 309 
 
 Since, then, we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine 
 is like gold or silver or brass, the graving of art and of man's genius." 1 
 
 Condensed as this speech evidently is, lot us pause for an instant, before 
 we give its conclusion, to notice the consummate skill with which it was 
 framed, the pregnant meanings infused into its noble and powerful sentences. 
 Such skill was eminently necessary in addressing an audience which attached 
 a primary importance to rhetoric, nor was it less necessary to utilise every 
 moment during which he could hope to retain the fugitive attention of that 
 versatile and superficial mob. To plunge into any statements of the peculiar 
 doctrines of Christianity, or to deal in that sort of defiance which is the weapon 
 of ignorant fanaticism, would have been to ensure instant failure ; and since 
 his solo desire was to win his listeners by reason and love, he aims at becoming 
 as a heathen to the heathen, as one without law to them without law, and 
 speaks at once with a large-hearted liberality which would have horrified 
 the Jews, and a classic grace which charmed the Gentiles. In expres- 
 sions markedly courteous, and with arguments exquisitely conciliatory, 
 recognising their piety towards their gods, and enforcing his views by 
 an appeal to their own poets, he yet manages, with the readiest power 
 of adaptation, to indicate the fundamental errors of every class of his 
 listeners. While seeming to dwell only on points of agreement, he yet 
 practically rebukes in every direction their natural and intellectual self-com- 
 placency. 2 The happy Providence others, but not St. Paul; might have said 
 the happy accident 3 which had called his attention to the inscription on th 
 nameless altar, enabled him at once to claim them as at least partial sharers in 
 the opinions which he was striving to enunciate. His Epicurean auditors be- 
 lieved that the universe had resulted from a chance combination of atoms ; he 
 tells them that it was their Unknown God who by His fiat had created the 
 universe and all therein. They believed that there were many gods, but that 
 they sat far away beside their thunder, careless of mankind ; he told them that 
 there was but one God, Lord of heaven and earth. Around them arose a 
 circle of temples as purely beautiful as hands could make them yet there, 
 under the very shadow of the Propylsaa and the Parthenon, and with all those 
 shrines of a hundred divinities in full view with their pillared vestibules and 
 their Pentelic marble, he tells the multitude that this God who was One, not 
 
 "Judaea gens Deum sine simulacro colit" (Varro, Fr. p. 229). Hence the "Nil 
 praeter nubes et caeli numen adorat " of Juv. iiv. 97 and " Dedita sacris Incerti Judaea 
 Dei " of Luc. ii. 592 ; Tac. H. v. 6. 
 
 2 Paul had that beautiful spirit of charity which sees the soul of good even in things 
 evil. Hostile as he was to selfish hedonism, and to hard "apathy," he may yet have 
 seen that there was a good side to the philosophy both of Epicurus and Zeno, in so far 
 as Epicurus taught " the happiness of a cultivated and self-contented mind, and Zeno 
 contributed to diffuse a lofty morality. "Encore quo les philosophes soient les pro- 
 tecteurs de 1'erreur toutefois Us ont frappe a la porte de la verit& (Veritatis forea 
 pulsant. Tert.) S'ils ne sont pas entr&i dans son sanctuaire, a i us n ont pas eu le bonneur 
 de la voir et de 1'adorer dans son temple, Us se sont quelquefois pr6sentes a sea portiqueft, 
 qt lui ont rendu de loin quelque hommage " (Bossuet, Panty. & Ste. flntof****- 
 
 ' The word TV'^I does not oQW }n the J?.T-
 
 310 THE LIFE AND WOUK OF ST. FATTL. 
 
 many, dwelt not in their toil-wrought temples, 1 but in the eternal temple of 
 His own creation. But while he thus denies the Polytheism of the multitude, 
 his words tell with equal force against the Pantheism of the Stoic, and the 
 practical Atheism of the Epicurean. While he thus de-consecrated, as it 
 were, the countless temples, the Stoics would go thoroughly with him ; a when 
 he said that God needeth not our ritualisms, the Epicurean would almost 
 recognise the language of his own school ; 3 but, on the other hand, he laid the 
 axe at the root of their most cherished convictions when he added that Matter 
 was no eternal entity, and God no impersonal abstraction, and Providence no 
 mere stream of tendency without us, which, like a flow of atoms, makes for 
 this or that ; but that He was at once the Creator and the Preserver, the living 
 and loving Lord of the material universe, and of all His children in the 
 great family of man, and of all the nations, alike Jew and Gentile, alike Greek 
 and barbarian, which had received from His decrees the limits of then* endur- 
 ance and of their domains. In this one pregnant sentence he also showed the 
 falsity of all autochthonous pretensions, and national self-glorifications, at the 
 expense of others, as well as of all ancient notions about the local limitations 
 of special deities. The afflicted Jew at whom they were scoffing belonged to 
 a race as dear to Him as the beautiful Greek ; and the barbarian was equally 
 His care, as from His throne Ho beholds all the dwellers upon earth. And 
 when ho told them that God had given them the power to find Him, and that 
 they had but dimly groped after Him in the darkness nnd when he clenched 
 by the well-known hemistich of Aratus and Cleanthes (perhaps familiar to 
 them at their solemn festivals) the truth that we are near and dear to Him, 
 the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, they would be prepared 
 for the conclusion that all these cunning effigies at which he pointed as he 
 spoke all these carved and molten and fictile images, were not and could not 
 be semblances of Him, and ought not to be worshipped* were they even as 
 venerable as the "heaven-fallen image" the Aiotrerls &ya\fia of their 
 patron-goddess, or glorious as the chryselephantine statue on which Phidias 
 had expended his best genius and Athens her richest gifts. 
 
 Thus far, then, with a considerateness which avoided all offence, and a 
 power of reasoning and eloquence to which they could not be insensible, he 
 had demonstrated the errors of his listeners mainly by contrasting them with 
 the counter-truths which it was his mission to announce. 5 But lest the mere 
 
 1 2 Chron. Vi. 32, 33. iroto? S' a.v O!KO rettroviav wXorOU VTO AV* TO Selov ircpt/JoAoi TOI^M* 
 mxM ; (Eur. ap. Clem. Alex. Strom. V. xi. 76). 
 
 * Seneca, ap. Lact. Instt. vi. 25, and Ep, Mor. x.xxi. 11. 
 
 /'Omnis enim per se Divom natura necesse est 
 Immortal! aevo sumiuft cum pace fruatur . . . 
 Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indigo, nosiri." Lucr. 11. 850. 
 
 Cf. Sen. Ep. 95, 47. St. Paul, however, more probably derived the sentiment, If from 
 any source, from 2 Mace. xiv. 35, or from Ps. 1. 11, 12 ; Job xli. 11. 
 
 4 See for the Pagan view Cic. de Nat. Dew. i. 18. 
 
 5 Tiie Epicurean notion of happiness as the result of coarser atoms was as marterial as 
 Paley's, who considers it to be "a certain state of the nervous system in that part of the 
 system in which we feel joy and grief . . . which may be the upper region of the stomach 
 or the fine net-work lining the whole region of the praecordia ' (Moral Philos, ch. vi.).
 
 ST. PAUL AT ATHENS. 311 
 
 demonstration of error should end only in indifference or despair, he desired 
 to teach the Stoic to substitute sympathy for apathy, and humility for pride, 
 aud the confession of a weakness that relied on God for the assertion of a 
 self-dependence which denied all need of Him ; and to lead the Epicurean to 
 prefer a spiritual peace to a sensual pleasure, and a living Saviour to distant 
 and indifferent gods. He proceeded, therefore, to tell them that during long 
 centuries of their history God had overlooked or condoned 1 this ignorance, 
 but that now the kingdom of heaven had come to them now He called them 
 to repentance now the day of judgment was proclaimed, a day in which the 
 world should be judged in righteousness by One whom God had thereto 
 appointed, even by that Jesus to whose work God had set His seal by raising 
 Him from the dead " 
 
 That was enough. A burst of coarse derision interrupted his words. 3 
 The Greeks, the philosophers themselves, could listen with pleasure, even with 
 something of conviction, while he demonstrated the nullity of those gods of 
 the Acropolis, at which even their fathers, four centuries earlier, had not been 
 afraid to jeer. But now that he had got to a point at which he mixed up 
 mere Jewish matters and miracles with his predication now that he began to 
 tell them of that Cross which was to them foolishness, and of that Resurrection 
 from the dead which was inconceivably alien to their habits of belief all 
 interest was for them at an end. It was as when a lunatic suddenly introduces 
 a wild delusion into the [midst of otherwise sane and sensible remarks. The 
 "strange gods" whom they fancied that he was preaching became too 
 fantastic even to justify any further inquiry. They did not deign to waste on 
 such a topic the leisure which was important for less extraordinary gossip. 8 
 They were not nearly serious enough in their own belief, nor did they consider 
 this feeble wanderer a sufficiently important person to make them care to 
 enforce against St. Paul that decree of the Areopagus which had brought 
 Socrates to the hemlock draught in the prison almost in sight of them ; but 
 they instantly offered to the great missionary a contemptuous toleration more 
 fatal to progress than any antagonism. As they began to stream away, some 
 broke into open mockery, while others, with polite irony, feeling that such a 
 
 1 Ver. 30, vncpi&iav. "Winked at" is a somewhat unhappy colloquialism of the E. V. 
 (cf. Rom. i. 24). It also occurs in Ecclus. xxx. 11. "Times of ignorance" is a half- 
 technical term, like the Arabic jahilujya for the time before Mahomet. 
 
 2 Acts xvii. 32. " The moment they heard the words ' resurrection of the dead, 'some 
 began to jeer." 'ExAuX", which occurs here only in the N.T., is a very strong word. 
 It means the expression of contempt by the lips, as /uvKTTjpi'fw by the nostrils. It is used 
 by Aquila in Prov. xiv. 9, for "Fools make a mock at sin." Not that the ancients found 
 anything ludicrous in the notion of the resurrection of the soul ; it was the resurrection 
 of the body which seemed so childish to them. See Plin. N. H. vii. 55 ; Lucian, De Mart. 
 Percgr. 13. The heathen Caecilius in Minucius Felix (Oct. 11, 34) says, OraotUw fabulas 
 adstruunt. Kenasci se ferunt j>os< mortem el cineres ctfavillas, et netcio qua fiducid wtm- 
 dacii* invicem credunt." See Orig. c. Celt, v. 14; Arnob. ii. 13; Athenag. De Rtsurr. 
 lii. 4 ; Tert. De Cam. Christi, 15 ; &c. .. . 
 
 3 There is a sort of happy play of words in the tuxm'pow of Acts xvii. 21. It is not a 
 classical word, but implies that they were too busy to spare time from the important 
 occupation of gossiping.
 
 312 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 speaker deserved at least a show of urbanity, said to him, " Enough for one 
 day. Perhaps some other time we will listen to you again about Ilim." But 
 even if they were in earnest, the convenient season for their curiosity recurred 
 no more to them than it did afterwards to Felix. 1 On that hill of Ares, 
 before that throng, Paul spoke no more. He went from the midst of them, 
 Borry, it may be, for their jeers, seeing through their spiritual incapacity, but 
 conscious that in that city his public work, at least, was over. He could brave 
 opposition ; he was discouraged by indifference. One dignified adherent, indeed, 
 he found but one only 2 in Dionysins the Areopagite; 3 and one more in a 
 woman possibly a Jewess whose very name is uncertain: 4 but at Athens he 
 founded no church, to Athens he wrote no epistle, and in Athens, often as ho 
 passed its neighbourhood, ho never set foot again. St. Luke has no pompous 
 falsehoods to tell us. St. Paul was despised and ridiculed, and ho does not for a 
 moment attempt to represent it otherwise ; St. Paul's speech, so far as any im- 
 mediate effects were concerned, was an all but total failure, and St. Luke does not 
 conceal its ineffectiveness. 6 He shows us that the Apostle was exposed to the 
 ridicule of indifforentism, no less than to the persecutions of exasperated bigotry. 
 And yet his visit was not in vain. It had been to him a very sad one. 
 Even when Timothous had come to cheer his depression and brighten his 
 solitude, he felt so deep a yearning for his true and tried converts at 
 Thessalonica, that, since they were still obliged to face the storm of persecu- 
 tion, he had sacrificed his own feelings, and sent him back to support and 
 comfort that struggling Church. 6 He left Athens as he had lived in it, a 
 despised and lonely man. And yet, as I have said, his visit was not in vain. 
 Many a deep thought in the Epistle to tho Romans may have risen from the 
 Apostle's reflections over the apparent failure at Athens. The wave is flung 
 back, and streams away in broken foam, but the tide advances with irresistible 
 majesty and might. Little did those philosophers, in their self-satisfied 
 superiority, suppose that the trivial incident in which they had condescended 
 to take part was for them the beginning of the end, 7 Xerxes and his Persians 
 
 1 Acts xxiv. 25. 
 
 8 " Le p6dagogue est le moins convertissable dcs hommea " (Kenan, p. 199). " (Test qu'il 
 faut plus d'un miracle pour convertir a Fhumilite' de la croix un sage uu siecle " (Quesnel). 
 
 3 Christian tradition makes him a bishop and martyr (Euseb. H.E. iii. 4 ; iv. 23 ; 
 Nic^ph. iii, 11), and he is gradually developed into St. Denys of France. The books 
 attributed to him, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, On the Divine Names, &c., are not earlier 
 than the fifth century. 
 
 4 Aa/j Ai ? , "heifer," would be a name analogous to Dorcas, &c. ; Damaria occurs 
 nowhere else, and is probably a mere difference of pronunciation. It can have nothing 
 to do with Sa/xap, and has led to the conjecture that she was a Syrian metic. Absolutely 
 nothing is known about her. 
 
 * Yet we are constantly asked to believe, by the very acute and impartial criticism of 
 sceptics, that St. Luke is given to inventing the names of illustrious converts to do credit 
 to St. Paul. If any one will compare Philostratus's Life of Apollonius with the Acts 
 of the Apostles he will soon learn to appreciate the difference between the cloudy romance 
 of a panegyrist and the plain narrative of a truthful biographer. 
 
 ' As may be inferred from 1 Thess. iii. 2. Did Silas also join him at Athens, and was he 
 also sent back (to Bercea) ? The >jjr is in favour of the supposition, the jxdi-ot is against it. 
 
 7 Renan alludes to the Edict of Justinian suppressing the Athenian chair of Philosophy 
 474 years after.
 
 ST. PAUL AT CORINTH. 813 
 
 had encamped on the Areopagus, and devoted to the flames the temples on the 
 Acropolis on the very grounds urged by St. Paul, " that the gods could not be 
 shut within walls, and that the whole universe was their home and temple." l 
 Yet the sword and fire of Xerxes, and all the millions of his vast host, have 
 been utterly impotent in then* effects, if we compare them to the results which 
 followed from the apparent failure of this poor and insulted tent-maker. 
 Of all who visit Athens, myriads connect it with the name of Paul who 
 never so much as remember that, since the epoch of its glory, it has been 
 trodden by the feet of poets and conquerors and kings. They think not of 
 Cicero, or Virgil, or Germanicus, but of the wandering tent-maker. In 
 all his seeming defeats lay the hidden germ of certain victory. He founded 
 no church at Athens, but there it may be under the fostering charge of the 
 converted Areopagite a church grew up. In the next century it furnished 
 to the cause of Christianity its martyr bishops and its eloquent apologists. 2 
 In the third century it flourished hi peace and purity. In the fourth century 
 it was represented at Nicaea, and the noble rhetoric of the two great Christian 
 friends St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus was trained in its Christian 
 schools. Nor were many centuries to elapse ere, unable to confront the 
 pierced hands which held a wooden Cross, its myriads of deities had fled into 
 the dimness of outworn creeds, and its tutelary goddess, in spite of the 
 flashing eyes which Homer had commemorated, and the mighty spear which 
 had been moulded out of the trophies of Marathon, resigned her maiden 
 chamber to the honour of that meek Galilsean maiden who had lived under 
 the roof of the carpenter of Nazareth the virgin mother of the Lord. 3 
 
 CHAPTER XXYIIL 
 
 ST. PAUL AT CORINTH. 
 
 " Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours 
 Slmffled their feet along the pavement white, 
 Companioned or alone ; while many a light 
 Flared here and there from wealthy festivals, 
 And threw their moving shadows on the walls, 
 Or found them clustered in the corniced shade 
 Of some arched temple-door or dusky colonnade." 
 
 KEATS, Lamia. 
 "Ecdtsia Dei in Corintho : Isetum et ingens paradoxon." 
 
 BENGKL, in 1 Cor. i. 2. 
 
 NNOTICED as he had entered it nay, even more unnoticed, for he was now 
 alone St. Paul left Athens. So little had this visit impressed him, that he 
 only once alludes to it, and though from the Acroeorinthus he might often 
 
 8 Publiua, A.D. 179; Quadratus, Euseb. H. B. iv. 23; Aristidea, A.D. 126; Athena- 
 goras, circ. A.D. 177. 
 
 3 It was probably in the sixth century, when Justinian closed the schools of philo- 
 sophy, that the Parthenon wa* dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the Thesenm to Sfc 
 George of Cappadocia.
 
 314 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 have beheld its famed Acropolis, he never felt the smallest inclination to enter 
 it again. This was his only recorded experience of intercourse with the 
 Gentile Pharisaism of a pompons philosophy. There was more hope of raging 
 Jews, more hope of ignorant barbarians, more hope of degraded slaves, than of 
 those who had become fools because in their own conceit they wore exceptionally 
 wise ; who were alienated by a spiritual ignorance born of moral blindness ; 
 who, because conscience had lost its power over them, had become vain in their 
 imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 
 
 He sailed to Corinth, the then capital of Southern Greece, which formed 
 the Roman province of Achaia. The poverty of his condition, the desire to 
 waste no time, the greatness of his own infirmities, render it nearly certain 
 that he did not make his way over those forty miles of road which separate 
 Athens from Corinth, and which would have led him through Eleusis and 
 Megara, but that he sailed direct, in about five hours, across the Saronic bay, 
 and dropped anchor under the low green hills and pine- woods of Cenchreae. 
 Thence he made his way on foot along the valley of Hexamili, a distance of 
 some eight miles, to the city nestling under the huge mass of its rocky citadel. 
 Under the shadow of that Acrocorinthus, which darkened alternately its double 
 seas, 1 it was destined that St. Paul should spend nearly two busy years of hia 
 eventful life. 
 
 It was not the ancient Corinth the Corinth of Periander, or of Thucydides, 
 or of Tiinoleon that ho was now entering, but Colonis Julia, or Laus Juli 
 Corinthus, which had risen out of the desolate ruins of the older city. When 
 the Hegemony had passed from Sparta and Athens, Corinth occupied their 
 place, and as the leader of the Achaean league she was regarded as the light 
 nnd glory of Greece. Flamininus, when the battle of Cynoscephalae had 
 destroyed the hopes of Philip, proclaimed at Corinth the independence of 
 Hellas. 2 But when the city was taken by L. Mummius, B.C. 146, its inhabi- 
 tants had been massacred, its treasures carried off to adorn the triumph of the 
 conqueror, and the city itself devastated and destroyed. For a hundred years 
 it lay in total ruin, and then Julius Caesar, keenly alive to the beauty and 
 importance of its position, and desiring to call attention to the goddess for 
 whose worship it had been famous, and whoso descendant he professed to be, 
 rebuilt it from its foundations, and peopled it with a colony of veterans and 
 freedmen. 8 
 
 It sprang almost instantly into fame and wealth. Standing on the bridge 
 of the double sea, its two harbours Lechaeum on the Corinthian and Cenchreae 
 m the Saronic Gulf instantly attracted the commerce of the east and west. 
 The Diolkos, or laud-channel, over which ships could be dragged across the 
 Isthmus, was in constant use, because it saved voyagers from the circum- 
 navigation of the dreaded promontory of Malea. 4 Jews with a keen eye to 
 
 i Stat. Theb. vii. 106. s B.C. 196. 
 
 * B.C. 44. Pausan. ii. 1, 8 ; Plut. Caes. 57 ; Strabo / viii. 6. 
 
 * Cape Matapan. The Greeks had a proverb, MoAe'oj irtpurMtov ri\o0ow rav ooc3 M 
 r might say, "Before sailing round Malea, make your will" (Strab. riii. p. 368). 
 "Formidatum Maleae caput" (Stat. Theb. ii. 33).
 
 ST. PA.TJL AT COEINTH. 315 
 
 the profits of merchandise, Greeks attracted by the reputation of the site and 
 the glory of the great Isthmian games, flocked to the protection of the Roman 
 colony. The classic antiquities found amid the debris of the conflagration, and 
 the successful imitations to which they led, were among the earliest branches 
 of the trade of the town. Splendid buildings, enriched with ancient pillars of 
 marble and porphyry, and adorned with gold and silver, soon began to rise 
 side by side with the wretched huts of wood and straw which sheltered the 
 mass of the poorer population. 1 Commerce became more and more active. 
 Objects of luxury soon found their way to the marts, which were visited by 
 every nation of the civilised world Arabian balsam, Egyptian papyrus, 
 Phoenician dates, Libyan ivory, Babylonian carpets, Cilician goats'-hair, Lycao- 
 nian wool, Phrygian slaves. With riches came superficial refinement and 
 literary tastes. The life of the wealthier inhabitants was marked by self- 
 indulgence and intellectual restlessness, and the mass of the people, even down 
 to the slaves, were more or less affected by the prevailing tendency. Corinth 
 was the Vanity Fair of the Roman Empire, at once the London and the Paris 
 of the first century after Christ. 
 
 It was into the midst of this mongrel and heterogeneous population of 
 Greek adventurers and Roman bourgeois, with a tainting infusion of Phoeni- 
 cians this mass of Jews, ex-soldiors, philosophers, merchants, sailors, 
 freedmon, 2 slaves, tradespeople, hucksters, and agents of every form of vice 
 a colony " without aristocracy, without traditions, without well-established 
 citizens " that the toil-worn Jewish wanderer made his way. He entered it 
 as he had entered Athens a stricken and lonely worker ; but here he was 
 lost even more entirely in the low and careless crowd. Yet this was the city 
 from which and to whose inhabitants he was to write those memorable letters 
 which were to influence the latest history of the world. How little we under- 
 stand what is going on around us ! How little did the wealthy magnates of 
 Corinth suspect that the main historic significance of their city during this 
 epoch would be centred in the disputes conducted in a petty synagogue, and 
 the thoughts written in a tent-maker's cell by that bent and weary Jew, so 
 solitary and so wretched, so stained with the dust of travel, so worn with the 
 attacks of sickness and persecution ! How true it is that the living world 
 often knows nothing of its greatest men ! 
 
 For when wo turn to the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, 
 and trace the emotions which during this period agitated the mind of the 
 Apostle, we find him still suffering from weakness 3 and anxiety, from outward 
 opposition and inward agonies. He reminds the Thessaloniana that he had 
 prepared thorn for his tribulations and their own, and speaks touchingly of the 
 comfort which he had received from the news of their faith in the midst of his 
 afflictions.* Had he possessed tho modern temperament he might often have 
 been helped to peace and calm as he climbed the steep Acrocorinthus and gazed 
 
 i 1 Cor. iii. 12 ; Hausrath, p. 317. 
 
 3 'EiroiKOU* TOV an-eXfvflcfHicou Wvou irX<rrovs (Strab. viil. 6). 
 
 Probably another attack of his malady (1 Cor. ii. 3), 1 The*s. 111. 4, 7.
 
 316 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 from its lofty summit on the two seas studded with the white sails of many 
 lands, or watched the glow of sunset bathing in its soft lustre the widespread 
 pageant of islands and mountains, and groves of cypress and pine. But all 
 his interest lay in those crowded streets where his Lord had much people, and 
 in the varied human surroundings of his daily life. How deeply he was 
 impressed by these may be seen in the Corinthian Epistles. His illustrations 
 are there chiefly drawn from Gentile customs the wild-beast fights, 1 which 
 Athens would never admit while she had an Altar to Pity ; the lovely stadium, 
 in which he had looked with sympathy on the grace and strength and swiftness 
 of many a youthful athlete ; the race 2 and the boxing-matches, 3 the insulting 
 vanity of Roman triumph, 4 the long hair of effeminate dandies, 5 the tribunal 
 of the Proconsul, 6 the shows of the theatre, 7 the fading garland of Isthmian pine. 8 
 But there was one characteristic of heathen life which would come home 
 to him at Corinth with overwhelming force, and fill his pure soul with infinite 
 pain. It was the gross immorality of a city conspicuous for its depravity 
 even amid the depraved cities of a dying heathenism. 9 Its very name had 
 become a synonym for reckless debauchery. This abysmal profligacy of 
 Corinth was due partly to the influx of sailors, who made it a trystiug-plaee 
 for the vices of every land, and partly to the vast numerical superiority of the 
 slaves, of which, two centuries later, the city was said to contain many myriads. 10 
 And so far from acting as a check upon this headlong immorality, religion 
 had there taken under its immediate protection the very pollutions which it 
 was its highest function to suppress. A thousand Hierodouloi were conse- 
 crated to the service of Impurity in the infamous Temple of Aphrodite 
 Pandemos. The Lais of old days, whose tomb at Corinth had been marked 
 by a sphinx with a human head between her claws, had many shameless and 
 rapacious representatives. East and west mingled their dregs of foulness in 
 the new Gomorrah of classic culture, 11 and the orgies of the Paphian goddess 
 were as notorious as those of Isis or of Ashorah. It was from this city and 
 amid its abandoned proletariate that the Apostle dictated his frightful sketch 
 of Paganism. 12 It was to the converts of this city that he addressed most 
 frequently, and with most solemn warning and burning indignation, his stern 
 prohibitions of sensual crime. 18 It was to converts drawn from the reeking 
 
 1 1 Cor. xv. 32 ; Lucian, Demonax, 57 ; Philostr. Apollon. Iv. 22. 
 s 1 Cor. ix. 24. 
 
 Id. ver. 27. 1 Cor. xi. 14. ' 1 Cor. iv. 9. 
 
 * 2 Cor. ii. 1416. 2 Cor. v. 10. * 1 Cor. ix. 25. 
 
 9 Hesych. s. v. Kopv8iof*<u. Wetstein (the great source of classical quotations 
 In illustration of the New Testament, whose stores have been freely rifled by later 
 authors) and others refer to Ar. flat. 149 ; llor. Epp. I. xvii. 36 ; Athen. vii. 13 ; xiii. 
 21, 32, 54 ; Strabo, viii. 6, 2021 ; xii. 3, 36 ; Cic. De Rep. ii. 4 ; and Aristid. Or. III., 
 p. 39, &c. 
 
 10 On the numbers of slaves in ancient days, see Athenaeus vi. p. 275 (ed. Casaubon). 
 
 11 Juv. viii. 112 ; Hor. Ep. I. xvii. 36; Strdbo, viii. 6; Athen. xiii. p. 573, ed. Casaubon. 
 A reference to the immorality of the city may still be heard in the use of the trcn?d 
 " Corinthians " for profligate idlers. 
 
 Rom. i. 2132. 
 
 lCor. T. l; vi, 9-20; x. 7, 8; 2 Cor. vt. 14; vU. 1,
 
 8*. PAtTL AT CORINTH. 817 
 
 haunts of its slaves and artisans that lie writes that they too Lad once been 
 sunk in the lowest depths of sin and shame. 1 It is of this city that we hear the 
 sorrowful admission that in the world of heathendom a pure life and an honest 
 life was a thing well-nigh unknown. 8 All sins are bound together by subtle 
 links of affinity. Impurity was by no means the only vice for which Corinth 
 was notorious. It was a city of drunkards ; 3 it was a city of extortioners and 
 cheats. But the worse the city, the deeper was the need for his labours, and 
 the greater was the probability that many in it would be yearning for delivery 
 from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 
 In such a place it was more than ever necessary that St. Paul should not 
 only set an example absolutely blameless, but that he should even abstain from 
 tilings which were perfectly admissible, if they should furnish a handle to the 
 enoinies of Christ. And therefore, lest these covetous shopkeepers and traders 
 should be able to charge him with seeking his own gain, he determined to 
 accept nothing at their hands. There seemed to be a fair chance that he 
 would be able to earn his bread by tent-making in a port so universally fre- 
 quented. In this respect he was unusually fortunate. He found a Jew of 
 Pontus, named Aquila, 4 who worked at this trade with his wife Priscilla. 
 As nothing is said either of their baptism or their conversion, it is probable 
 that they wore already Christians, and Paul formed with them a lifelong 
 friendship, to which he owed many happy hours. This excellent couple were 
 at present living in Corinth in consequence of the decree of Claudius, expelling 
 all Jews from Rome. 6 Tyrannous as the measure was, it soon became a dead 
 letter, and probably caused but little inconvenience to those exiles, because 
 
 1 Cor. vi. 911 ; 2 Cor. xii. 2L s 1 Cor. v. 9, 10. 
 
 3 Corinthians were usually introduced drunk on the stage (-(Eliau. V. II. iii. 15; Atlien. 
 x. 438, iv. 137 ; 1 Cor. xi. 21 ; Hausrath, p. 323). 
 
 4 The Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, who translated the Old Testament into Greek more liter- 
 ally than the LXX., lived more than half a century later, and may conceivably have been 
 a grandson of this Aquila. Pontius Aquila was a noble Roman name (Cic. ad Fain. x. 33; 
 Suet. Jul. 78) ; but that Aquila may have been a freedrnan of that house, and that Luke 
 has made a mistake in connecting him with Pontus, is without the shadow of probability 
 (cf. Acts ii. 9 ; 1 Pet. i. 1). His real name may have been Onkdos (Deutsch, Lit. Item., 
 p. 330), Hebraised from 'A/cvAo.?, or may have been "\CJ, Latinised into Aquila ; but these 
 are mere valueless conjectures. He was a tent-maker, married to an active and kindly 
 wife, who lived sometimes at Rome, sometimes at Corinth, and sometimes at Ephesus 
 (Acts xviii. 26 ; 1 Cor. xvL 19 ; Horn. xvi. 3 ; 2 Tirn. iv. 19) ; and they were much 
 beloved by St. Paul, and rendered extraordinary services to the cause of Christianity. 
 Priscilla was probably the more energetic of the two, or she would not be mentioned 
 first in Acts xviii. IS, 26; Rom. xvi. 3; 2 Tim. iv. 19. {Ewald, vi., p. 489; Plumptre, 
 Jiibl. Studies, p. 417.) 
 
 5 In A.D. 52 the relations of Judjca to Rome began to be extremely unsettled (Tac. 
 Ann. xii. 54), and just as the Gauls and Celts were expelled from Rome (A.D. 9) on 
 receipt of the news about the loss of Varus and his legions, so the Jews were now 
 ordered to quit Rome. Suetonius says, "Judaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumul- 
 tuantes Roma expulit" (Claud. 25). Whether Chrestos was some unknown ringleader 
 of tumult among the immense Jewish population of Rome so immense, that from their 
 Ghetto across the Tiber no less than 8,000 had petitioned against the succession of 
 Archelaus (Jos. Antt. xvii. 11, 1} or an ignorant misreading of the name of Christ, 
 cannot be ascertained. We know that Christianity was very early introduced into 
 Rome (Rom. xvi. 7 ; Acts xxviii. 14), and we know that wherever it was introduced, 
 Jewish. tumultB followed (Acts xvii. 13 ; xiv. 19 ; xiil 50), and that the Romans never
 
 318 THE Lira AHD WORK o? ST. PAUL. 
 
 the nature of their trado seems to have made It desirable for them to move 
 from place to place. At Corinth, as subsequently at Ephcsus, Paul worked 
 in their employ, and shared in their profits. These profits, unhappily, were 
 scanty. It was a time of general pressure, and though the Apostle toiled 
 night and day, all his exertions were unable to keep the wolf from the door. 1 
 He knew what it was to suffer, even from the pangs of hunger, but not even 
 when he was thus starving would he accept assistance from his Achaian eon- 
 verts. He had come to an absolute determination that, while willing to receive 
 necessary aid from churches which loved him, and which he loved, he would 
 forego at Corinth the support which he considered to be the plain right of an 
 Apostle, lest any should say that he too, like the mass of traffickers around 
 him, did but seek his own gain. 2 Contentedly, therefore nay, even gladly, did 
 he become a fellow-labourer with the worthy pair who were both compatriots 
 and brethren ; and even when he was working hardest, he could still bo giving 
 instruction to all who sought him. But now, as ever, the rest of the Sabbath 
 furnished him with his chief opportunity. On that day he was always to be 
 found in the Jewish synagogue, and his weekly discourses produced a deep 
 impression both on Jews and Greeks. ,-l...i,{; 
 
 But when the peiiod of his solitude was ended by the arrival of Silas from 
 Beroea, and Tiinotheus from Thessalonica, he was enabled to employ a yet 
 more intense activity. Not only did he find their presence a support, but they 
 also cheered him by favourable intelligence, and brought him a contribution 
 from the Philippians, 8 which alleviated his most pressing needs. Accordingly, 
 their arrival was followed by a fresh outburst of missionary zeal, and he bore 
 witness with a yet more impassioned earnestness to his Master's cause.* At 
 this period his preaching was mainly addressed to the Jews, and the one object 
 of it was to prove from Scripture the Messiahship of Jesus.' But with them 
 
 took the trouble to draw any distinction between Jews and Christians. It is, therefore, 
 quite possible that these incessant riots may have arisen in disputes about the Messiah. 
 Dion Cassius, indeed, corrects Suetonius, and says that the Jews were so numerous that 
 they could not be expelled without danger, and that Claudius therefore contented himself 
 with closing their synagogues (Dion, bt. 6). Perhaps the decree was passed, but never 
 really enforced; and Aquila may have been one of the Jews who obeyed it without difficulty 
 for the reasons suggested in the text. Nay, more, he may have been selected for special 
 banishment as a ringleader in the agitation, if, as some suppose, he and his wife were 
 the founders of Christianity at Home. In any case its operation was brief, for shortly 
 afterwards we again find the Jews in vast numbers at Home (Rom. rvi. 3 ; Acts xxviii. 
 17). It is not at all impossible that the edict may have been identical with, or a part 
 of, that De Mathematicis Italid pdhndia which Tacitus mentions as atrox et irritum. 
 
 2 Cor. xi. 9 ; 1 Cor. iv. 11, 12 ; ix. 4. 
 
 2 See Acts xx. 34 ; 1 Cor. ix. 12 ; 2 Cor. vii. 2; 1 Thess. ii. 9 ; 2 Thess. ffi. 8. 
 
 Phil iv. 15 ; 2 Cor. xi. 9. 
 
 "was engrossed " (Vulg., instabat verlo), but less correctly. ' Sensus est, majore vehe- 
 mentia fuisse impulsum ut iibere palamque de Christo dissereret " (Calvin), 
 6 1 Cor. xv. 3.
 
 8T. PAXTL AT COSINTH. 819 
 
 be made no further progress. Crispus, indeed, the governor of the synagogue, 
 had been converted with all his house ; and perhaps during the absence of 
 his companions Paul abandoned his usual rule by baptising him "with his 
 own hands. 1 But, as a body, the Jews met him with an opposition which at 
 last found expression in the sort of language of which the Talmud furnishes 
 some terrible specimens. 3 No further object could bo served by endeavouring 
 to convince them, and at last he shook off the dust of his garments, and calling 
 them to witness that he was innocent of their blood, 3 he announced that from 
 that day forth he should preach only to the Gentiles. 
 
 Already he had converted some Gentiles of humble and probably of slavish 
 origin, the first among these being the household of Stephanas. 4 With Crispus 
 and these faithful converts, ho migrated from the synagogue to a room close by, 
 which was placed at his disposal by a proselyte of the name of Justus. 6 In 
 this room he continued to preach for many months. The entire numbers of 
 the Corinthian converts were probably small to be counted rather by scores 
 than by hundreds. This is certain, because otherwise they could not have met 
 in a single room in the small houses of the ancients, nor could they have been 
 all present at common meals. The minute regulations about married women, 
 widows, and virgins seem to show that the female element of the little con- 
 gregation was large in proportion to the men, and it was even necessary to 
 lay down the rule that women were not to teach or preach among them, though 
 Priscilla and Phoebe had been conspicuous for their services. 8 And yet, small 
 &s was the congregation, low as was the position of most of them, vile as had 
 been the antecedents of some, the method and the topics of the Apostle's preach- 
 ing had been adopted with much anxiety. He was by no means at homo 
 among these eager, intellectual, disputatious, rhetoric-loving, sophisticated 
 Greeks. They had none of the frank simplicity of his Thessalonians, none 
 of the tender sympathy of his Philippians, none of the emotional suscep- 
 tibility of his Galatian converts. They were more like the scoffing and self- 
 satisfied Athenians. At Athens he had adopted a poetic and finished style, 
 and it had almost wholly failed to make any deep impression. At Corinth, 
 accordingly, he adopted a wholly different method. HI and timid, and so 
 nervous that he sometimes trembled while addressing them 7 conscious that 
 his bodily presence was mean in the judgment of these connoisseurs in beauty, 
 
 1 1 Cor. L 14. 
 
 2 Acts xviii. 6, atmnuriroiitvav . '* i *al facurfanov-srur. gee " Life of Christ," il. 4591 
 * Ezek. xxxiii. 4. 
 
 4 1 Cor. xvi. 15, "the firstf raits of Achaia" (in Rom. xvi. 5 the true reading is "of 
 Alia"). Fortanjitus and Achaicus were probably slaves or freedmen, as were " Chloe's 
 household " ; Tertius who had the high honour of being the amanuensis of the Epistle 
 to the Romans and Ouartus were probably descendants of the Roman veterans who were 
 the first colonists, and may have been younger brothers of Secundus. Lucius, Jason, 
 and Sosipater were Jews (Rom. xvi. 21). . 
 
 * There is no sufficient ground for calling him Titius Justus on the strength of K and 
 one or two versions ; it seems to be simply due to the homoeoteleuton in ii-d/ian. Theie 
 la etiil less ground for identifying him with Titus. 
 
 Horn, xvi. L. 2. 71Cor.it 8.
 
 320 TOE LIFE AND WOBK O KT. PAUL. 
 
 and his speech contemptible in the estimation of these judges of eloquence 1 -* 
 thinking, too, that he had little in the way of earthly endowment, unless it 
 were in his infirmities, 2 he yet deliberately decided not to avoid, as he had 
 done at Athens, the topic of the Cross. 3 From Corinth he could see the snowy 
 summits of Parnassus and Helicon ; but he determined never again to adorn 
 his teaching with poetic quotations or persuasive words of human wisdom, 4 
 but to trust solely to the simple and unadorned grandeur of his message, and 
 to the outpouring of the Spirit by which he was sure that it would be accom- 
 panied. There was, indeed, a wisdom in his words, but it was not the wisdom 
 of this world, nor the kind of wisdom after which the Greeks sought. It was 
 a spiritual wisdom of which he could merely reveal to them the elements not 
 strong meat for the perfect, but milk as for babes in Christ. He aimed at 
 nothing but the clear, simple enunciation of the doctrine of Christ crucified.* 
 But what was lacking in formal syllogism or powerful declamation was more 
 than supplied by power from on high. Paul had determined that, if converts 
 were won, they should be won, not by human eloquence, but by Divine love. 
 Nor was he disappointed in thus trusting in God alone. Amid all the sufferings 
 which marked his stay among the Achaians, he appeals to their personal 
 knowledge that, whatever they may have thought or said among themselves 
 about the weakness of his words, they could not at least deny the " signs, and 
 wonders, and powers" 8 which, by the aid of the Spirit, were conspicuous in his 
 acts. They must have recalled many a scene in which, under the humble roof 
 of Justus, the fountains of the great deep of religious feeling wero broken up, 
 the strange accents of " the tongues" echoed through the thrilled assembly, 
 and deeds were wrought which showed to that little gathering of believers 
 that a Power higher than that of man was visibly at work to convince and 
 comfort them. And thus many Corinthians the Gentiles largely exceeding 
 the Jews in number were admitted by baptism into the Church. r The 
 majority of them were of the lowest rank, yet they could number among 
 them some of the wealthier inhabitants, such as Gains, and perhaps Chloe, 
 and even Erastus, the chamberlain of the city. Nor was it in Corinth only 
 that Christians began to be converted. Paul, like Wesley, " regarded all the 
 world as his parish,'' and it is little likely that his restless zeal would have 
 made him stay for nearly two years within the city walls. We know that 
 there was a church at Cenchresa, whose deaconess afterwards " carried under 
 the folds of her robe the whole future of Christian theology;" 8 and saints 
 were scattered in small communities throughout all Achaia. 9 
 
 And yet, though God was thus giving the increase, it must have required 
 
 ' 2 Cor. T. 1, 10. Luther, who seems to have entered into the very life of St. Paul, 
 calls him " Em armes din-res Mannlein wie unaer Philippua " (Melaucthon), 
 2 2 Cor. xii. 5, 9. 
 
 1 Cor. i. 23; ii. 2. 
 
 1 Cor. ii. 1 5. ivBpiairivjfi fs a good explanatory gloss of A, 0, J, &o, 
 
 1 Cor. L 17 ; ii. 2 ; 2 Cor. i. 18. 
 
 2 Cor. xii. 12. 7 Acts xviii. 8. 8 Renan, p. 219. 
 
 2 Cor. i. 1 ; Rom. xvi. 1. The nearest Achaian towns would be Leclueum, Schoenus, 
 Cenchreae, Crommyon, Sioyon, Argos.
 
 8T. PAUL AT CORINTH. 321 
 
 no small courage in such a city to preach such a doctrine, and the very vicinity 
 of the synagogue to the house of Justus must have caused frequent and pain- 
 ful collisions between the Jews and the little Christian community. Among 
 all the sorrows to which St. Paul alludes whenever he refers to this long stay 
 at Corinth, there is none that finds more bitter expression than his complaint 
 of his fellow-countrymen. He speaks of them to the Thessalonians in words of 
 unusual exasperation, saying that they pleased not God, and were contrary 
 to all men, and that by their attempts to hinder the preaching to the Gentiles 
 of the Christ whom they had murdered, they had now filled up the measure 
 of their sins. 1 The rupture was open and decisive. If they had excommu- 
 nicated him, and he was filled with such anger and despair when he thought 
 of them, it is certain that the struggle between them must have been a constant 
 source of anxiety and peril. This might even have ended in Paul's with- 
 drawal to now fields of labour in utter despondency but for the support which 
 again, as often at his utmost need, he received from a heavenly vision. The 
 Lord whom he had seen on the road to Damascus appeared to him at night, 
 and said to him : " Fear not, but speak, and hold not thy peace ; for I am 
 with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee ; for I have much people 
 in this city." 
 
 But at last the contest between the Jews and the Christians came to a 
 head. The Proconsul of Achaia 2 ended his term of office, and the Proconsul 
 appointed by the emperor was Marcus Anuseus Novatus, who, having been 
 adopted by the friendly rhetorician Lucius Junius Gallic, had taken the name 
 of Lucius Junius Annseus Gallio, by which he is generally known. Very 
 different was the estimate of Gallio by his contemporaries from the mistaken 
 one which has made his name proverbial for indiff erentism in the Christian 
 world. To the friends among whom he habitually moved he was the moat 
 genial, the most lovable of men. The brother of Seneca, and the uncle of 
 Lucan, he was the most universally popular member of that distinguished 
 family. He was pre-eminently endowed with that light and sweetness which 
 are signs of the utmost refinement, and " the sweet Gallio " is the epithet by 
 which he alone of the ancients is constantly designated. 3 " No mortal man 
 is so sweet to any single person as he is to all mankind," 4 wrote Seneca of him. 
 
 1 Thess. ii. 1416. 
 
 3 The term Proconsul is historically exact. The Government of Achaia had been BO 
 Incessantly changed that a mistake would have been excusable. Achaia had been Procon- 
 sular under Augustus ; imperial, for a time, under Tiberius (Tac. Ann. L 76) ; Procon- 
 sular, after A.D. 44, under Claudius (Suet. Claud, xxv.) ; free under Nero (Suet. Ner. 
 24) ; and again Proconsular under Vespasian (Suet. Yap. viiL). See supra, p. 197, md 
 Excursus XVI. 
 
 8 " Dulcis Gallio " (Stat. Sylv. IL 7, 32). See Seekert after God, 16 2L I need not 
 here recur to the foolish notion that Gallio sent some of St. Paul's writings to his 
 brother Seneca. On this see Aubertin, Seneque et St. Paul, p. 117. Nor need I 
 recur to the resemblance between the Roman philosopher and the Apostle, which I have 
 examined in Seekers after God, 174183, and which is fully treated by Dr. Ughtfoot 
 (Phil. pp. 268331). 
 
 4 "Nemo mortal iu m unl tarn dulcis est quam hie omnibus" (Sen. Quaest. N*A. IT. 
 praef. 11). He dedicates to him his De Ira and Dt Vita Beata, and alludes tc him 
 in Ep. civ. Consol. ad Udv. 16.
 
 322 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 " Even those who love my brother Gallic to the very utmost of their power 
 yet do not love him enough," l ho says in another placo. Ho was the very 
 flower of pagan courtesy and pagan culture a Roman with all a Roman's 
 dignity 3 and seriousness, and yot with all the grace and versatility of a 
 polished Greek. 8 
 
 Such was the man on whoso decision the fortunes of Paul were to depend. 
 Whoever the former Proconsul had been, he had not been one with whom the 
 Jews could venture to trifle, nor had they once attempted to get rid of their 
 opponent by handing him over to the secular arm. But now that a new Pro- 
 consul had arrived, who was perhaps unfamiliar with the duties of his office, and 
 whose desire for popularity at the beginning of his government might havo 
 made him complaisant to prosperous Jews, they thought that they could with 
 impunity excite a tumult. They rose in a body, seized Paul, and dragged him 
 before the tesselated pavement on which was set the curule chair of the Pro- 
 consul. It was evident that they had presumed on his probable inexperience, 
 and on his reputation for mildness; and, with all the turbulent clamour of 
 their race, they charged Paul with " persuading men to worship God contrary 
 to the Law." Though Claudius had expelled them from Rome, their religion 
 was a religio licita i.e., it was licensed by the State ; but the religion of 
 " this fellow," they urged, though it might pass itself off under the name of 
 Judaism, was not Judaism at all it was a spurious counterfeit of Judaism, 
 which had become a religio illicita by running counter to its Mosaic Law. 4 
 Such was the charge urged by a hubbub of voices, and, as soon as it had 
 become intelligible, Paul was on the point of making his defence. But Gallio 
 was not going to trouble himself by listening to any defence. He took no 
 notice whatever of Paul, and, disregarding him as completely as though he 
 had been non-existent, replied to the Jews by a contemptuous dismissal of 
 them and their charge. With a thorough knowledge of, and respect for, the 
 established laws, but with a genuinely Roman indifference for conciliatory 
 language, and a more than Roman haughtiness of demeanour towards a 
 people whom, like his brother, he probably despised and detested, he stopped 
 the proceedings with the remark that their accusation against St. Paul, as a 
 violator of any law, Mosaic or otherwise, which he could recognise, was 
 utterly baseless. " Had this been a matter of civil wrong or moral outrage 5 
 it would have been but right for me to put up with you, and listen to these 
 charges of yours ; but if it be a number of questions 6 about an opinion, and 
 
 1 " Giillionera, fratrem meum. quern nemo non parum amat etiam qui amare plus non 
 potcst " (Nat. Qu. iv. pracf. 10). 
 
 adA.U.C. 818). 
 
 Dion Casa. be. 35. 
 
 * Hence though Topi rbv r6^ov, ver. 13, means "contrary to the Jewish law " (of. ver. 
 15), it might in this way come under the cognisance of the Roman law. 
 
 * Ver. 14, iiunjfia, a legal injury ; pq&ovpyw" 1 . a moral offence. 
 
 8 jmfaaTa infr. A, B, D 2 , E, Coptic, Sahidic, Armenian, &c. "My lord's" Roman 
 disdain for the yens sceleratissima is heard in every accent.
 
 ST. PAUL AT COEINTH. 323 
 
 about mere names, and your law, see to it yourselves ; for a judge of these 
 matters I do not choose to be." Having thus, as we should say, quashed 
 the indictment, " my Lord Gallio " ordered his lictors to clear the court. We 
 may be sure they made short work of ejecting the frustrated but muttering 
 mob, on whose disappointed malignity, if his countenance at all reflected the 
 feelings expressed by his words, he must have been looking down from his 
 lofty tribunal with undisguised contempt. 1 It took the Romans nearly two 
 centuries to learn that Christianity was something infinitely more important 
 than the Jewish sect which they mistook it to be. It would have been better 
 for them and for the world if they had tried to got rid of this disdain, and 
 to learn wherein lay the secret power of a religion which they could neither 
 eradicate nor suppress. But while we regret this unphilosophic disregard, let 
 us at least do justice to Roman impartiality. In Gallio, in Lysias, in Felix, 
 in Festus, in the centurion Julius, even in Pilate, 2 different as were their 
 degrees of rectitude, wo cannot but admire the trained judicial insight with 
 which they at once saw through the subterranean injustice and virulent ani- 
 mosity of the Jews in bringing false charges against innocent men. Deep as 
 was his ignorance of the issues which were at stake, the conduct of Gallio 
 was in accordance with the strictest justice when " he dravo them from his 
 judgment-seat." 
 
 But the scene did not end here. The volatile Greeks, 3 though they 
 had not dared to interfere until the decision of the Proconsul had been 
 announced, were now keenly delighted to see how completely the malice of 
 the Jews had been foiled ; and since the highest authority had pronounced 
 the charge against St. Paul to be frivolous, they seized the opportunity of 
 executing a little Lynch law. The ringleader of the Jewish faction had 
 been a certain Sosthenes, who may have succeeded Crispus in the function 
 of Ruler of the Synagogue, and whose zeal may have been all the more 
 violently stimulated by the defection of his predecessor.* Whether the 
 Corinthians knew that St. Paul was a Roman citizen or not, they must at 
 least have been aware that he had separated from the synagogue, and that 
 
 1 Perhaps no passage of the ancient authors, full as they are of dislike to the 
 Jews (see infra, Excursus XIV.), expresses so undisguised a bitterness, or ia so 
 thoroughly expressive of the way in which the Romans regarded this singular people, 
 as that in which Tacitus relates how Tiberius banished 4,000 freedmen "infected with 
 that superstition " into Sardinia, to keep down the brigands of that island, with the 
 distinct hope that the unhealthy climate might help to get rid of them " et si, ob 
 gravitatem caeli interissent, vile damnum " (Ann. ii. 85). Suetonius tells us, with yet 
 more brutal indifference, that Tiberius, on pretext of military service, scattered them 
 among all the unhealthiest provinces, banishing the rest on pain of being reduced to 
 slavery (Suet. Tib. 86 ; Jos. Antt. xviii. 3, 5). 
 
 1 Acts xxiii. 29 ; xxv. 19. The ignorant provincialism of the justices at Philippi was 
 of too low a type to understand Roman law. 
 
 Acts xviii. 17, vavTft. The OC'EAATJW O f D, E is a gloss, though a correct one. If 
 this Sosthenes is identical with the Sosthenes of 1 Cor. i. 1, he must have been sub- 
 sequently converted ; but the name is a common one, and it is hardly likely that two 
 rulers of the synagogue would be converted in succession. 
 
 * I give the view which seems to me the most probable, pjwrfng over masses of idle 
 conjectures.
 
 334 THE LIFE AJTD WO&K OF ST PAUI 
 
 many Gentiles espoused his views. They thought it intolerable that Jews 
 should try to trump up charges against one who in some measure belonged 
 to themselves. The opportunity to show these Jews what they thought of 
 them, and give them a lesson as to the way in which they should behave in 
 the future, was too tempting. Accordingly they seized Sosthenes, and gave 
 him a beating in the actual basilica in front of the tribunal, and under the 
 very eyes of the Proconsul. An ancient gloss says that he pretended not 
 to see what they were doing, 1 but the text implies that he looked on at the 
 entire proceeding with unfeigned indifference. So long as they w*r& not 
 guilty of any serious infraction of the peace, it was nothing to him how 
 they amused themselves. He had been familiar with similar disturbances in 
 Borne. The Jews were everywhere a turbulent, fanatical race. What was 
 it to him if the Greek gamins liked to inflict a little richly-deserved casti- 
 gation ? It would be so much the better if they taught this Sosthenes and 
 any number more of these Jews a severe lesson. They would be more likely 
 (he thought) to keep order in future, and less likely to trouble him again 
 with their meanness and their malevolence, their riots and their rancours. 2 
 
 There is one thing that we cannot but deeply regret It is that Gallio'a 
 impatient sense of justice has deprived us of another speech by St. Paul 
 which, delivered under such circumstances, and before such a judge, would 
 have been of the deepest interest. But Gallio dismissed the whole scene 
 from his mind as supremely unimportant. Had he ever thought it worth 
 alluding to, in any letter to his brother Seneca, it would have been in some 
 such terms as these : " I had scarcely arrived when the Jews tried to play 
 on my inexperience by dragging before me one Panlus, who seems to be an 
 adherent of Chrestus, or Christus, of whom we heard something at Rome. 
 I was not going to be troubled with their malefic superstitions, and ordered 
 them to be turned out. The Greeks accordingly, who were favourable to 
 Paulus, beat one of the Jews in revenge for their malice. You would have 
 smiled, if you had been present, at these follies of the turba forensis. Bed 
 haec hactenus." 
 
 But the superficiality which judges only by externals always brings its 
 own retribution. It adores the mortal and scorns the divinity ; it welcomes 
 the impostor and turns the angel from its door. It forms its judgment on 
 trivial accidents, and ignores eternal realities. The haughty, distinguished, 
 and cultivated Gallio, brother of Seneca, Proconsul of Achaia, the most 
 popular man and the most eminent litterateur of his day, would have been 
 to the last degree amazed had any one told him that so paltry an occurrence 
 would be for ever recorded in history ; that it would be the only scene in bis 
 life in which posterity would feel a moment's interest ; that he would owe 
 
 1 "Tune Gallio fingebat enim non videre" (MS. <f). 
 
 * Paley (/Tor. Paul.) points out the honesty with which St. Lake narrates the roper 
 cilious indifference of great men to the circumstances which affected the life of th 
 Apostle. The "things," however, for which Gullio "did not care" were not "the 
 things of the kingdom of heaven," but the beating of & Jew by Greek*,
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAWS. 325 
 
 to it any immortality he possesses; that he -would for all time be mainly 
 judged of by the glimpse we get of him on that particular morning ; that 
 he had flung away the greatest opportunity of his life when he closed the 
 lips of the haggard Jewish prisoner whom his decision rescued from the 
 clutches of his countrymen ; that a correspondence between that Jew Shaul, 
 or Paulus, and his great brother Seneca, would be forged and would go down 
 to posterity; 1 that it would be believed for centuries that that wretched 
 prisoner had converted the splendid philosopher to his own " execrable super- 
 stition," and that Seneca had borrowed from him the finest sentiments of 
 his writings ; that for all future ages that bent, ophthalmic, nervous, unknown 
 Jew, against whom all other Jews seemed for some inconceivably foolish 
 reason to be so infuriated, would be regarded as transcendently more impor- 
 tant than his deified Emperors and immortal Stoics; that the "parcel of 
 questions " about a mere opinion, and names, and a matter of Jewish law, 
 which he had so disdainfully refused to hear, should hereafter become the 
 most prominent of all questions to the whole civilised world. 
 
 And Paul may have suspected many of these facts as little as " the sweet 
 Gallic" did. Sick at heart with this fresh outrage, and perhaps musing 
 sadly on the utterance of his Master that He came not to send peace on earth 
 but a sword, he made his way back from the bema of the great Proconsul to 
 the little congregation in the room of Justus, or to his lodging in the squalid 
 shop of Aquila and Priscilla. 
 
 ^rraio^eKjp hnt/, .tn*w - i }r* -r"irj I,T 
 
 terf odJ B&it* .fie io tr* &>iiiir ~"^> V -? ' " ' " - ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAWS. 
 "Ergo latet ultimus dies ut observentur omnes dies." ADO. 
 
 AT some period during his stay in Corinth, and probably before his arrest by 
 the Jews early in the year 53, or at the close of A.D. 52,an event had taken 
 place of immense significance in the life of the Apostle and in the history of 
 the Christian faith. He had written to the Thessalonians a letter which may 
 possibly have been the first he wrote to any Christian church, 8 and which 
 
 i No one in these days doubts that the letters of St. Paul and Seneca (Fleury, St. 
 Paul and Slneque, ii. 300 ; Aubertin, Seneque et St. Paul, 409 ; Lightfoot, Phil. 327 ; 
 Boissier, La Religion Bomaine, ii. 52104) are spurious. On the real explanation of the 
 resemblances between the two, see Seekers after God, p. 270, tq., and passim. It will 
 there be seen how small ground there is for Tertullian's expression Seneca tacpe 
 noster" 
 
 J I only put this as & possibility. It will be seen hereafter (see 1 Cor. v. 9 ; 2 Cor. 
 x. 9) that I regard it as certain that St. Paul wrote other letters, of which some perhaps 
 man y_have perished ; and it is difficult to believe that (for instance) he wrote no word 
 of thanks to the Philippians for the contributions which they had twice sent to him at 
 Thessalonica, or that he wrote nothing to the Thessalonians themselves when he sent 
 Timothy to them from Athens. Does not the whole style of these Epistles show that 
 they could not have been the first specimens of their kind ? We cannot be surprised that,
 
 326 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 certainly is the earliest of those that have come down to us. He had begun, 
 therefore, that new form of activity which has produced effects so memorable 
 to all generations of the Christian world. 
 
 We have already seen that Paul had left Timotheus in Macedonia, had 
 been joined by him in Athens, and had once more parted from him, though 
 with deep reluctance and at great self-sacrifice, because his heart yearned for 
 his Thessalonian converts, and he had been twice prevented from carrying out 
 his earnest desire to visit them once more. After doing all that he could to 
 comfort and support them in their many trials, Timotheus had returned, in 
 company with Silas, to Corinth, and doubtless there the Apostle had talked 
 with them long and earnestly about the friends and brethren who had been 
 won to Christ in the Macedonian city. There was deep cause for thankfulness 
 in their general condition, but there was some need for advice and consolation. 
 Paul could not send Timothy again. There was other work to be done. Other 
 Churches required his own personal services. Nor could he spare the com- 
 panions of his toils in the midst of a city which demanded his whole energy 
 and strength. But since he could neither come to the Thessalonians himself, 
 nor send them back his truest and dearest fellow- workers, he would at least 
 write to them, and let his letter supply, as far as possible, the void created by 
 his absence. It was a very happy Providence which inspired him with this 
 thought. It would come quite naturally to him, because it had been a custom 
 in all ages for Jewish communities to correspond with each other by means of 
 travelling deputations, and because the prodigious development of intercourse 
 between the chief cities of Italy, Greece, and Asia rendered it easy to send one 
 or other of the brethren as the bearer of his missives. And epistolary 
 correspondence was the very form which was of all others the best 
 adapted to the Apostle's individuality. It suited the impetuosity of 
 emotion which could not have been fettered down to the composition of 
 formal treatises. It could be taken up or dropped according to the 
 necessities of the occasion or the feelings of the writer. It permitted 
 of a freedom of expression which was far more intense and far more 
 natural to the Apostle than the regular syllogisms and rounded periods of a 
 book. It admitted something of the tenderness and something of the 
 familiarity of personal intercourse. Into no other literary form could he have 
 infused that intensity which made a Christian scholar truly say of him that he 
 alone of writers seems to have written, not with fingers and pen and ink, but 
 with his very heart, his very feelings, the unbared palpitations of his 
 inmost being ; * which made Jerome say that in his writings the words 
 were all so many thunders ; 2 which made Luther say that his expressions 
 were like living creatures with hands and feet. The theological importance of 
 this consideration is immense, and has, to the deep injury of the Church, been 
 
 amid the disorders of the times, letters written on fugitive materials should have perished, 
 especially as many of them may have been wholly undoctrinal. In 2 Thess. iii. 17 could 
 St. Paul say 3 <" cnmtlov tracrp errnrroArJ, if he had only written one f 
 
 i Casaubon, Adversaria ap. Wolf., p. 135. 8 Jer. ad Pammach. Ep. 48,
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAH8. 327 
 
 too much neglected. Theologians have treated the language of St. Paul as 
 though he wrote every word with the accuracy of a dialectician, with the 
 scrupulous precision of a school-man, with the rigid formality of a philosophic 
 dogmatist. His Epistles as a whole, with thoir insoluble antinomies, resist 
 this impossible and injurious method of dealing with them as absolutely as 
 does the Sermon on the Mount. The epistolary form is eminently spontaneous, 
 personal, flexible, emotional. A dictated epistle is like a conversation taken 
 down in shorthand. In one word, it best enabled Paul to be himself, and to 
 recall most vividly to the minds of his spiritual children the tender, suffering, 
 inspired, desponding, terrible, impassioned, humble, uncompromising teacher, 
 who had first won them to become imitators l of himself and of the Lord, and 
 to turn from hollow ritualisms or dead idols to serve the living and true God, 
 and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even 
 Jesus who delivereth us from the coming wrath. 
 
 And one cause of this vivid freshness of style which he imparted to his 
 Epistles was the fact that they were, with few if any exceptions, not deeply 
 premeditated, not scholastically regular, but that they came fresh and burning 
 from the heart in all the passionate sincerity of its most immediate feelings. 
 He would even write a letter in the glow of excited feeling, and then wait with 
 intense anxiety for news of the manner of its reception, half regretting, or 
 more than half regretting, that he had ever sent it. 2 Had he written more 
 formally ho would never have moved as he Tiers moved the heart of the world. 
 Take away from the Epistles of St. Paul the traces of passion, the invective, 
 the yearning affection, the wrathful denunciation, the bitter sarcasm, the dis- 
 tressful boasting, the rapid interrogatives, the affectionate entreaties, the frank 
 colloquialisms, the personal details those marks of his own personality on 
 every page which have boon ignorantly and absurdly characterised as intense 
 egotism and they would never have been, as they are, next to the Psalms of 
 David, the dearest treasures of Christian devotion ; next to the four Gospels 
 the most cherished text-books of Christian faith. We cannot but love a man 
 whose absolute sincerity enables us to feel the very beatings of his heart ; who 
 knows not how to wear that mask of reticence and Pharisaism which enables 
 others to use speech only to conceal their thoughts ; who, if he smites under 
 the fifth rib, will smite openly and without a deceitful kiss ; who has fair blows 
 but no precious balms that break the head ; who has the feelings of a man, 
 the language of a man, the love, the hate, the scorn, the indignation of a man ; 
 who is no envious cynic, no calumnious detractor, no ingenious polisher of 
 plausible hypocrisies, no mechanical repeater of worn-out shibboleths, but who 
 will, if need be, seize his pen with a burst of tears to speak out the very 
 tiling he thinks ; s who, in the accents of utter truthf ulness alike to friend and 
 to enemy, can argue, and denounce, and expose, and plead, and pity, and 
 forgive ; to whose triumphant faith and transcendent influence has been due 
 
 i 1 Thess. 1. 6, f"^*!, not " followers," as in E. V. See Excursus L, on " The Style 
 of St. Paul as Illustrative of his Character," p. , 3- 
 
 3 2 Cor. vii 8. * 2 Car. iL 4.
 
 328 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 in no small measure that fearless and glad enthusiasm which pervaded the 
 life of the early Church. 
 
 And thus, when Timothy had told him all that he had observed among the 
 brethren of Thessalonica, we may feel quite sure that, while his heart was full 
 of fresh solicitude, he would write to guide and comfort them, 1 and that many 
 days would not elapse before he had dictated the opening words : 
 
 " Paul, and Silvanns, and Timotheus to the Church 2 of the Thessalonians 
 in God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, grace to you, and peace [from 
 God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ 3 ]." 
 
 This opening address is in itself an interesting illustration of St. Paul's cha- 
 racter. Though his letters are absolutely his own, yet with that shrinking from 
 personal prominence which we often trace in him, he associates with himself in 
 the introduction not only the dignified Silas, 4 but even the youthful Timothy; 5 
 and in these his earlier, though not in his later Epistles, constantly uses " we " 
 for " I." By " we " he does not mean to imply that the words are conjointly 
 those of his two fellow-labourers, since he adopts the expression even when he 
 can only be speaking of his individual self; 6 but he is actuated by that sort of 
 modesty, traceable in the language and literature of all nations, which dislikes 
 the needlessly frequent prominence of the first personal pronoun. 7 In hia 
 letters to all other Churches, except to the Philippians, to whom the designa- 
 tion was needless, he calls himself Paul an Apostle, but he does not use the 
 
 1 That the external evidence to the genuineness of the Epistles to the Thessalonians 
 is amply sufficient may be seen in Alford, iii., Prolegom. ; Davidson, Introduct. i. 19 28; 
 Westcott, On the Canon, 68, n. , 168, &c. The internal evidence derived from style, &c. , 
 is overwhelming (Jowett, i. 1526). The counter-arguments of Kern, Schrader, Baur, 
 &c., founded, as usual, alike on divergences and coincidences, on real similarities and 
 supposed discrepancies, on asserted references and imaginary contradictions to the Acts, 
 are silently met in the text. They carry no conviction with them, and have found few 
 followers ; Baur (Paul, ii. 85 97), to a great extent, furnishing positive arguments 
 against his own conclusion. (See Lunemann, Br. an die Thessal. 10 15.) Grotius, 
 Ewald, Baur, Bunsen, Davidson, &c., consider that the First Epistle is really the second ; 
 but the hypothesis is against external and internal evidence, is wholly needless, and 
 creates obvious difficulties. It would require many volumes to enter into all these dis- 
 cussions for every Epistle ; but though I have no space for that here, I have respectfully 
 and impartially considered the difficulties raised, and in many cases shown incidentally 
 my grounds for disregarding them. One most inimitable mark of genuineness is the 
 general resemblance of tone between the Epistle and that written ten years later to the 
 other chief Macedonian Church Philippi. (See Laghtfoot in Smith's Bibl. Diet.) 
 
 2 So in 1, 2 Thess., 1, 2 Cor., and Gal. But in the other Epistles rote iyiois. 
 
 3 This addition is probably spurious. It belongs to 2 Thess. i. 2, and was added 
 because the greeting is so short. As we have now reached St. Paul's first Epistle I must 
 refer the reader to the Excursus which gives the Uncial Manuscripts of the Epistles, infra, 
 Excursus XX. 
 
 * Acts xv. 22, 32, 34. 
 
 6 Silas and Timothy are associated with him in 2 Thess. ; Sosthenes in 1 Cor. ; Timothy 
 In 2 Cor., Phil., Col., and Philem. Paul writes in his own name only to the Romans and 
 Laodiceaus, which Churches he had not personally visited. Origen says that the con- 
 currence of Paul and Silas flashed out the lightning of these Epistles (Horn, v. in Jerein. 
 588 6). 
 
 6 In 1 Thess. iii. 2, 6, and in Phil. ii. 19, Timothy is spoken of, though associated 
 with Paul in the greeting. 1 Thess. ii. 18, "we . . even I Paul." 
 
 7 "We " is chiefly characteristic of 1, 2 Thess. In 2 Thess. the only passage which 
 relapses into " I " to ii. 6.
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THE3SALONIANS. 32 
 
 title directly l to the Thessalonians, because his claim to i f in its more special 
 sariso had not yet been challenged by insidious Judaisers.* In his five earlier 
 Epistles he always addresses "the Church;" in his later Epistles "the Saints," 
 and tho reason for this is not clear ; * but to all Churches alike he repeats this 
 opening salutation, " Grace and peace." 4 It is a beautiful and remarkable 
 blending of the salutations of the Jew and the Greek, the East and the West, 
 with their predominant ideals of calm and brightness. The solemn greeting 
 of the Jew was SHALOM, " Peace be to you ; " the lighter greeting of the 
 Greek was x a 'P eiv , " Rejoice ; " the Church of Christ possessed of ft joy that 
 defied tribulation, heir to a peace that passeth understanding not only com- 
 bined the two salutations, but infused into both a deeper and more spiritual 
 significance. 6 
 
 After this salutation ' he opens his letter with that expression of thankful- 
 ness on their behalf which he addresses even to tho Corinthians, whose deeds 
 were so sad a contrast to their ideal title of saints, and which is never wanting, 
 except in tho burning letter to the apostatising Galatians. So invariable i* 
 this characteristic of hia mind and style that it has acquired a technical 
 description, and Gorman writers call it the DanJcsagung of the Epistles. 7 It 
 was no mere insincere compliment or rhetorical artifice. Those to whom he 
 wrote, however much they might sink below their true ideal, wore still converts, 
 were a Church, were saints, were brethren. There might be weak, there might 
 
 , . . .. .. .'!>'!> ' ! '-*< ":':' *'"< **' ..J:viitTU! 1 
 
 1 See 1 Thes*. 11. 6. 
 
 - It would have been inapprop riate in the private note to Philemon. 
 
 3 Another slight peculiarity is that in his first two Epistles he says " the Church of 
 the Thessaloniaus ;" whereas in the next three he prefers the expression " the Church in " 
 such and sucli a city. This may be a mere trifle. 
 
 4 In hia Pastoral Epistles he acids the word t.^rt, "mercy." We may thus sum 
 up the peculiarities of the salutations: i. "An Apostle," in all except Philem. and 
 Phil. ii. "To the Church," in 1, 2 Thess., 1, 2 Cor., Gal. iii. "To the Church of the," 
 1, 2Thesg. ; but "to the Church which is in," 1, 2 Cor., Gal. In all other Epistles 
 li Tothe taints." iv. "Grace and peace, "in all but the Pastoral Epistles, which have 
 " Grace, mercy, and peace." 
 
 Xipis, quae est prmcipium omnis boni ; tlrfrq, quae est finale bonorum omnium 
 (Tho. Aquin.). 
 
 6 The Epistle, which is mainly personal and practical, may be analysed as follows : 
 l.f. iii. Historical ; II. iv., v. Hortatory ; each ending with a prayer. (I.) i. 1. Brief 
 greeting, i. 2 10. Thanksgiving for their conversion and holiness, ii. 1 12. Appeal 
 to them as to the character of his ministry, ii. 1316. Renewed expression of thanks- 
 giving for their constancy under persecutions, and bitter complaint of the Jews. ii. 
 17 iii. 10. His personal feelings towards them, and the visit of Timothy, iii. 11 13. 
 His prayer for them. (II.) iv. 18. "Warning against impurity, iv. 9, 10. Exhortation 
 to brotherly love ; and 11, 12. honourable diligence, iv. 13 v. 11. The only doctrinal 
 part of the Epistle, iv. 1318. Consolation about the dead. v. 111. Dufr^r of watch- 
 fulness, sinc the Lord's advent is near, and the time uncertain, v. 1215. Their duties 
 to one another. 1622. Spiritual exhortations. 23, 24. His prayer for them. 2528. 
 Last words and blessing. The Epistle is characterised by simplicity of style, and the 
 absence of controversy and of developed doctrine. Its keynote is "hope," as the keynote 
 cf the Epistle to the Philippians is joy." 
 
 " Ewald, Die Sendsc&rcilen da Ap. Pauliu, 19,30, &o. It may perhaps be urged that 
 some of these peculiarities may be due to the ordinary stereotyped formula of corresjion- 
 
 how little he was inclined to mere formula. 
 12
 
 330 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 be false, there might be sinful members among them, but as a body they were 
 w.islied and sanctified and justified, and the life of even those who were un- 
 worthy of their high vocation yet presented a favourable contrast to the lives 
 of the heathen around them. But the expression of thankfulness on behalf 
 of the Thessalonians is peculiarly full and earnest. It is an overflow of 
 heartfelt gratitude, as indeed the special characteristic of the letter is its sweet- 
 ness. 1 St. Paul tells them that he is always giving thanks to God for them all, 
 mentioning them in his prayers, filled with the ever-present memory of the 
 activity of their faith, the energy of their love, the patience of their hope.* 
 He reminds them of the power and fulness and spiritual unction which had 
 accompanied his preaching of the Gospel, and how they had become 3 imitators* 
 of him and of Christ with such spiritual gladness in the midst of such deep 
 affliction 6 that they had become models to all the Churches of Northern and 
 Southern Greece, and their faith had been as a trumpet-blast 8 throngh all the 
 Mediterranean coasts. So universally was their belief in God known and 
 spread abroad, that there was no need for St. Paul or his companions to tell 
 how they had worked at Thessalonica, because every one had heard of their 
 conversion from idolatry to belief in the very and living God/ and to the 
 waiting for the return of that risen Saviour who delivereth us from the coming 
 wrath. 8 
 
 He appeals to them, therefore, as to unimpeachable witnesses of the 
 earnestness of his visit to them, and of the boldness with which he had faced 
 the dangers of Thessalonica, after such recent and painful experience of the 
 
 1 " Habet haec Epistola meram quandam dulcedinem " (Bengel). 
 
 s Of. Gal. v. 6. Thus in the very first lines which we possess from his pen we meet 
 with his fundamental trilogy of Christian virtues faith, hope, love. Of. v. 8 ; Col. 
 i. 4 ; Eph. i. 15, 18 ; iii. 17, 18, 20, &c. See Reuss, TJUol. Chret. ii. 240. 
 
 3 St. Paul, like many emotional and impressible writers, is constantly haunted by 
 the same word, which he then repeats again and again ^TU aetSoirr<ri vturant ap^im ATJTOU 
 jucovovTeao-i. He uses the verb yiVo/uai no less than eight times, although, as Bishop 
 Ellicott points out, it only occurs twelve times in all the rest of the New Testament, 
 except in quotations from the LXX. "Un mot I'obse'de, il le ramene dans une page a tout 
 propos. Ce n'est pas de la ste'rilitS : c'est de la contention de 1'esprit et une complete 
 insouciance de la correction du style " (Kenan, p. 233). 
 
 4 fti/xijrai, E.V. " followers." 
 
 5 L 6. The reader will notice the exquisite originality of conception in the words 
 lv 8\tyei. iroAAj} fxera xP" T iii'tvunros 'Ayiov. It is uo rhetorical oxymoron, but the sign of 
 a new aeon in the world's history. 
 
 6 i. 8, efTJxrp-ai. *><r eirl <r<iAjriyyo? Aafijrpbv qx "'"!* (Theoph.). Admitting for the warmth 
 of feeling which dictated the expression, it suggests no difficulty when we remember that 
 a year may have elapsed since his visit, and that Thessalonica was "posita in gremio 
 imperii Romani " (Cic. ), and stood "on a level with Corinth and Ephesus in its share 
 of the commerce of the Levant." 
 
 7 i. 10, 'AA)0up (1 John v. 20). ZUVTI M contrasted with dead men and idols ("Wisd. 
 xiv. 15 ; Gal. iv. 8), which are mere elilim, " nullities " (Lev. xix. 4), and hakhalim, 
 " vapours." The expression shows that the Thessalonian Church was mainly composed 
 of Gentiles, which accords with Acts xvii. 4, if we read <u 'EAArjvwv (supra, p. 288). If we 
 omit ai there is still no contradiction, for obviously many Gentiles, especially women, 
 were converted, and even the proselytes had once been idolaters. 
 
 8 Not as in E. V., "who delivered (pvo^evov) us from the wrath to come" (epxatnenit, 
 not f*AAov<ri)0' The deliverance is continuous ("Christus nos semcl fAi>xio-aTo semper 
 0vTu " Bengel) ; the wrath works as a normal law (i. 1 10).
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THB THESSALONIAXS. 331 
 
 outrages of Philippi. It has been evident, even through these opening sen- 
 tences of thanksgiving, that there is in his words an undercurrent of allusion 
 to some who would, if they could, have given a very different account of his 
 conduct and motives. 1 These appeals to their knowledge of the life and 
 character and behaviour of Paul and his two fellow-missionaries would have 
 been needless if they had never been impugned. But it is easy to understand 
 that alike the Jews in their eagerness to win back the few members of the 
 synagogue who had joined the brethren, and the Gentiles vexed at the silent 
 rebuke against their own sins, would whisper calumnies about the new teachers, 
 and try to infuse into others their own suspicions. The cities of that age 
 swarmed with every kind and denomination of quack and impostor. Might 
 not these three poor Jews that silent and dignified elder, the shy, gentle 
 youth, and the short enthusiast of mean aspect might they not be only a 
 new variety of the genus goes like the wandering Galli and worshippers of 
 Isis, or Chaldaei, or Mathematici, or priests of Mithras ? 2 Were they not a 
 somewhat suspicious-looking trio 1 What was their secret object ? Was it with 
 sinister motives that they gathered into their communities those widows and 
 maidens ? Were they not surreptitiously trying to get hold of money ? or 
 might it not be their own exaltation at which they were aiming? Now 
 there were some charges and attacks which, in after days, as we shall see, 
 filled Paul with bitter indignation ; but insinuations of this nature he can 
 afford to answer very calmly. Such calumnies were too preposterous to be 
 harmful ; such innuendos too malevolent to be believed. In order to disprove 
 them he had but to appeal at once to notorious facts ; and, indeed, no elaborate 
 disproof was needed, for his Thessalonian friends knew, and God was witness, 8 
 that there had been no deceit, no uncleanness, no base motives, no secret 
 avarice, no desire to win favour, no fawning flattery in the exhortations of the 
 missionaries. They had come, not for selfishness, but for sacrifice ; not for 
 glory, but to pour out their hearts' tenderness, and spend their very lives for 
 the sake of their converts, 4 cherishing them as tenderly 5 as a nursing mother 
 fosters her children in her warm bosom, 6 yet waiving their own rights, and 
 taking nothing wliatever from them, nor laying the smallest burden upon 
 them. 7 The brethren knew that while they were preaching they regarded 
 
 1 1 Thess. ii. 5, 9. These phrases are not accounted for by contrast with heathen 
 deceptions. The viiiv-roi* irierrvov<nv of verse 10 means " though others did not so regard 
 our conduct. '" 
 
 vene 5, irXeo^e^'a ( Acts xx. 33 ; 1 Cor. ix. 15 ; 2 Cor. xii. 14). 
 
 3 1 Thess. ii. 5. 
 
 4 ii. 8, leg. Vpo/troi, > A, B, C, D, E, F, G, "clinging to you;" .rpoo-fcif^oi (Theoph.); 
 mvrrxontvoi i>nlair (CEcumen.). 
 
 ' ii. 7, iirtoi, found also in 2 Tim. ii. 24. The ^TTIOI of , B, C, D, F, G, is an obviooi 
 instance of mere homoeoteleuton. 
 
 1 ii. 7, SoAiTj. 
 
 7 n ftdpti etrai, " oneri ease " (Vuhj.). It may mean to be dictatorial (-.XA^t iroAavrw 
 ** Chrys.), but see verse 9 ; 2 Cor. xi. 9 ; xiL 16 ; 2 Thess. iii 8.
 
 332 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATJL. 
 
 their mission as a glorious privilege ; l and because their one desire was to 
 please God, they endured and laboured 2 night and day 3 to win their own 
 bread, setting blameless examples of holiness towards God, and righteousness 
 towards men, and all the while exhorting their followers one by one 4 to live 
 lives worthy of God and of the kingdom of His Christ. 5 
 
 And this was why, thank God, the Thessalouians had accepted their preach- 
 ing for what it was a divine and not a human message ; and had borne 
 suffering at the hands of their Gentile neighbours with the same exemplary 
 courage as the Churches of Judasa, who in like manner had been persecuted 
 by the Jews. And here Paul, as be so constantly does, " goes off at a word." 
 The mere incidental mention of Jews makes him digress to denounce them, 
 writing as he did in the very heat of those conflicts which ended in his indig- 
 nant withdrawal from their synagogue at Corinth, and recalling the manner 
 in which these murderers of the Lord and of the Prophets, 8 displeasing ? to 
 God and the common enemies of man, 8 chased him from city to city, and tried 
 to prevent his mission to the Gentiles. And it is thus, ho sayg, that they 
 are always filling up the measure of guilt, and the wrath camo upon them to 
 the end potentially overtook thorn in that sudden consummation of thoir 
 sins. Thoir very sin, ho seems to say, in hindering the proclamation of the 
 Gospel, was itself their punishment; their wrath against Christ was God's wrath 
 against them ; their dementation would be, and was, their doom. * 
 
 And having been thus diverted by bis feeling of indignation against thorn 
 
 1 ii. 4. 5s8o.ajaio-f0a. * H. 9, rfvos, " active toil ; " M^X^S, "steady endurance of toil." 
 1 St. Paul uses the ordinary Hebrew expression (iii. 10; 2 TLess. iii. 8, &c.), which 
 arose from the notion, found in an old border oath, that " God made the earth in six days 
 and seven nights." Hence too the term wx^tpov. St. Luke, writing in his own person. 
 says, "day and night " (Acts ix. 24). The fact that there were wealthy and distinguished 
 women among the proselytes (Acts xvii. 4) made this self-denial the more striking. 
 
 * ii. 11, iva. Zxurrov vfiip. Cbjysostom says, fidfiai iv TOCTOVTU x\f,9n juTjSeVa tmoa\tVi[y ', 
 
 but probably the Christians in Thessalonica would have made an exceedingly small 
 modern pariah. 
 
 * ii. 1-12. 
 
 6 Omit la.'ovs, , A, B, D, &o. "Suos adjectio eat haeretiei" (i.e., of Marcion} Teri, 
 adv. Marc. v. 15. 
 
 7 /i5j cpta-K6vru>. The^'j, though "the prevailing New Testament combination with 
 the participle " (Ellicott), is slightly less severe than if he had used OVK. 
 
 s The momentary exacerbation against the Jews in the mind of St. Paul must have 
 been unusually intense to wring from him such words as these. We almost seem to catch 
 the echo of the strong condemnation uttered against them by Gentiles as a God-detested 
 race, who hated all men ("odium generis humani" Tac. H. v. 5 ; Juv. Sat. xiv. 100), 
 and such a view of them (which Lunemann here fails to overthrow) must have caused a 
 deep pang to one who remained at heart a genuine patriot. (See Horn. ix. 1 5.) But 
 the triumph of the Jews over the impious attempts of Caligula had caused a great recru- 
 descence of fanaticism among them. 
 
 9 ii. 14 16. Baur, in arguing that this could only have been written after the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem, makes a double mistake. First, he takes I^Oaucy in the sense of 
 f&wtt- (like the E. V. " has come "), which is the erroneous gloss of B. D ; and secondly, 
 he does not see the ethical conception which I have here tried to bring out. The wrath of 
 God found its full consummation in the fulness of their criminality (Matt, xxvii. 25); 
 the fiat of their doom had then gone forth. It was not finally consummated till the foil 
 of Jerusalem, eighteen years later, but signs were already obvious that its execution 
 wonld not long be delayed. To the prescient eye of St. Paul the commencing troubles 
 in Palestine and the recent expulsion of the Jews from Borne would be ample to
 
 THE FIRST EPI3TLE TO THK THESSALONIAHg. 333 
 
 from the topic of self-defence on which, indeed, nothing more was necessary 
 to be said he goes on to tell them that regarding them as his glory and joy 
 nd crown of boasting 1 at the coming of Christ feeling, in his absence from 
 them, like a father bereaved of his children 2 he had twice purposed to coma 
 to them, and had twice been hindered by Satan. 3 He had, however, done the 
 next best thing he could. He had parted from Timothy in Athens, and sent 
 him to prevent them from succumbing * to those fierce afflictions, of the cer- 
 tainty of which they had been faithfully forewarned ; and to ascertain their 
 faith, as shown by the dubious result of too definite temptations. 4 When 
 Timothy rejoined him at Corinth, the news which he had brought back was 
 BO reassuring he was able to give so good an account of their faith, and love, 
 and steadfastness, and affection that it had cheered the Apostle in the midst 
 of his own heavy afflictions, and been to him like a fresh spring of life. No 
 thanks to God could be too hearty for this blessing, and it added intensity to 
 his prayer that God would yet enable him to come and see them, and to perfect 
 all deficiencies of their faith. Ho concludes this historic or personal section 
 of his Epistle with the fervent prayer that God would deepen the spirit of 
 love which already prevailed among them, and so enable them to stand before 
 Him in blameless holiness at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints. 8 
 From these earnest and loving messages he turns to the practical part of 
 his letter. He beseeches 7 and exhorts them not to be stationary, but to 
 advance more and more in that Christian course which he had marked out 
 for them. And then he enters on those special injunctions which he knew to 
 be most needful. First and foremost he puts the high virtue of purity. 
 
 justify bis expression. In the true prophetic spirit he regards the inevitable as the 
 actual. It is possible, too, that St. Paul may be alluding to the great discourse of 
 Christ (Matt, xsiii. 3739 ; xxiv. 6, 16. Of. Kom. i. 18 ; Dan. be. 24), 
 
 1 Ezek. xvi. 12 (LXX.). : ii. 17, rop4<m<7liTf i<p' vpS>v. 
 
 3 Once apparently at Bercea, once at Athena. The Satanic hindrance may have been 
 In Bercea Jewish persecutions, in Athens feeble health. (Of. llom. iv. 22.) He is writing 
 to Gentile converts, to whom it will be observed that he does not adduce, in either 
 Epistle, a single quotation from the Old Testament, with which they could have been 
 as yet but little familiar ; but the immediate reference of trials, sickness, and hindrances 
 to Satan is found to this day in all Oriental forms of speech. Even in the Bible the 
 term Satan is sometimes applied to "any adversary or "opposing influence" (cf. 
 1 Chron. Xii. 1 with 2 Sam. x_xiv. 1). "The devil," &i/3oAo;, aa distinguished from 
 unclean spirits, Jei^dno, is only used by St. Paul in Eph. iv. 27 ; vi. 11; and three times 
 in the letters to Timothy. Where he regarded the hindrance as Satanic he carries oat 
 his purpose another time, but where it is a divine prohibition (Acts xvi. 6, 7) he finally 
 gives it up. Acts xii. 4 is only an apparent exception. 
 
 4 He here uses the metaphor ftuWfru. derived from the fawning cowardice of frightened 
 animals; elsewhere he uses the metaphor nYXXrf<u, "to furl the sails in a high wind." 
 He calls Timothy "a fellow-worker with God" (ovvtpyw roC eoO, D), an expression only 
 altered in the MSS. because of its boldness (L Cor. iii. 9; 2 Cor. vi. 1). 
 
 5 Hi. 5, jijj >rws iri'pa<r<rF . . . KM ttxvw yevijrac. 
 
 8 ii. 17 iii. 13. Parousia occurs six times in these two Epistles, and only besides in 
 1 Cor. xv. 23. The word " advent " is said to occur first in Tert. De JRaurrect, 24. Ths 
 " saints " seems to be a reference, not to angels (Ps. Ixxxix. 7; Matt, xvi 27; Jude 14, &c. ), 
 because St. Paul does not use this term of angels, but to those mentioned in iv. 16; 
 1 Cor. vi. 2. 
 
 . l ipuTuncv, as In T. 12 ; 2 Thess. ii. 1 ; only elsewhere to hit other Macedonian 
 Church (Phil. iv. 3).
 
 334 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAT7I* 
 
 These converts had but recently been called out of a heathenism which looked 
 very lightly on the sins of the flesh. The mastery over lifelong habits of 
 corruption was not to be won in a day. They were still in danger of relaps- 
 ing into sensual crime. It was necessary to remind them that, however small 
 might be the censure which Gentiles attached to fornication, 1 and even to 
 yet darker and deadlier sins, 2 they were in direct opposition to the command, 
 and would immediately deserve the retribution of that God whose will was 
 their sanctification, and who laid on them the duty, however difficult, of ac- 
 quiring a secure and tranquil mastery over their body and its lusts. 3 If then 
 any one among them professed to despise these precepts as though they were 
 merely those of the Apostle, he must now be reminded that he was thereby 
 despising, not any human teacher, but God, who called them, not for un- 
 cleanliness, but in sanctification, 4 and by giving them His Holy Spirit, not 
 only deepened the duty, but also inspired them with the power to sanctify His 
 Temple in their hearts. 6 
 
 The next Christian virtue of which he speaks is brotherly love. He feels 
 it unnecessary to do so, 9 for God Himself had taught them both to recognise 
 that duty and to put it in practice, not only towards the members of their 
 own church, but towards all Macedonian Christians (vs. 9, 10). 
 
 Further, they should make it their ambition to be quiet/ working with 
 
 1 Cic. pro Caelio, 48 ; Hor. Sal. I. ii. 32 ; Ter. Adelpk. I. ii. 21 ; Jer. Ep. 77 ; Aug. 
 De Civ. Dei. xiv. 18. 
 
 s Ver. 7, ou . . . ciri Ko0apm'f oAA' iv ayia<rfi<j>. 
 
 * iv. 4. The exact meaning of tlSfvtu ficacr-rov vpiav rb iavrov iTKfvos K-ra.aBa.1, K.T.A., must 
 remain uncertain. It is wrongly translated in the E.V. "that erery one of you should 
 know ho w to possess his vessel, " &c. , for KrZ<r6<u is ' ' to acquire. " I have given what would 
 be a very fine and forcible meaning of the words, but it cannot be regarded as certain 
 that viuvot means "body" (of. 2 Cor. iv. 7, Chrys., Theoph., CEcumen., Theod., Tert., 
 and most modern writers). I regard it, however, as by far the most probable interpreta- 
 tion (cf. 1 Sam. xxi. 5 ; 2 Cor. iv. 7). So ayydov is used for "body " in Philo, and vas in 
 Latin writers (see Cic. T, Disp., i. 22 ; Lucr, iii. 44). Theodore of Mopsuestia and 
 Augustine make it mean " his own wife ; " and then it would be a recommendation to 
 the spirit of chastity at once preserved and continued In a holy marriage (Heb. xili. 4X 
 This view has been recently adopted by De Wette, Schott, &c., act it was by Aquinas 
 and Estius. In favour of it are the Hebrew ^3 for wife (see Rabbinic instances in 
 Schoettgen, Hor. Hebr., ad loc.), and the phrase KravSai yvvaina. (Ecclus. xxxvi. 29. Cf. 
 Eph. v. 28 ; 1 Cor. vii. 2 ; 1 Pet. iii. 7). But would the Thessalonians, whose women 
 held a much higher and freer position than Oriental women, have been aware of this 
 somewhat repulsive Orientalism ? Would the use of it have been worthy of St. Paul's 
 refinement? and is he not, as Theodoret observes, speaking to celiba^s and to women as 
 well as to men ? 
 
 4 Leg. ittovra, M, B, D, E, F, G. 
 
 * iv. 1 8. The dark warning of iv. 6 is lost in the E. V., because, though it would 
 be but too intelligible to Pagan converts, St. Paul veils it under the delicate euphemisms, 
 the konesta aposiopesis, familiar to his sensitive refinement (cf. 1 Cor. v. 1, 2; 2 Cor. vii. 11, 
 &c. ; Eph. v. 3, 12). At any rate, the Greek commentators, who would here be most 
 likely to see bis meaning, take him to mean not only adultery, but yet deeper abysses of 
 wickedness. It cannot be "business," which would be TOIS jrpayjuacriK. (See Dollinger, 
 Judcnth. . Heidentk.) 
 
 ' This sort of irapaAt<Jus (or praeteritio), noticed here by Theophylact, is a rhetorical 
 
 figure characteristic of St. Paul's kindliness (see v. 1 ; 2 Cor. ix. 1 ; Philem. 19). But the 
 
 phrase also implies that it is easier to teach Christian virtue than to.eradicate habitual vice. 
 
 7 One of St. Paul's happy turns of expression (oxymoron, Bom. xii. 11 ; cf. Isa. xxx. 7).
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS, 
 
 their own hands, 1 and not to meddle with others, and not to rely on the 
 assistance of others, but to present to the outer world a spectacle of honour- 
 able and active independence (vs. 11, 12). 
 
 And now, by these moral exhortations, by thus recalling them from over- 
 eschatological excitement to the quiet fulfilment of the personal' duties which 
 lay nearest at haud, he has prepared the way for the removal of a serious 
 doubt which had troubled some of them. Since he loft them there had been 
 deaths in the littlo community, and these deaths had been regarded by some 
 of the survivors with a peculiar despondency. They had been taught again 
 and again to hope for, to look unto, the coming of Christ. That blessed 
 Presence was to be for them the solution of all perplexities, the righting 
 of all wrongs, the consolation for all sufferings. What the hopes of the 
 birth of the Messiah had been to the Jew, that the hope of His return with 
 all His saints was to the early Christian. And it was natural that such a 
 topic should be prominent in the addresses to a church which, from its very 
 foundation, had been, and for years continued to be, peculiarly afflicted. 2 
 *"*WTiat, then, was to be said about those who had died, and therefore had not 
 t,een the promise of Christ's coming ? What could be said of those whose 
 life had ended like the common life of men no wrongs righted, no miseries 
 consoled? Had not they been beguiled of their promise, disappointed in 
 their hope, deceived, even, as to the event on which they had fixed their 
 faith ? And if they, why not others ? If the dead were thus frustrated in 
 their expectation, why might not the living be ? St. Paul has already given 
 them the advice which would prevent them from brooding too much on that 
 one uncertain moment of Christ's coming. He has bidden them be pure, and 
 loving, and diligent, and live their daily lives in simple honour and faithful- 
 ness. He would have eminently approved the quiet good sense of that 
 president of the Puritan assembly, who, when a dense darkness came on, 
 and some one proposed that they should adjourn because it might be the 
 beginning of the Day of Judgment, proposed rather that caudles should be 
 lighted, because if it was to be the Day of Judgment, they could not be found 
 better employed than in the quiet transaction of duty. But Paul does not 
 leave his converts in their perplexity about their departed friends. He tells 
 them, in words which have comforted millions of mourners since, not to sor- 
 row as those that have no hope, 3 for that " if we believe that Jesus died and 
 
 I This shows that the Thessalonian converts were mainly artisan*. 
 
 II 2 Cor. vii. 5. 
 
 3 That the Gentiles were at this time, as a rule, despondent in their views of death, 
 in spite of dim hopes and splendid guesses, is certain. " Mortuus nee ad DCOB, nee ad 
 homines acceptus est" (Corp. Inscr. i. 118; Boissier, La Rd. Rom, L 304, teq.). See, 
 for the more ancient Greek view, Jisch. Eumen. 648, &o. The shade of Achilles says to 
 Ulysses in Hades : 
 
 " ' Talk not of reigning In this dolorous gloom, 
 
 JJor think vain words/ he cried, ' can ease my doom ; 
 
 Better by fax laboriously to bear 
 
 A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air 
 
 Slave to the meanest hiud that begs his bread. 
 
 Than reign the sceytred monarch of the deafl..
 
 336 THS LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PAUL, 
 
 rose again, even so them also which had been laid asleep by Jesus will God 
 bring with Him." 1 He even enters into details. He tells them " by the word 
 of the Lord " 2 that death would practically make no difference whatever be- 
 tween the living and the dead, for that in the tremendous " MOW " of the Day 
 of Judgment 3 the Lord Himself should descend from heaven with a cry of 
 summons, with the voice of the archangel, 1 and with the trump of God, 3 and 
 that then the dead in Christ should rise first, and we who are alive and 
 remain 6 be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and so be for ever with 
 Him. " "Wherefore," he says, " comfort one another with these words." 7 
 
 But when should this beP after what period, at what critical moment P 3 
 That was a question which he need not answer, because they themselves knew 
 precisely 9 the only answer which could be given, which was that the day of 
 the Lord should come as a thief in the night, overwhelming those that chose 
 darkness with sudden destruction. But they were not of the darkness, 
 but children of light ; so that, however suddenly it came, that day could 
 not find them unprepared. 10 For which purpose let them be sober and 
 vigilant, like soldiers, armed with faith and love for a breastplate, and the 
 hope of salvation for a helmet ; u since God had not appointed them for wrath, 
 but to obtain salvation through Him who had died in order that they, whether 
 in life or in death, might live with Him for ever. 13 The Thessalonians are 
 bidden to continue edifying and comforting one another with these words. 
 Did none of them ask, " But what will become of the Jews P of the heathen ? 
 of the sinners and backsliders among ourselves ? " Possibly they did. But 
 here, and in the Romans, and in the Corinthians, St. Paul either did not 
 anticipate such questions, or refused to answer them. Perhaps he had heard 
 the admirable Hebrew apophthegm, "Learn to say, ' I do not know.' " This 
 at least is certain, that with him the idea of the resurrection is so closely 
 connected with that of faith, and hope, and moral regeneration, that when he 
 speaks of it he will speak of it mainly, indeed all but exclusively, in con- 
 nexion with the resurrection of the saints. 13 
 
 <"> y/jjj .h;'JiU.,j.rj;T> Jo ^Jj(j .-,ilj ftii 01 *Jt'\i it ij (j'PKVaf .!H 
 
 I iv. 14. If the Sia rov 'Iriirov be taken with Koi/oDjfleWo*, "laid asleep by Jesus." Cf, 
 Acts iiL 16 ; Rom. i. 8 ; v. 11 ; 2 Cor. i. 5, &c. 
 
 3 " Quasi Eo ipso loquente " (Beza). As this can hardly be referred to Matt. xxiv. 31, 
 and must be compared with the Hebrew phrase (1 Kings xx. 35, &c.), wo can only under- 
 stand it either of a traditional utterance of Christ or a special revelation to the Apostle. 
 Ewald, however, sayi (Sendschr. 48), "Aus Christusworten die ihuen gewisa auoh 
 schriftlich vorlagen." 
 
 3 Luther. 4 Archangel only here and iu Jud. 9. 
 
 4 The imagery is borrowed from Ex. xix. 16. 
 ' These words will be explained infra. 
 
 ^ iv. 1318. These verses furnish one leading nwtwe of the Epistle. 
 
 * V. 1, irepl U luv Xp6v<av (toi rwcKaipuv. ' V. 2, ixpi/Sij. 
 
 10 v. 4, A, B, read uX^raf, which would bs a slight change of metaphor. " Weil dei 
 Dieb nur in und mit der Nacht kommt, vom Tage aber uberrascht wird " (Ewald). Cf . 
 Matt. xxiv. 87 ; Rom. xiii. 11 14. 
 
 II The germ of the powerful and beautiful figure of the Christian's panoply which ia 
 elaborated in Eph. vi. IS 17 ; Rom. xiii. 12. (Cf. AVisd. v. IS : Baruch. r. 12.) 
 
 * v. 111. 
 
 " Pfleiderer, 1. 275 ; Rom, vl. 23 ; 1 Cor. xv. 22, 4c. See lieuss, Thcol Chret. ii. 214.
 
 337 
 
 To the thoughts suggested by St. Paul's treatment of this weighty topic 
 we shall revert immediately. He ends the Epistle with moral exhortations 
 all, doubtless, suggested by the needs of the Church of extraordinary fresh- 
 ness, force, and beauty. There wore traces of insubordination among them, 
 and he bids them duly respect and love, for their work'* sake, the spiritual 
 labourers and leaders of their gommunity, 1 and to be at peace among them- 
 selves. He further tells them perhaps in these last verses especially 
 addressing the presbyters to warn those unruly brethren who would not obey. 
 There was despondency at work among them, and he bids them " comfort the 
 feeble-minded, take the weak by the hand, be patient towards all men." They 
 ^ere to avoid all retaliations, and seek after all kindness 2 (vers. 12 15). Then 
 follow little arrow-flights of inestimably precious exhortation. Waa depression 
 stealing into their hearts P Let them meet it by remembering that God's 
 will for them in Christ Jesus was perpetual joy, unceasing prayer, universal 
 thanksgiving. Had there been any collisions of practice, and differences of 
 opinion, among the excited enthusiasts whose absorption in the expected return 
 of Christ left them neither energy nor wish to do their daily duties, while it 
 made them also set very little store by the calmer utterances of moral 
 exhortation P Then, besides the exhortation to peace, and the noble general 
 rule to avoid every kind of evil, 8 he warns them that they should neither 
 quench the Spirit nor despise prophesyings that is, naither to stifle an 
 impassioned inspiration nor to undervalue a calm address 4 but to test all 
 that was said to them, and hold fast what was good.* 
 
 Then, once more, with the affirmation that God's faithfulness would grant 
 the prayer, he prays that God would sanctify them wholly, and preserve their 
 bodies, their wills and affections, their inmost souls, 6 blamelessly till that 
 coming of the Lord to which he has so often alluded. He asks their prayers 
 for himself ; bids them salute all the brethren with a holy kiss ; r adjures 
 them by the Lord 8 that his letter be read to the entire community ; and so 
 
 1 These vague terms seem to show that ilia ecclesiastical organisation of the Church 
 was as yet very flexible. 
 
 2 v. 15, contrast this with Soph. Philoct. 679. 
 
 3 Not " every appearance of evil " (E. V.), grand a such an exhortation undoubtedly 
 U. It may perhaps be " from every evil appearance," everything which has an ill look : 
 possibly it refers to bad yV>? of spiritual teaching, 
 
 < 1 Cor. xiv. 39. 
 
 * Vers. 1621. What they needed was the *tpi!n wvivntrav (1 Cor. xil. 10 ; Hsb. 
 v, 14), and to be 66*11*01 TpairfiTai. 
 
 6 v. 23, <ri)ia, "body;" ^x^ the entire human life and faculties; <rvvM=, the divinely 
 imbreathed spirit, the highest region ef life. 4A.oTAIs, oXoicAipot (James L 4). (Trench. 
 Synon, p. 70.) 
 
 7 The TOVS oSeA^ois n-airas must mean " one another, '' as in Eom. ivi. 16; 1 Cor. ivi, 
 20; 2 Cor. xiii. 12; 1 Pet. v. 14, unless these few concludicg lines are addressed specially 
 to the elders. On the "kiss of charity" an Oriental custom soe Bingham, Antiq. iii 
 3, 3 ; Hooker, Prcf. iv. 4. 
 
 8 The very strong adjuration may have been rendared necessary by som* of the 
 differences between the converts and the leading members of the community, at which 
 the Apostle hints in v. 1215. Some influential persons, to vrhorn th letter was first 
 handed, might be inclined to suppress any parts of it with which they disagreed, or which 
 seemed to condemn their views or conduct, Timothy may have brought the news that 
 
 12*
 
 338 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 concludes with his usual ending, " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be 
 with you. Amen." l These last three verses were probably written in his 
 own hand. 
 
 It may easily be imagined with what rapture the arrival of such a letter 
 would be hailed by a yoxing, persecuted, and perplexed community ; how 
 many griefs it would console ; how many doubts it would resolve ; how much 
 joy, and hope, and fresh enthusiasm it would inspire. It could not but have 
 been delightful in any case to be comforted amid the storm of outward 
 opposition, and to be inspirited amid the misgivings of inward faithlessness, 
 by the words of the beloved teacher whose gospel had changed the whole 
 current of their lives. It was much to feel that, though absent from them in 
 person, he was present with them in heart, 2 praying for them, yearning over 
 them, himself cheered by the tidings of their constancy ; but it was even more 
 to receive words which would tend to heal the incipient disagreements of that 
 small and loving, but inexperienced, and as yet but half-organised community, 
 and to hear the divinely authoritative teaching which silenced their worst fears. 
 And further than this, if the words of St. Paul shine so brightly to us through 
 the indurated dust of our long familiarity, how must they have sparkled for 
 them in their fresh originality, and with heaven's own light shining on those 
 oracular gems ! " Having received the word in much affliction with joy of 
 the Holy Ghost ; " * that was no mere artificial oxymoron, but an utterance 
 which came from a new world, of which they were the happy lords. " Jesus 
 which delivereth us from the coming wrath ; " * " God who called you unto 
 His kingdom and glory ; " * " This is the will of God, even your sanctifica- 
 tion ; " ' " So shall we ever bo with the Lord ;" T " Ye are all the children of the 
 light and the children of the day ; " 8 " See that none render evil for evil unto 
 any ;" ' " Rejoice evermore." 10 What illimitable hopes, what holy obligations, 
 what golden promises, what glorious responsibilities, what lofty ideals, what 
 
 gome previous letter of the Apostle to this, or other churches, had not properly been 
 made known. How easily such an interference was possible we see from 3 John 9, "I 
 wrote to the Church, but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the pre-eminence among them, 
 receiveth us not " (see Ewald, Sendschr, p. 51). Dionysius of Corinth deplores the falsi- 
 fication of his own letters (Euseb. H. E. iv. 23). St. Paul generally asked for a prayer 
 himself towards the close of a letter (Eph. vi. 19 ; Col. iv. 3 ; 2 Thess. iii. 1). 
 
 1 This yvwpicTfi* or badge of cognisance is found, with slight variations, at the close of 
 all St. Paul's Epistles. Thus : 
 
 (a.) In 1 Thess. v. 28 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 23 we have, " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 be with you," to which the word "all" is added in 2 Thess. iii. 18; Horn. xvi. 24 ; 
 PhiL iv. 23. 
 
 03) In Philem. 25 ; Gal. vi. 18 we have, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with 
 your spirit " (" brethren," Gal.). 
 
 (y) In Col. iv. 18 ; 1 Tim. vi. 21 ; 2 Tim. iv. 22 we have the shortest form, " Grace 
 be with you " (thee), to which Titus iii. 15 adds " all. " 
 
 (8) In Eph. vi. 24 we have the variation, " Grace be with all them that love the Lord 
 Jesus Christ in sincerity," and in 2 Cor. xiii. 14 alone the full " Apostolic benediction.'' 
 
 The subscriptions added to the Epistles at a much later period are mostly valueless 
 (see Paley, Horae Paulinae, chap. xv.). 
 
 8 1 Thess. ii. 17. 
 
 i. 6. M. 10. 1i:ll : IT. 3. 
 
 * iv. 17. . 5. . 1&, K> r. 16.
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS. 339 
 
 reaches of morality beyond any which their greatest writers had attained, 
 what strange renovation of the whole spirit and meaning of life, lay hidden 
 for them in those simple words ! 1 The brief Epistle brought home to them 
 the glad truth that they could use, for their daily wear, that glory of thought 
 which had only been attained by the fewest and greatest spirits of their 
 nation at their rarest moments of inspiration ; and therewith that grandeur of 
 life which, in its perfect innocence towards God and man, was even to these 
 unknown. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that in this Epistle St. Paul alludes no less than 
 four times to the coming of Christ, 2 and uses, to describe it, the word parousia 
 " presence " which also occurs in this sense in the second Epistle, 3 but 
 in only one other passage of all his other Epistles. 4 Whether, after the 
 erroneous conclusions which the Thessaloiiians drew from this letter, and the 
 injurious effects which this incessant prominence of eschatology produced in 
 their characters, he subsequently made it a less salient feature of his own 
 teaching, we cannot tell. Certain, however, it is that the misinterpretation of 
 his first letter, and the reprehensible excitement and restlessness which that 
 misinterpretation produced, 6 necessitated the writing of a second very shortly 
 after he had received tidings of these results. 6 It is equally certain that, from 
 this time forward, the visible personal return of Christ and the nearness of 
 the end, which are the predominant topics in the First Epistle to the Thessa- 
 lonians, sink into a far more subordinate topic of reference ; and that, 
 although St. Paul's language in the letter was misunderstood, yet the mis- 
 understanding was not a wilful but a perfectly natural one ; and that in his 
 later letters he anticipates his own death, rather than the second Advent, as 
 his mode of meeting Christ. The divine and steady light of history first 
 made clear to the Church that our Lord's prophetic warnings as to His 
 return applied primarily to the close of the Jewish dispensation, and the 
 winding up of all the past, and the inauguration of the last great aeon of 
 God's dealings with mankind. 
 
 1 Baur (Paul, ii.), Kein(Tiib. Zeitschr. 1839), Van der Vaier (Lie beiden Brief en aan 
 de Thessal.), De Wette (Einleit.), Volkmar, Zeller, &c., and the Tubingen school 
 generally, except Hilgenfeld (Die Thessalonicherbnefe), reject both Epistles to the Thes- 
 salonians as ungenuine, and Baur calls the First Epistle a " mattes Nachwerk." I have 
 carefully studied their arguments, but they seem to me so slight as to be scarcely 
 deserving of serious refutation. The difficulties which would be created by rejecting 
 these Epistles are ten times as formidable as any which they suggest. If an unbiassed 
 scholar, familiar with the subject, cannot fed the heart of St. Paul throbbing through 
 every sentence of these Epistles, it is hardly likely that argument will convince him. 
 External evidence (Iron. Haer. v. 6, 1 ; Clem. Alex. Paedag. L, p. 109, ed. Potter ; Tert. 
 De Resurrect. Carnis, cap. 24), though sufficiently strong, is scarcely even required, ^ot 
 only Bunsen, Ewald, &c., but even Hilgenfeld (I.e.), Holtzmann (Thessalon. in Schenkel, 
 Bibel-lexikon), Pfleiderer (Paulinism, 29), Hausrath, Weisse, Schmidt, &., accept the first. 
 
 2 ii. 19 ; iii. 13 ; iv. 15 ; v. 23. 2 Thess. ii. 1, 8. * 1 Cor. xv. 23 
 
 6 We find in St. Paul's own words abundant proof that his teaching was distorted 
 and slandered, and St. Peter gives us direct positive assurance that such was the case 
 (2 Pet. iii. 16). . _ 
 
 4 Tradition should have some weight, and rpos er<r<tAovii P is the reading of A, B, 
 D, E, F, G. The internal evidences also, to some of which I have called attention, 
 feem to me decisive.
 
 340 THE LIFE AND WOBK Or ST. PAUL. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAN8. 
 " Ai yap raiira ycvcVdct wpG~ov, iAA" eux f vQiios ro WXos. LUJCX xzi. 9. 
 
 MANY months could not have elapsed before the Apostle heard that the 
 Thcssalonians, with all their merits and virtues, were still, and even more 
 than previously, hindered in moral growth by esehatological enthusiasms. 
 When he wrote to them before, they were tempted to despond about the death 
 of friends, whom they supposed likely ta be thus deprived of part at least of 
 the precious hopes which were their main, almost their sole, support in the 
 fiery furnace of affliction. The Apostle's clear assurance seems to have 
 removed all anxiety on this jtppic, but now they regarded the immediate coming 
 of Christ as a thing so certain that some of them were tempted to neglect his 
 exhortations, and to spend their lives in aimless religious excitement. 1 St. 
 Paul felt how fatal would be such a temperament to all Christian progress, 
 and the main object of his second letter was to control into calm, and shame 
 into diligence, the gossiping enthusiasm which fatally tended towards irregu- 
 larity and sloth. They were not to desert the hard road of the present for the 
 mirage which seemed to bring so close to them the green Edens of the future ; 
 they were not to sacrifice the sacreduess of immediate duty for the dreamy 
 sweetness of unrealised expectations. The Advent of Christ might be near 
 at hand ; but it was not so instant as they had been led to imagine from an 
 erroneous view of what he had said, and by mistaken reports possibly 
 even by written forgeries which ascribed to him words which he had 
 never used, and opinions which he had never held. 
 
 The expression on which the Apocalyptic fanaticism of the less sensible 
 Theesalonians seems to have fastened was that which occurs in 1 Thess. iv. 
 15 " WE. which are alive and remain to tfoe presence of the Lord, sliall 
 certainly not anticipate those that have fallen asleep." It was not unnatural 
 that they should interpret this to mean that their teacher himself exjpected to 
 survive until the Epiphany of their Lord's presence. 2 If so, it must be very 
 close at hand; and again, if so, of what use were the petty details of daily 
 routine, the petty energies of daily effort ? Was it not enough to keep them- 
 selves alive anyhow until tho dawn of that near day, or the shadows of that 
 rapidly approaching night, which might be any day or any night, on which all 
 earthly interests should be dissipated for ever as soon as the voice of God and 
 the trumpet of the dead should sound P 
 
 Now, we ask, had this been tho real tssaning of the words of St. Paul P 
 
 1 The reader will be struck with the close analogy of this temptation to that which 
 did BO much mischief among the Anabaptiati and other sects in the days of the Reforma- 
 tion. The Thes&alonian Church may have had its Carls tadts whom St. Paul felt ifc 
 necessary to warn, just as Luther fought, with all the force of big manly sense, against 
 the crudities of the religious errors which had derived their impulse from a perversion of 
 bis own teaching. 
 
 * 'JL.T^'. i; J;L Tip
 
 THI SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THES8ALONU.NS 341 
 
 The question has been voluminously and angrily debated. It lias tnen made, 
 in fact (and very needlessly), the battle-ground as to the question of verbal 
 inspiration. Some have tried to maintain the desperate and scarcely honest 
 position that neither St. Paul nor the Apostles generally had aiiy expectation 
 of the near visible advent of Christ ; others that they were absolutely 
 convinced that it would take place in their own generation, and even in their 
 own lifetime. 
 
 Not in the interests of controversy, but in those of truth, 1 will endeavour 
 to prove that neither of these extreme theses can be maintained. If the view 
 of the Thessalonians had been absolutely groundless, it woiild have been easy 
 for St. Paul to eay to them, as modern commentators have said for him, 
 " You mistook my general expression for a specific and individual one. When 
 I said ' tc which are alive and remain ' at the presence of Christ, I did not 
 mean either myself, or you, in particular, but merely ' the living ' the class 
 to which we at present belong as opposed to the dead, about whose case I 
 was speaking to you. 1 You are mistaken in supposing that I meant to imply 
 a conviction that before my own death the Lord would reappear." Now, he doea 
 not say this at all ; * he only tells them not to be drifted from their moorings, 
 not, as he expresses it, to be tossed from their sound sense 3 by the supposition 
 tliat he had spoken of the actual instancy 4 of the day of the Lord. He tells 
 them plainly that certain events must occur before that day came ; and these 
 as certainly are events which precluded all possibility of the Second Advent 
 taking place for them to-morrow or the next day. But, on the other hand, he 
 does not tell them that the day of the Lord was not near (^rx^). If he had 
 done BO he would have robbed of their meaning the exhortations which had 
 formed the staple of his preaching at Thessalonica, as they constituted the 
 only prominent doctrinal statement of his First Epistle. 5 If we are to judge 
 of St. Paul's views by his own language, and not by the preconceptions of 
 scholasticism, wo can divine what would have been his answer to the plain 
 question, " Do yon personally expect to live till the return of Christ ? " At 
 this period of his life his answer would have been, " I cannot speak positively 
 on the matter. I see clearly that, before His return, certain things must take 
 place ; but, on the whole, I do expect it," But at a later period of his life he 
 would have said in substance, " It may bs so ; I cannot tell. On the whole, 
 however, I no longer hope to survive till that day ; nor does it seem to me of 
 any importance whether I do or not. At that day the quick will have no 
 advantage over the dead. What I now look forward to, what I sometimes even 
 yearn for, is my own death. I know that when I die I shall be with Christ, 
 
 1 1 These. IT. 15. ^tit . . . irepl Jovrov frpiv aXXi rvin rumO* Wyt (Chrys.). 
 
 3 It is never his method to explain away hii views because they have been perverted, 
 but merely to bring them out in their full and proper meaning. 
 
 * fiSj Tox<fws ffoAfvfl^ai iir'o ToO vote (2 ThftSS. li. 2). 4 ivift^Ktv. 
 
 6 At Baur rightly observes (Paulut, ii. 94) : but to assume that thereiore the EpistU 
 cannot be St. raul is to the last degree uncritical. Moreover, though there are no 
 other "dogmatic ideas" brought forward with very ipeeial prominence, there we 
 " dogmatic ideas " Attuned in ever; ilm>.
 
 342 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 and it is for that pathway into His presence that I am now watching. In the 
 earlier years of my conversion we all anticipated a speedier development of 
 Antichrist, a speedier removal of the restraining power, a speedier brightening 
 of the clouds about the flaming feet of our Saviour. That for which I now 
 look is far more the spiritual union with my Lord than His visible manifesta- 
 tion. It may be, too, that He cometh in many ways. If we ever mistook the 
 nearer for the farther horizons of His prophecy, it is but a part of that 
 ignorance which, as He Himself warned us, should, as regards the details of 
 this subject, be absolute and final. For said He not when He was yet with 
 us, ' Of that day and that hour knoweth no man ; no, not the angels which 
 are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father ' ? But whether He come so 
 soon as we have expected, or not, yet in one form or another assuredly now 
 and ever ' the Lord is at hand ; ' and the lesson of His coming is that which 
 He also taught us, and which we have taught from Him ' Take ye heed, 
 watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is.' " 
 
 That these were tho views of St. Paul and of other Apostles on " the crises 
 and the periods" respecting which, if they ventured to hold any definite 
 opinion at all, they could not but, according to their Lord's own warning, be 
 liable to be mistaken, will, I think, be evident to all who will candidly weigh 
 and compare with themselves the passages to which I here refer. 1 
 
 Now BO far as the fall of Jerusalem and the passing of doom upon 
 the Jewish race was " a day of the Lord," so far even the most literal accep- 
 tation of their words is in close accordance >viik the actual results. Nor 
 should this remarkable coincidence be overlooked. On December 19th, A.D. 69, 
 the Capitoline Temple was burnt down in the war between Vitellius and Ves- 
 pasian, which Tacitus calls the saddest and most shameful blow, and a sign of 
 the anger of the gods. On August 10, A.D. 70, a Roman soldier flung a 
 brand within the Temple of Jerusalem. " Thus," says Dolliuger, 2 " within a 
 few months the national sanctuary of Rome and the Temple of God, the two 
 most important places of worship in the old world, owed their destruction 
 to Roman soldiers thoughtless instruments of the decrees and -judgment of 
 a higher power. Ground was to bo cleared for the worship of God in spirit 
 and in truth. The heirs of the two temples, the Capitoline and the Jewish a 
 handful of artisans, beggars, slaves, and women were dwelling at the time 
 in some of the obscure lanes and alleys of Rome ; and only two years before. 
 
 ^Allusions to a near Advent, 1 Thess. i. 9, 10, "ye turned to God .... to wait 
 for His Son from heaven ; " 1 Cor. i. 7, " To wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus " 
 (cf. 2 Theus. iii. 5) ; 1 Cor. xv. 51, " We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed " 
 (cf. 1 Thess. iv. 15 17) ; James v. 8, 9, "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh . . . The 
 judge standeth before the door ; " 1 Pet. iv. 7, " The end of all things is at hand ; " 
 1 John ii. 18, " Even now are there many antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last 
 time ; " Rev. xxii. 20, " Surely I come quickly." On the sayings of our Lord, on which 
 the expectation was perhaps founded (Matt. xxiv. 29, SO, 34), see my Life of Christ, ii. 
 257, sq. On the other hand, if St. Paul contemplated the possibility of being alive at 
 the Day of the Lord, he also was aware that though near, it would not be immediate 
 (2 Cor. iv. 14 ; 2 Thess. ii. ; Horn. xi. 24 27), and at a later period looked forward to 
 hi* own death (Phil. i. 2023). 
 8 Judenth. u. Heidenth. ix. ad. f.
 
 THE SECOND 3SPISTLK TO THE THESSALONLA.N3. 343 
 
 when they had first drawn public attention to themselves, a number of them 
 wore sentenced to be burnt alive in the imperial gardens, and others to be 
 torn in pieces by wild beasts." 
 
 We may, then, say briefly that the object of the Second Epistle to the 
 Thessaloniang was partly to assure them that, though St. Paul believed the 
 day of the Lord to be near though he did not at all exclude the possibility 
 of their living to witness it yet it was not so instantaneous as in the least to 
 justify a disruption of the ordinary duties of life. 1 He had as little meant 
 positively to assert that he would survive to the Advent when he said "tee 
 that are alive," than he meant positively to assert that he should die before it 
 occurred, when, years afterwards, he wrote, " He which raised up the Lord 
 Jesus sliall raise up us also by Jesus." 2 That the " we " in these instances 
 was generic is obvious from the fact that he uses it of the dead and of the 
 living in the same Epistle, saying in one place, " We shall not all sleep,"* and 
 in another, " God will also raise up u$ by His own power." * 
 
 On the nearness of the final Messianic Advent, the Jewish and the Christian 
 world were at one ; and even the Heathen were in a state of restless anticipa- 
 tion. The trials of the Apostle had naturally led him to dwll on this topic 
 both in his preaching at Thessalonica, and in his earlier Epistle. His Second 
 Epistle follows the general outlines of the First, which indeed formed a 
 model for all the others. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which 
 the Epistles combine a singular uniformity of method with a rich exuberance 
 of detail* In this respect they are the reflex of a life infinitely varied in its 
 adventures, yet swayed by one simple and supremely dominant idea. Except 
 when special circumstances, as in the Epistles to Ihe Corinthians, modify his 
 ordinary plan, his letters consist, as a rule, of six parts, viz. : i. a solemn 
 salutation ; ii. an expression of thankfulness to God for His work among those 
 to whom he is writing ; iii. a section devoted to religious doctrine ; iv. a section 
 
 CV !i -^ 
 
 1 The dread of some imminent world- catastrophe, preluded by prodigies, was at thi 
 time universal (Tac. Ann. vi. 28 ; xii. 43, 64 ; xiv. 12, 22 ; xv. 22 ; Hist. i. 3 ; Suet. 
 Nero, 36, 39; Dion Cass. Ix. 35; Ixi. 1618, &c.). Hausrath, N. Zeitgtsch. ii. 108. 
 Kenan L'Antechritt, p. 35 : " On ne parlait que de prodiges et de malheurs." 
 
 J 2 Cor. iv. 14. 3 1 Cor. xv. 51, on the reading, v. infra, p. 399. 
 
 4 1 Cor. vi. 14. Here, as in so many cases, a passage of the Talmud throws most 
 valuable light on the opinions of St. Paul, which, on such a subject where all special 
 illumination was deliberately withdrawn were inevitably coloured by the tone of opinion 
 prevalent in his own nation : " ' When will Messiah come ?' asked R. Joshua Ben Laive 
 of Elijah the Tishbite. ' Go and ask Himself.' ' Where is He ? ' 'At the gateway of 
 Rome. ' ' How shall I know Him ? ' 'He sits among the diseased poor.' (Rashi quotes 
 Isa. liii. 5.) ' All the others change the bandages of their sores simultaneously, but Hd 
 change* them successively, lest, if called, His coming should be delayed.' R. Joshua 
 Ben Laive went to Him, and saluted Him with the words ' Peace be to thee, my Rabbi, 
 my teacher.' 'Peace be unto thee, Son of Laive,' was the answer of Messiah. 'When 
 will the Master come ? ' asked the Rabbi. ' TO-DAY,' was the answer. By the time the 
 Rabbi had finished telling the story to Elijah, the sun had set. ' How? said the Rabbi ; 
 ' He has not come ! Has H lied unto me ? ' 'No,' said Elijah. ' He meant " To-DAY, IT 
 YE WILL HMA His YOic* " ' (Ps. xcv. 7)." (Sanhedrin, f . 98, 1.) This involves the same 
 truth as the famous remark of St. Augustine, " Ergo latet ultimas dies, ut observentur 
 oiimei dies," which was also said by R. Eliczor. 
 
 See Reuse, TMol. Chret. ii. 11.
 
 344 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 devoted to practical exhortation ; v. a section composed of personal details 
 and greetings ; and, vi. the final autograph benediction which served to mark 
 the authenticity of the Epistle. We have already noticed that this is the 
 general structure of the First Epistle, and it will be observed no less in the 
 subjoined outline of the Second. 1 
 
 After the greeting, in which, as in the last Epistle,, he associates Silas and 
 Timothy with himself,* he thanks God once more for the exceeding increase* 
 of their faith, and the abounding love which united them with one another, 
 which enabled him as well as others * to hold them up in the Churches of God 6 
 as a model of faith and patience, and that, too, under special tribulations. 
 Those tribulations, he tells them, are an evidence that the present state of 
 things cannot be final ; that a time is coming when their persecutors will be 
 punished, and themselves have relaxation from endurance 6 which time will 
 be at the Epiphany, in Sinaitic splendour, 7 of the Lord Jesus with His mighty 
 angels, to inflict retribution on the Gentile ignorance which will not know 
 God, and the disobedient obstinacy which rejects the Gospel. That retribu- 
 tion shall be eternal* cutting off from the presence and glorious power of 
 Christ e when He shall come to be glorified in His saints and to be wondered 
 
 1 i. The greeting, 2 Thesa. i. 1, 2. li The thanksgiving, or Eushariitie section, 
 mingled with topics of consolation derived from the coming of Christ, i. 3 12. 
 iii. The dogmatic portion, which, in this instance, is the remarkable and indeed unique 
 section about the Man of Sin, ii. 1 12 ; the thanksgiving renewed with exhortations 
 and ending in a prayer, ii. 1317. iv. The practical part, consisting of a request for 
 their prayers (iii. 1 5). v. Exhortations, and messages, also ended by a prayer, iii. 616. 
 vi. The autograph conclusion and benediction, iii. 17, 18. These divisions, however, an 
 not rigid and formal ; one section flows naturally into another, with no marked separa- 
 tion. Each of the prayers (ii. 16 ; iii. 1C) begins with the same words, Avrtt 6 Kv'pip?. 
 
 2 This accurately marks the date of the letter, as having been written at Corinth 
 shortly after the former. Silas ceases to be a fellow- worker with Paul, and apparently 
 loins Peter, after the visit to Jerusalem at the close of the two years' sojourn at Corinth. 
 It is probable that the mental and religious affinities of Silas were more closely in accor- 
 dance with the old Apostles who had sent him to Antioch than with St. Paul. 
 
 a vrr.-pavfayci, It is a part of St. Paul's emphatic style that he delights in compounds 
 of i"fep, a* virtpax^, vrrspXfav, virepjSaXAw, vrreptxvtpitrffov, &C, 
 
 4 2 Thess, i. 4, nitis avrovt. 
 
 6 This is a strong argument against Ewald's view that the Epistle was written from 
 Ecvoea ; but it does not prove, as Chrysostom says, that a considerable time must have 
 elapsed. Writing from Corinth, there were Churches both in Macedonia and Achaia to 
 which St. Paul alludes. There can be little doubt that the Epistle was written late in 
 A.D. 53 or early in A.D. 54. 
 
 fi ivi<TiV- 
 
 1 Ei. iii. 2 ; rfx. 18 j ndv. 17 J 2 Chr. vil. 1, &c. *, A, K, L, have m> P \ <Aoyfc. The 
 eomma should be after jfre.not, as in E.V., after " angels." 
 
 8 i. 9. It is clear that ijrb here means "separation from," not " immediately after," 
 or " by." Thia is the only passage in all St. Paul's Epistles where his eschatology even 
 seems to touch on the future of the impenitent. When Chrysostom triumphantly asks, 
 "Where, then, are the Origenists? He calls the destruction alwtov ;" his own remarks 
 in other places show that he could hardly have been unaware that this rhetoric of 
 ' ueconomy " might sound convincing to the ignorant and the superficial, but had no bearing 
 whatever on the serious views of Origen. Observe, i. JiSoyai txSwojo-tj' (cf. 2 Sam. xxii. 
 48, LXX.) does not mean "take vengeance." ii. The fire is not penal fire, but is the 
 Shechinah-glory of Advent (Dan. vii. 9; Ex. iii. 2). iii. Those spoken of are not 
 inners in general, but wilful enemies and persecutors, iv. The retribution is not 
 ' destruction," but " destruction-from-the-Preseace of the Lord,"t.e., a cutting off from
 
 THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESS1LONIA.N8. 345 
 
 at In all that "believed in Him. 1 And that they may attain to this glory, he 
 prayed that God may count them worthy of their calling, and bring to fulfil- 
 ment the goodness in which they delight, 2 and the activity of their faith, both 
 to the glory of their Lord and to their own glory, as granted by His grace. 3 
 
 Then follows the most remarkable section of the letter, and tha one for 
 the sake of which it was evidently written. He had, in his first letter, urged 
 them to calmness and diligence, but the eagerness of expectation, unwittingly 
 increased by his own words, had prevailed over his exhortations, and it was 
 now hia wish to give them further and more definite instruction on this great 
 subject. This was rendered more necessary by the fact that their hopes 
 had been fanned into vivid glow, partly by prophecies which claimed to be 
 inspired, and partly by words or letters which professed to be stamped with 
 his authority. He writes, therefore, in language of which I have attempted 
 to preserve something of the obvious mystery and reticence. 4 
 
 we beseech you, brethren, touching* the presence of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ and our gathering 6 to meet Him, that ye be not quickly tossed from your 
 state of mind,' nor even be troubled either by spirit, 8 or l>y word, or by letter pur- 
 porting to come from us,' as though the day of the Lord is here. 10 Let no one deceive 
 you in any way, because u unless the apostasy 1S come first, and the man of sin 
 
 Beatific Vision, v. The " tfonian exclusion " of this passage takes place at Christ's First 
 Advent, not at the final Judgment Day. 
 
 1 They will inspire wonder, because they will in that day reflect His brightness. 
 
 2 i. 11, irXTi/jwcTjtvSoiciov <xyu<rx7)9. Not as in E.V., " fulfil all the good pleasure of 
 hit goodness, but "honestatis dulcedinem" i.e., "honestatem, qua recreemini." 
 EiJoKia, indetd, is often referred to God (Eph. i. 5, 9, &c.); but .ya<?j<rvij, used four 
 times in St. Paul, is " moral and human goodness," the classic xp>j<rron)s. It is borrowed 
 from the LXX. (See Eccl. ix. 18.) 
 
 3 2 Thess. i. 312. 
 
 4 Neither this nor any other passage which I translate apart from theE.V. is intended 
 as a specimen of desirable translation. I merely try to translate in such terms as shall 
 most easily explain themselves to the modern reader, while they reproduce as closely as 
 possible the form of the original. 
 
 s i^-p, not an adjuration in the New Testament, yet a little stronger than >repi. 
 
 6 An obvious allusion to 1 Thess. iv. 17. The substantive tvurvvaytart only occurs in 
 Rob. x. 25, but the verb in Matt, xxiii. 37 ; xxiv. 31, "as a hen gathereth her chickens 
 under her wings :> (cf. John xi. 52). 
 
 ' "Fro youre witte " (Wicl.) ; " from your sense " (Rhemish version). 
 
 8 i.e., by utterance professing to be inspired. The " discerning of spirits," or testing 
 of what utterances were, and what were not, inspired, was one of the most important 
 xapto>iTa in the early Church. 
 
 9 The commentators from Chrysostom and Theodoret downwards are almost unani- 
 mous in taking this to mean that a letter on these subjects had been forged in St. Paul's 
 name, and had increased the excitement of the Thessalonians. It seems to me that the 
 requirements of the expression are fulfilled if we make the surely more probable suppo- 
 sition that some letter had been circulated amone them perhaps anonymous, perhaps 
 with perfectly honest intentions which professed to report his exact opinions, while m 
 reality it misunderstood them. 
 
 10 This, rather than "is immediately imminent," seems to be the meaning of i v i<m,ztv 
 
 {Rom. viii. 38 ; Gal. i. 4, ic. ). T,v yip n-po^Tj-m'av viroKpiroiMyot jirAarwr rt>v Xftiv w f j S >f 
 
 s-apbvTosToCKvpi'ov (Theod.). At any rate, the word implies the closest possible proximity. 
 TJ ivt<rrur<i means "things present." (See Rom. viii. 88; 1 Cor. iii. 22). 
 
 11 He purposely suppresses the discouraging words "The Lord will not cc<me," 
 ** Certainly not " the revolt of the Jews,"
 
 346 THE LIFK AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 be revealed, 1 the son of destruction, 1 who oppoaeth, 1 and exalteth himself above and 
 against every one who is called God, 4 or is an object of worship, so that he enters 
 and seats himself in the shrine of God,* displaying himself that he is God. Do 
 you not recall that, while I was still with you, I used to tell you this ? And now 
 the restraining power you know what it is which prevents his appearing that 
 he may appear in his own due time [and not before]. For the mystery of the law- 
 lessness is already working, only he who restrains now until he be got out of the 
 way. 8 And then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus shall 
 destroy with the breath of His mouth, and shall annihilate with the Epiphany of 
 His presence ; 7 whose presence is in accordance with the energy of Satan in all 
 power, and signs, and prodigies of falsehood, and in all deceitfulness of iniquity 
 for the ruin of those who are perishing,* because they received not the love of the 
 truth that they might be saved. And, because of this, God is sending 9 them an 
 energy of error, so that they should believe the lie I0 that all may be judged who 
 believed not the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness. 11 
 
 Of this strange but unquestionably genuine passage, which is nevertheless 
 so unlike anything else in St. Paul's Epistles, I shall speak immediately. He 
 proceeds to tell them that their case, thank God, was very different from that 
 of these doomed dupes of Antichrist, seeing that God had chosen and called 
 them from the beginning 1 * to sanctification and salvation and glory. 13 He 
 exhorts them therefore, to stand fast, and hold the teaching which they had 
 received from his words and his genuine letter, and prays that our Lord Jesus 
 Christ and God our Father may comfort them and stablish them in all goodness. 1 * 
 
 1 The apocalypse of the Antichrist. 
 
 3 Whose end is destruction (Phil. iii. 19 ; John xvii. 12). 
 
 * A human Satan or adversary (Renan, p. 255). 
 
 4 vrpupoMv<K . . . JT, perhaps "exceedingly exalteth himself against." Dan. 
 xi. 86, speaking of Antiochus Epiphanes. 
 
 6 (cafliVot . . . tit. A conttruciio praegnans. (See my Brief Greek Syntax, 89). 
 Omit w$ tt&v, X, A, B, D, &c. vbv stronger than i f p6v, and could only be naturally under- 
 stood of the Jewish Temple. 
 
 * " Tantum qui nunc tenet (teneat) donee de medio fiat"(Tert. De Retur. Cam. 
 25). I have attempted to preserve the unfinished clauses (anakolutfui) of the original, 
 which are full of meaning. The 6 K*ri\ntv may, however, be merely misplaced by hyperbaton. 
 
 7 Isa. xi. 4 ; "Wisd. xi. 20, 21. A rabbinic expression. " Prima adventus ipsiua 
 emicatio " (Bengal). 
 
 8 I so render rols airoAAvn.Voi.* because it is the dative of " disadvantage." The is 
 probably spurious, being omitted in H, A, B, D, F, G. 
 
 I Leg. jr^iirei, , A, B, D, F, G. The " strong delusion " of the E.V. is a happy 
 expression ; it is penal blindness, judicial infatuation, the dementation before doom. 
 
 w 1 Tim. iv. 1, 2. 
 
 II 2 Thess. ii. 1 12. In the E.V. there are the following five or six obvious errors, 
 which I have corrected: Ver. 1, Oirep TTJS irapov<r', "by the coming;" ver. 2, in-b TOU 
 vabs, " in mind ; " tvf'irn))c, " is at hand" (which is not strong enough, and contradicts 
 1 ' Maranatha," o mipios ryyus) ; ver. 3, ^ a*-o<rro<ria, "a falling away;" ver. 4, . irdvrm., K. r. A., 
 "above all, &c.," instead of "against every one," though this is perhaps defensible 
 is e*bi', ' ' as God, " is probably spurious, not being found in >*, A, B, D ; ver. 5, Aryor, 
 "I told;" ver. 11, r<3 </evJ, "a lie;" ver. 12, Kpidixn, "be damned." There are also 
 minor inaccuracies. But while calling attention to these, let me not be supposed to speak 
 with any feeling but admiration and gratitude of our English version. It needs the re- 
 vision which it is receiving, but it is magnificent with all its defects ; and while those 
 defects are far fewer than might have been reasonably expected, there is incomparable 
 merit in its incessant felicity and noble rhythm. 
 
 " aw' ipxi* (Eph. i. 4). B, F, G have Tpx>i>', "as a firstfruit;" but this was not * 
 fat (Acts. xvi.). 
 
 13 eis rvpin-o.Vi.' aifijs, " to the obtaining of glory ;" of. 1 The**, v. 9: Heb. x. 39. 
 i 2 Thegs. ii. 1317.
 
 THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THE8S1.LONU.N8. 347 
 
 Beginning the practical section of the Epistle, he asks their prayers that 
 the Gospel may have free coarse among others as among them, and that ha 
 may be delivered from perverse and wicked men ; l and expressing his trust 
 in God, and his confidence in them, prays that the Lord may guide their 
 hearts into the love of God and the patience of Christ. 2 That patience was 
 lacking to some of them who, he had been told, were walking disorderly, not 
 following the precepts he had given, or the example he had set. The rule he had 
 given was that a man who would not work had no right to eat, and the example 
 he had set, as they well knew, had been one of order, manly self-dependence, 
 strenuous diligence, in that he had voluntarily abandoned even the plain right 
 of maintenance at their hands. 3 
 
 He therefore commands and exhorts* in the name of Christ those who 
 were irregular, and whose sole business was to be busybodies, 6 to be quiet 
 and diligent, and earn their own living ; and if, after the receipt of this letter, 
 any one refused obedience to his advice, they were to mark that man by avoid- 
 ing his company that he might be ashamed ; not, however, considering him 
 as an enemy, but admonishing him as a brother. As for the rest, let them 
 not be weary in fair-doing ; 6 and he again concludes with a prayer that the 
 Lord of Peace Himself may give them peace perpetually, and in every way. 
 The Lord be with them all ! J 
 
 And having dictated so far probably to his faithful Timothy the Apostle 
 himself takes the pen, for the use of which his weak sight so little fitted him, 
 and bending over the papyrus, writes : 
 
 " The salutation of me Paul with my own hand, which autograph salutation 
 is the proof of genuineness in every Epistle. 8 This is how I mite. The Grace 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you alL"j* 
 
 . y?-. p-fvp'.' ,.; ,. _j c _, j ^ _ TtiA Fr.fTr-' -T v 
 
 1 An allusion to his struggles with the Jews at Corinth. " Synagogas Judaeorum 
 fontes persecutionum " (Tert. Scorp, 10). aroiros only in Luke xxiii. 41, and Act*, xxviii. 6. 
 
 2 i.e., a patience like His patience. The "patient waiting for Christ," of the E.V., 
 though partially sanctioned by Chrysostom and Theophylact, can hardly be tenable, and 
 they prefer the meaning here given. 
 
 5 iii. 111. 
 
 4 These injunctions are more emphatic, authoritative, and precise than thoie of the 
 First Epistle ; another sign that this followed it. n-apayyf'AAw, o much stronger than 
 POJTU>, occurs four times in this Epistle (iii. 4, 6, 10, 12), and only elsewhere, of hia 
 Epistles, in 1 Thess. iy. 11; 1 Tim. ri. 13; 1 Cor. vii. 10; xi. 17. 
 
 5 2 Thess. iii. 11, VK <pyoo/x<><ov? iAAi irpie|>y<iofiVovs (gee infra, p. 695. " The Rhetoric 
 of St. Paul"). 
 
 Ka\oirotovr, "beautiful conduct;" not exactly iyo*o, "well-doing" (cf. 2 Cor. 
 viii. 21). 
 
 7 iii. 12-16. 
 
 8 iii. 17, 18. This emphatic autograph signature, not necessary in the first letter, 
 had been rendered necessary since that letter was written by the credence given to the 
 unauthorised communication alluded to in ii. 2. The "tvtry Epistle" shows that St. 
 Paul meant henceforth to write to Churches not unfrequently. Of course, Epistles sent 
 by accredited messengers (e.g., 2 Cor. and Phil.) would not need authentication. The 
 ordinary conclusion of letters was ppw<r8, "farewell." On this authenticating signat-.n* 
 see Cic. a.d Att. viiL 1 ; Suet. Tib. 21, 32. 
 
 9 The " all " is only found in 2 Cor., Rom., and Tit. (cf. Kph. vi. 24 and Heb. liii. 
 25), but was peculiarly impressive here, because hi* last word* have been mainly those 
 of censure.
 
 348 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Valuable to us, and to all time, a are the practical exhortations of this 
 brief Epistle, 'the distinctly* cause f qr it being written was the desire to dispel 
 delusions abont the instantaneous appearance of Christ, which prevented the 
 weak and excitable from a due performance of their duties, and so tended to 
 diminish that respect for them among the heathen which the blamelessness 
 of the early Christians was well calculated to inspire. To the Thessalonians 
 the paragraph on this subject would have had the profoundest interest. To 
 ns it is less immediately profitable; because no one has yet discovered, or ever 
 will discover, what was St. Paul's precise meaning; or, in other words, because 
 neither in bis time, nor since, have any events as yet occurred which Christians 
 have unanimously been able to regard as fulfilling the conditions which he 
 lays down. We need not, however, be distressed if this passage must be 
 ranked with the very few others in the Now Testament which must remain to 
 us in the condition of insoluble enigmas. It was most important for the 
 Thcssalonians to know that they did not need to get up every morning with 
 the awe-inspiring expectation that the sun might be darkened before it set, 
 and the air shattered by the archangelic trumpet, and all earthly interests 
 smitten into indistinguishable ruin. So far St. Paul's assurance was perfectly 
 distinct. Nor, indeed, is there any want of clearness in his language. Th 
 difficulties of the passage arise exclusively from our inability to explain it by 
 subsequent events. But these one or two obscure passages in no wise affect 
 the value of St. Paul's writings. 1 Since his one object is always edification, 
 we may be sure that subjects which are with him purely incidental, which 
 are obscurely hinted at. or only partially worked out, and to which he scarcely 
 ever afterwards recurs, are non-essential parts of the central truths, to the 
 dissemination of which he devoted his life. To the Messianic surroundings 
 of a Second personal Advent he barely again alludes. He dwells more and 
 more on the mystic oneness with Christ, less and less on His personal return. 
 He speaks repeatedly of the indwelling presence of Christ, and the believer's 
 incorporation with Him, and hardly at all of that visible meeting in the air 
 which at this epoch was most prominent in his thoughts. 8 
 
 "We may assume it as a canon of ordinary criticism that a writer intends 
 to be understood, 3 and, as a rule, so writes as to be actually understood by 
 those whom he addresses. "We have no difficulty in seeing that wliat St. Paul 
 here says to the Thessalonians ia that Christ's return, however near, was not 
 BO instantaneous as they thought, because, before it could occur, there must 
 come " the apostasy," which will find its personal and final development in the 
 apocalypse of " the man of sin " a human Satan who thrust himself into the 
 temple of God and into rivalry with Him. Then, with an air of mystery and 
 secrecy which reminds ns of the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of St. 
 
 See Reuss, Thtel. Chrit. ii., p. 10. 
 
 * 1 Cor. viii. 6; Gal. iii. 28: Eph. Iv. 8, &c. 
 
 . . . . . . , . 
 
 ^ "No man write* unintelligibly on purpose" (Paly, HOT. Pairfinae). He acutely 
 points out how the very obscurity or this passage furnishes one strong argument for tJEre 
 gcnuinencM of the Epistle, which I note by way of curiosity that Hilgenfeld regards aa 
 Tl a little Ptui:e Apocalypse of the last year of Trajau " (Einleit, 6421
 
 THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIA.N8. 349 
 
 Johu, 1 and with a certain involved enibarrasBment of language, he reminds 
 them of his repeated oral toachings'about something, and some person, 2 whose 
 power must first be removed before this mystery of iniquity conld achieve its 
 personal and final development. They knew, he says, what was " the check " 
 to the full development of this opposing iniquity, which was already working, 
 aad would work, until ; the removal of " the checker." After that removal, 
 with power and lying portents winning the adherence of those who were 
 doomed to penal delusion, the Lawless One should be manifested in a power 
 which the brnath and brightness of Christ's Pr-esonee should utterly anni- 
 hilate. Between the saved, therefore, and tho Second Advent there lay two 
 events " the removal of the restrainer," and the appearance of the Lawless 
 One. The destruction of the latter would be simultaneous with the event 
 which they had so often been bidden to await with longing expectation. 
 
 This is what St. Paul plainly says; but how is it to bo explained? and 
 why is it so enigmatically expressed P 
 
 The second question is easily answered. It is enigmatically expressed for 
 two reasons first, because all that is enigmatical in it for us had been orally 
 explained to the Theesaloniane, who would therefore clearly understand it ; 
 and secondly, because there was some obvious danger in committing it to 
 writing. This is in jitself a sufficient proof that he is referring to the Roman 
 Empire and Emperor. The tone of St. Pal is exactly the same as that of 
 Josephus, when he explains tke prophecy of Daniel. All Jews regarded the 
 Fourth Empire as the Roman ; but when Josephus comes to the stone which is 
 to dash the image to pieces, he stops short, and says that " he does not think 
 proper to explain it," 3 for tho obvious reason that it would have been politi- 
 cally dangerous for him to do so. 
 
 Now this reason for reticence at once does away with the conjecture that 
 " the check," or " tho checker," was some distant power or person which did 
 not for centuries come on the horizon, even if we could otherwise adopt the 
 notion that St. Paul was uttering some far-off vaticination of event* which, 
 though they might find their fulfilment in distant centuries, could have no 
 meaning for the Thcssaloniaus to whom ho wrote. When a few Roman 
 Catholic commentators say that the Reformation was the Apostasy, and 
 Luther tho Man of Sin, and the Germau Empire " tho chock ;" or when a 
 mass of Protestant writers unhesitatingly identify the Pope with the Man of 
 oiu one can only aak whether, apart from traditional exegesis, they have 
 really brought themselves to hold such a view? If, as we have Been, St. Paul 
 undoubtedly held .that the day of the Lord was ai hand, though not 
 
 1 These secrets and dim allusions (cf. Dan. xii. 10) current among the early Christiana 
 
 rounded them on every side. The years which elapsed between the Epistle and tha 
 Apocalypse had made the views of the Christiana as to Antichrist much moro 
 (Eenan, L 1 Antichrist, p. 1^7, &c.). 
 
 2 ThesS. ii. 6, 7, 6 ratrexui/ TO xa.TfX.ov. 
 
 9 Sjee the instructive passage, Jop. 4-ntt, x. 10, 1
 
 350 THE LIFE AND WOEZ OF ST. PAUI* 
 
 immediate, do they really suppose, on the one hand, that St. Paul had any 
 conception of Luther P or, on the other, that the main development of 
 lawlessness, the main human representative of the power of Satan, is the 
 succession of the Popes? Can any sane man of competent education seriously 
 argue that it is the Papacy which pre-eminently arrays itself in superiority to, 
 and antagonism against, every one who is called God, or every object of 
 worship ? l that its essential characteristic marks are lawlessness, lying won- 
 ders, and blasphemous self -exaltation ? or that the annihilation of the Papacy 
 which has long been so physically and politically weak " by the breath of 
 His mouth and the brightness of His coming," is to be one main result of 
 Christ's return P Again, do they suppose that St. Paul had, during his first 
 visit, repeatedly revealed anything analogous to the development of the 
 Papacy an event which, in their sense of the word, can only be regarded 
 as having taken place many centuries afterwards to the Thessalonians who 
 believed that the coming of Christ might take place on any day, and who 
 required two epistles to undeceive them in the notion P If these suppositions 
 do not sink under the weight of their own intrinsic unreasonableness, let them 
 in the name of calm sense and Christian charity be consigned henceforth to 
 the vast limbo of hypotheses which time, by accumulated proofs, has shown to 
 be utterly untenable. 2 
 
 To that vast limbo of exploded exegesis the vastest and the dreariest that 
 human imagination has conceived I have no intention of adding a fresh con- 
 jecture. That " the check " was the Roman Empire, and " the checker " the 
 Roman Emperor, may bo regarded as reasonably certain ; beyond this, all U 
 uncertain conjecture. In the Excursus I shall merely mention, in the briefest 
 possible manner, as altogether doubtful, and most of them as utterly valueless, 
 the attempts hitherto made to furnish a definite explanation of the expressions 
 lined ; and shall then content myself with pointing out, no less briefly, the 
 
 1 St. Paul's " Lawless One," and "Man of Sin,"who is to be destroyed by the advent 
 of Christ must have some chronological analogy to St. John's Antichrist. Now St. John's 
 Antichrist in the Epistles is mainly Gnostic heresy ("omnis haereticus Antichristus " 
 Luther), and the denial that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (1 John iv. 3). In the 
 Apocalypse it is Nero. In the Old Testament Antichrist is Antiochus Epiphanes. What 
 has this to do either with the Papacy or with the Reformation ? 
 
 2 If it be urged that this was the view of Jewell and Hooker, Andrewes and Sander- 
 son, &c. , the answer is that the knowledge of the Church is not stationary or stereotyped. 
 The Spirit of God is with her, and is ever leading her to wider and fuller knowledge of 
 the truth. Had those great men been living now, they too would hve enlarged many 
 of their views iu accordance with the advance now made in the interpretation of the 
 Scripture. Few can have less sympathy than I have with the distinctive specialities of 
 the Church of Rome ; but in spite of what we hold to be her many and most seriou* 
 errors she is, by the free acknowledgment of our own formularies, a Church, and a Chris- 
 tian Church, and has been pre-eminently a mother of saints, and many of her Popes have 
 been good, and noble, and holy men, and vast benefactors of the world, and splendid 
 maintainers of the Faith of Christ ; and I refuse to regard them as " sons of perdition," 
 or representatives of blasphemy and lawlessness, or to consider the destruction of their 
 line with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord as the one thing to be 
 looked forward to with joy at the coming of Him who we believe will welcome many of 
 them, and myriads of those who accept their rule, into the blessed company of Hu) 
 redeemed.
 
 PAUL IT EPHESTJS. 351 
 
 regions in which we must look for illustrations to throw such light as is 
 possible on the meaning of St. PauL 1 As to the precise details, considering 
 the utter want of unanimity among Christian interpreters, I am content to 
 say, with St. Augustine, "I confess that I am entirely ignorant what the 
 Apostle meant." 
 
 * o o i | J. 
 
 EPHESUS. 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 PAUL AT EPHESUS. 
 
 They say this town it full of cozenage ; 
 Af, nimbling jugglers that deceive the eye, 
 Disguised cheaters, prating mountebank*, 
 And many luch-like liberties of sin." 
 
 SHAKSP. Comedy of Error*. 
 "Diana Ephesia ; cujus nomen unicum .... totus veneratur orbis." 
 
 APPUL. Metam. 
 
 THE justice of Gallic had secured for St. Paul an unmolested residence in 
 Corinth, such as had been promised by the vision which had encouraged him 
 amid his earlier difficulties. He availed himself of this pause in the storm of 
 opposition by preaching for many days perhaps for some months and then 
 determined to revisit Jerusalem, from which he had now been absent for nearly 
 three years. It may be that he had collected something for the poor ; but in 
 any case he felt the importance of maintaining amicable relations with the 
 other Apostles and with the mother church. He wished also to be present at 
 the approaching feast in all probability the Pentecost and thereby to show 
 that, in spite of his active work in heathen cities, and the freedom which he 
 claimed for Gentile converts, in spite, too, of that deadly opposition of many 
 synagogues which had already cost him so dear, he was still at heart a loyal 
 although a liberal Jew. Accordingly, he bade farewell to the friends whom 
 he had converted, and, accompanied by Priscilla and Aquila, set out for 
 Cenchreae. At that busy seaport, where a little church had been already 
 formed, of which Phcebe was a deaconess, he gave yet another proof of his 
 allegiance to the Mosaic law. In thanksgiving for some deliverance 2 perhaps 
 from an attack of sickness, perhaps from the Jewish riot he had taken upon 
 him the vow of the temporary Nazarite. In accordance with this, he abstained 
 
 1 See infra, Excursus XIX., "The Man of Sin." For the symbols employed, see 
 Ezek. xixviii. 16, 17 ; Dan. vii. 10, 11, 23^26 ; xi. 31, 36. 
 
 2 See Jos. B. J. ii. 15, 1, and the Minima treatise Nazir, ii. 8. Spencer (De Leg, 
 Hebr. iii. 6, $ 1) thinks, most improbably, that it was done to obtain a fair voyage. Cf. 
 JUT. Sat. xii. 8L
 
 352 THE LIFE AND WOBK OJF ST. PAUL. 
 
 from wise, and let his hair grow long. At the legal purification which formed 
 the termination of the vow, the head could only be shaved at Jerusalem ; but 
 as it was often impossible for a foreign Jew to reach the Holy City at the exact 
 time when the period of his vow concluded, it seems to hare been permitted 
 to the Nazarite to cut his hair, 1 provided that he kept the shorn locks until he 
 offered the burnt-offering, foe sin-offering, and the peace-offering in the 
 Temple, at which time his head was shaved, and all the hair burnt in the fire 
 under the sacrifice of the peace-offerings. Accordingly, Paul cut his hair at 
 Cenchreae, and set sail for Ephesus. The mention of the fact is not by any 
 means trivial or otiose. The vow which St. Paul undertook is highly 
 significant as a proof of his persoruil allegiance to the Levitic institutions, and 
 his desire to adopt a policy of conciliation towards the Jewish Christians of 
 the Holy City. 2 
 
 A few days' sail, if the weather was ordinarily propitious, would enable his 
 vessel to anchor in the famous haven of Panormus, which was then a forest of 
 masts at the centre of all the Mediterranean trade, but is now a reody swamp 
 in a region of desolation. His arrival coincided either with the eve of a 
 Sabbath, or of one of the three weekly meetings of the synagogue, and at once, 
 with his usual ardour and self-forgetfulness, he presented himself among the 
 Ephesian Jews. They were a numerous and important body, actively engaged 
 in the commerce of the city, and had obtained some special privileges from 
 the Roman Emperors. 3 Not only wsw their religion authorised, but their 
 youth were exempted from military service. One of their number, the 
 " Chaldean " or " astrologer " Balbillus, had at this period availed himself of 
 the deepening superstition which always accompanies a decadent belief, and 
 had managed to insinuate himself into the upper circles of Roman society 
 until he ultimately became the confidant of Nero.* Accustomed in that 
 seething metropolis to meet with opinions of every description, the Jews at 
 first offered no opposition to the arguments of the wandering Rabbi who 
 preached a crucified Messiah. Nay, they even begged him to stay longer with 
 them. His desire to reach Jerusalem and pay his vow rendered this impossible ; 
 but in bidding them farewell he promised that, God willing, 5 he would 
 
 1 The word used U *ipof*vo, "polling," not vpri<r<infvot, "shaving," or aa in B. V. 
 "having shaved" (see 1 Cor. xi. 14; St. Paul dislikes long hair). The notion that it 
 Tvas Aquila and not Paul who made the vow may be finally dismissed ; it merely arosa 
 from the fact that Aquila is mentioned after his wife ; but this, as we have seen, is also 
 the case in 2 Tim. IT. 19 ; Hem. xri. 3, and is an undesigned coincidence, probably due to 
 her greater zeal. 
 
 " Ho that makea a voy builds, aa it were, a private altar, and if be kesps it. offer*. 
 5 it were, a sacrifice upon it " ( Y<jbhar,icth, f. 109, 2 ; Nedartm, f. 59, 1). The views cf 
 the Rabbis about vows may be found in Erulhin, f . 64, 2 ; Chasigak, f. 10, 1 ; fic*h 
 Hoihaiwh, f. 10, 1 ; Ncdariiit, f. 2, 1 ; f. SO, 2, &c. They Lave been collected by Mr. P. 
 J. Hershon in his Hebrew commentary on Genesis exclusively drawn from the Talmud, 
 in the synoptical note on Gen. xxviii. 20. They throw very little light on St. Paul's vow. 
 The rule is that all votive terms, whether corbdn, conem, cones, or concch, are equally 
 binding (Nedari m, f. 2, 1). Perhaps Paul liked the temporary ascetic element in the vow 
 (1 Cor. ix. 25 ; Jos. B. J. ii. 15, { I). 
 
 * Jot. Antt. riv. 10. < Suet. Nero, 40; Dion Casa-jv}, 9. * James iv. 15,
 
 PAUL AT EPHESUS. 363 
 
 return. Once more, therefore, lie weighed anchor, and sailed to Csesarea. 
 From thence he hastened to Jerusalem, which he wag now visiting for the 
 fourth time after his conversion. He had entered it once a changed man ; l 
 he had entered it a second time with a timely contribution from the Church of 
 Antiooh to the famine- stricken poor ; a a third time he had come to obtain a 
 decision of the loud disputes between the Judaic and the liberal Christians 
 which threatened, even thus early, to rend asunder the seamless robe of Christ. 3 
 Four years had now elapsed, and he came one* more, a weak and persecuted 
 missionary, to seek the sympathy of the early converts,* to confirm his faithful 
 spirit of unity with them, to tell them the momentous tidings of churches 
 founded during this his second journey, not only iu Asia, but for the first time 
 la Europe also, and even at places so important as Philippi, Thessalcnica, 
 and Corinth. Had James, and the circle of which he was the centre, only 
 understood how vast for the future of Christianity would be the issues of these 
 perilous and toilsome journeys had they but seen how insignificant, compared 
 with the labours of St. Paul, would be the part which they themselves were 
 playing in furthering the universality of the Church of Christ with what 
 stfecfion and admiration would they have welcomed him ! How would they have 
 striven, by very form of kindness, of encouragement, of honour, of heartfelt 
 pa-ayer, to arm and strengthen him, and to fire into yet brighter lustre his grand 
 enthusiasm, so as to prepare him ia the future for sacrifices yet more heroic, 
 for efforts yet more immense ! Had anything of the kind occurred, St. Luke, 
 in the interests of his great Christian Eirenicon St. Paul himaelf, in his 
 account to the Galatiana of his relations to the twelve eould hardly have failed 
 to tell us about it. So far from this, St. Luke hurries over the brief visit in 
 the three words that " he saluted the Church," 6 not even pausing to inform ua 
 that he fulfilled his vow, or whether any favourable impression as to his Judaic 
 orthodoxy was created by the fact that he had undertaken it. There : is too 
 much reason to fear that his reception was cold and ungracious ; that even if 
 James received him with courtesy, the Judaic Christians who surrounded 
 " the Lord's brother " did not ; and even that a jealous dislike or that free 
 position towards the Law which he established amongst his Gentile converts, 
 led to that determination on the part of some of them to follow in his track 
 and to undermine his influence, which, to the intense embittormont of his latter 
 days, was so fatally successful. It must have been with a sad heart, with 
 something even of indignation at this unsympathetic coldness, that St. Paul 
 hurriedly terminated his visit. But none of these things moved him. He did 
 but share them with his Lord, whom the Pharisees had hated and the Sadduccoa 
 had slain. He did but share them with every great prophet and every true 
 thinker before and since. Not holding even his ike dear unto himself, it is not 
 likely that the peevishness of unprogressive tradition or the non-appreciation 
 of suspicious narrowness, should make him swerve from his divinely appointed 
 
 About A.D. 37. s A.D. 44. About A.D. 50. About A.D. 54. 
 
 ' St. Luke does not 10 much as mention the word Jerusalem, bat the word d^f-a* 
 dieproTes the fancy that Paul went no further than Csesarea*
 
 354 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 course. God bad counted him worthy of being entrusted with a sacred cause. 
 He had a work to do ; he had a Gospel to preach. If in obeying this call of 
 God he met with human sympathy and kindness, well ; if not, it was no great 
 matter. Life might be bitter, but life was short, and the light affliction which 
 was but for a moment was nothing to the exceeding and eternal weight of 
 glory. Once more he set forth for a new, and, as it turned out, for the most 
 brilliantly energetic, for the most eternally fruitful, for the most overwhelm- 
 ingly afflictive period of his life of toil. 
 
 From Jerusalem he went to Antioch, where we can well imagine that a 
 warmer and kindlier greeting awaited him. In that more cordial environment 
 he rested for some little time ; and thence, amid many a day of weariness and 
 struggle, but cheered in all probability by the companionship of Timothy and 
 Titus, and perhaps also of Gains, Aristarchns, and Erastus, he passed once more 
 through the famous Cilician gates of Taurus, 1 and travelled overland through 
 the eastern region of Asia Minor, 2 confirming on his way the Churches of 
 Galatia and Phrygia. In Galatia he ordered collections to be made for the 
 poor at Jerusalem by a weekly offertory every Sunday. 3 He also found it 
 necessary to give them some very serious warnings ; and although, as yet, 
 there had been no direct apostasy from the doctrines which he had taught, he 
 could trace a perceptible diminution of the affectionate fervour with which he 
 had been at first received by that bright but fickle population.* Having thus 
 endeavoured to secure the foundations which he had laid in the past, he 
 descended from the Phrygian uplands, and caught a fresh glimpse of the 
 Marseilles of the ^Egean, the hostelry and emporium of east and west, 5 the 
 great capital of Proconsular Asia. Very memorable were the results of his 
 visit. Ephesus was the third capital and starting-point of Christianity. At 
 Jerusalem, Christianity was born in the cradle of Judaism ; Antioch had been 
 the starting-point of the Church of the Gentiles ; Ephesus was to witness its 
 full development, and the final amalgamation of its unconsolidated elements 
 in the work of John, the Apostle of Love. It lay one mile from the Icarian 
 Sea, in the fair Asian meadow where myriads of swans and other waterfowl 
 disported themselves amid the windings of Cayster. 8 Its buildings were 
 clustered under the protecting shadows of Coressus and Prion, and in the 
 delightful neighbourhood of the Ortygian Groves. Its haven, which had once 
 been among the most sheltered and commodious in the Mediterranean, had 
 been partly silted up by a mistake in engineering, but was still thronged with 
 vessels from every part of the civilised world. It lay at the meeting-point of 
 great roads, which led northwards to Sardis and Troas, southwards to Magnesia 
 and Antioch, and thus commanded easy access to the great river- valleys of the 
 Hermus and Maeander, and the whole interior continent. Its seas and rivers 
 
 1 From Antioch to the Cilician gates, through Tarsus, is 412 miles, 
 9 ai-tartpuca ig practically equivalent to ivaro^iKa. 
 
 * 1 Cor. xvi. 1, 2. But the collection does not seem to have been sent with that of 
 the Grecian churches (Rom. xv. 25, 26). Perhaps the Judaic emissaries got hold of it. 
 
 Gal. iv. 16 ; v. 21. * Kenan, p. 337. 
 
 * Now the Kutschuk Menclerr, or Little Maeander.
 
 PATTL AT EPHESUS. 355 
 
 were rich with fish ; its air was salubrious ; its position unrivalled ; its popu- 
 lation multifarious and immense. Its markets, glittering with the produce of 
 the world's art, were the Vanity Fair of Asia. They furnished to the exile of 
 Patmos the local colouring of those pages of the Apocalypse in which ho speaks 
 of " the merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of psarls, 
 and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyme wood, and all 
 manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of 
 brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointment and 
 frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, aud 
 sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men" l 
 
 And Ephesus was no less famous than it was vast and wealthy. Perhaps 
 no region of the world has been the scene of so many memorable events in 
 ancient history as the shores of Asia Minor. The whole coast was in all 
 respects the home of the best Hellenic culture, and Herodotus declares that it 
 was the finest site for cities in the world of his clay. 2 It was from Lesbos, and 
 Smyrna, and Ephesus, and Halicarnassus that lyric poetry, and epic poetry, 
 and philosophy, and history took their rise, nor was any name more splendidly 
 emblazoned in the annals of human culture than that of the great capital of 
 Ionia. 3 It was here that Anacreon had sung the light songs which so 
 thoroughly suited the soft temperament of the Greek colonists in that luxurious 
 air ; here that Mimnermos had written his elegies ; here that Thales had given 
 the first impulse to philosophy ; here that Anaximander and Anaximenes had 
 learnt to interest themselves in those cosmogonic theories which shocked the 
 simple beliefs of the Athenian burghers ; here that the deepest of all Greek 
 thinkers, " Heracleitus the Dark," had meditated on those truths which he 
 uttered in language of such incomparable force ; here that his friend Hermo- 
 dorus had paid the penalty of virtue by being exiled from a city which felt 
 that its vices were rebuked by his mere silent presence ; * here that Hipponax 
 had infused into his satire such deadly venom ; 6 here that Parrhasius and 
 Apelles had studied their immortal art. And it was still essentially a Greek 
 city. It was true that since Attalus, King of Pergamos, nearly two hundred 
 years before, had made the Romans heirs to his kingdom, their power had 
 gradually extended itself in every direction, until they were absolute masters 
 of Phrygia, Mysia, Caria, Lydia, 6 and all the adjacent isles of Greece, and that 
 now the splendour of Ephesus was materially increased by its being the 
 residence of the Roman Proconsul. But while the presence of a few noble 
 Romans and their suites added to the gaiety and power of the city, it did not 
 affect the prevailing Hellenic cast of its civilisation, which was far more deeply 
 imbued with Oriental than with Western influences. The Ephesians crawled 
 at the feet of the Emperors, flattered them with abject servility, built temples 
 
 > Rev. xviii. 12, 13. 
 
 J Hist. i. 142. For full accounts of Ephesus tee Guhl's Ephetiaca (Berl. 1843). 
 
 * See Hausrath, p. 339, teqq. * See Strabo, xiv., p. 612. 
 
 * Cic. ad Fam. vii. 24. 
 
 * Cio. pro Flacco 27 ; Plin. H. N. v. 28 ; ap. Hauirath, I.e.
 
 358 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAXTL. 
 
 to their crime or their feebleness, deified them on their inscriptions and coins. 1 
 Even the poor simulacrum of the Senate came in for a share of their fulsome- 
 ness, and received its apotheosis from their complaisance. 2 The Romans, 
 seeing that they had nothing to fear from these degenerate lonians, helped 
 them with subsidies when they had suffered from earthquakes, flung them 
 titles of honour, which were in themselves a degradation, left them a nominal 
 autonomy, and let them live without interference the bacchanalian lives which 
 passed in a round of Paniouic, Ephesian, Arteniisian, and Lucullian games. 
 Such then was the city in which St. Paul found a sphere of work unlike any 
 in which he had hitherto laboured. It was more Hellenic than Antioch, more 
 Oriental than Corinth, more populous than Athens, more wealthy and more 
 refined than Thessalcnica, more sceptical and more superstitious than Ancyra 
 or Pessinus. It was, with the single exception of Rome, by far the most 
 important scene of all his toils, and was destined, in after-years, to become not 
 only the first of the Seven Churches of Asia, but the seat of one of those great 
 (Ecumenical Councils which defined the faith of the Christian world. 
 
 The character of the Ephesians was theu in very bad repute. Ephesus 
 was the head- quarters of many defunct superstitions, which owed their main- 
 tenance to the self-interest of various priestly bodies. South of the city, and 
 brightened by the waters of the Cenchrius, was the olive and cypress grove of 
 Leto, 3 where the ancient olive-tree was still shown to which the goddess had 
 clung when she brought forth her glorious '' twin-born progeny." 4 Here was 
 the hill on which Hermes had proclaimed their birth ; here the Curetes, with 
 clashing spears and shields, had protected their infancy from wild beasts ; 
 here Apollo himself had taken refuge from the wrath of Zeus after he had 
 slain the Cyclopes ; here Bacchus had conquered and spared the Amazons 
 during his progress through the East. Such were the arguments wliioh the 
 Ephesian ambassadors had urged before the Roman Senate in arrest of a 
 determination to limit their rights of asylum. That right was mainly attached 
 to the great world-renowned Temple of Artemis, of which Ephesus gloried ia 
 calling herself the sacristan. 8 Nor did they see that it was a right which was 
 ruinous to the morals and well-being of the city. Just as the mediaeval 
 Sanctuaries attracted all the scum and villainy, all the cheats and debtors and 
 murderers of the country round, and inevitably pauperised and degraded the 
 entire vicinity 6 just as the squalor of the lower purlieus of Westminster to 
 this clay is accounted for by its direct affiliation to the crime and wretchedness 
 which sheltered itself from punishment or persecution under the shadow of 
 the Abboy so the vicinity of the great Temple at Ephesus reeked with the 
 congregated pollutions of Aaia. Legend told how, when the temple was 
 
 1 Bee the Corpus Inter. Gr. 2957 ; 2961, &o. (Renan, p. 338, who also quotes Plui 
 Tit. Anton. 21). Chandler, Travdt, \. 25 ; Falkener, Ephetut, p. Ill ; 4>ac<r/3a<rr< and 
 ' ' ' up are common in Epheaian inscriptions. 
 
 PP 
 
 3 tbc or lepa. SvyicArjTik on coins, &c. (Renun, p. 352). 
 
 Strabo, xiv., p. 947. * Tac. Ann. iii. 61. 6 Acts xii. 85, vwo/x. 
 
 I hare already pointed out this fact in speaking of Daphne and raphoe, tupra, 
 . 166, 196. This TTM vbj Tiberius tried to abolish all "aayla " (Suet Tib. 37).
 
 PAUL AT KPHESUS. 357 
 
 finished, Mithridates stood on its summit and declared that the right of asylum 
 Bliould extend in a circle round it as far as he could shoot an arrow, and the 
 arrow miraculously flew a furlong's distance. The consequence was that 
 Ephosus, vitiated by the influences which affect all great sea-side commercial 
 cities, had within herself a special source of danger and contagion. 1 Ionia had 
 been the corruptress of Greece, 4 Ephesus was the corruptress of Ionia the 
 faYourite scene of her most voluptuous love-tales, the lighted theatre of her 
 most ostentatious sins. 
 
 Tho temple, which was the chief glory of the city and one of the wonders 
 of the world, 3 stood in fall view of the crowded haven. Ephesus was the most 
 magnificent of what Ovid calls " the magnificent cities of Asia," 4 and the 
 temple was its most splendid ornament. The ancient temple had been burnt 
 down by Herostratus an Ephssiau fanatic who wished his name to be 
 recorded in history on the nigut of the birth of Alexander the Great. It had 
 been rebuilt with ungrudging magnificence out of contributions furnished by 
 all Asia the very women contributing to it their jewels, as the Jewish womei* 
 had done of old for the Tabernacle of the Wilderness. To avoid the danger 
 of earthquakes, its foundation* were built at vast cost on artificial foundations 
 of skin aud charcoal laid over the marsh.* It gleamed far off with a star-like 
 radiance. 6 Its peristyle consisted of one hundred and twenty pillars of tho 
 Ionic order hewn out of Parian marble. Its doors of carved cypress-wocd 
 were surmounted by transoms so vast and solid that the aid of miracles was 
 invoked to account for their elevation. The staircase which led to the roof 
 was said to have been cut out of a single vine of Cyprus. Some of the pillars 
 were carved with designs of exquisite beauty. 7 Within were the masterpieces 
 of Praxiteles and Phidias, and Scopas and Polycletus. Paintings by the 
 greatest of Greek artists, of which one the likeness of Alexander the Great 
 by Apelles had been bought for a sum said to be equal in value to '5,000 
 of modern money, adorned the inner walls. The roof of the temple itself was 
 of ccMlar-wood, supported by columns of jasper on bases of Parian marble. 8 
 On these pillars hung gifts of priceless value, the votive offerings of grateful 
 superstition. At the end of it stood the great altar adorned by the bas-reiiaf 
 
 1 This is pointed out by Philostratus in the person of Apollonius. He praises them 
 for their banquets and ritual, and adds jie^nroi e CTUKHH rj Cs<* VVXTIK ?t na.1 imtpws ij OVK iv 
 o eAVnj5 TS (tat ATJOTT)* icat dvSpairoiKrrtjf at JTOS tt TIS aSi/co; T\ irpticrvXoc Jjv bpiiufifvot avr69tv. rt ydp 
 rif a-s-00-Tepo-^iTt.-y Tttvos etrnv. See, too, Strabo. xiv. 1, 23. 
 
 3 Hence the proverb " Ionian effeminacy. On their gorgeous apparel, see A then. 
 p. 525. " Taught by the soft loniana " (Dyor, Ruins of Home). 
 
 3 Fhilo, Byzaut. DC Sept. orbit miracidis, 7, M*"" "* fc"* "Ixas. Falkener's Epkcsus, 
 pp. 210-346. 
 
 < Ov. Pont. II. x. 21. 
 
 3 See Plin. H. N. xxxvi. 21 ; Dio^. Laert. ii. 8 ; Aug. De Civ. Dei, xxi. 4. Old 
 London Bridge was built, not "on woolsacks," but out of the proceeda of a tax on wool. 
 The anecdote of the discovery of the white marble by Pisidonis is given ia Yitrav, x. 7. 
 
 ' fieTewpo^xu'H. 
 
 7 One splendid example of the drum of one of these " columnae caelataa " (Plin.) is 
 now in the British Museum. For a complete and admirable account of the temple and ii* 
 excavation, see Wood's Epkesut. p. 237, tea. 
 
 9 Now in the mosque of St. Sophia.
 
 358 THE J.1FJB AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of Praxiteles, behind which fell the vast folds of a purple curtain. Behind 
 this curtain was the dark and awful adytum in which stood the most sacred 
 idol of classic heathendom ; and again, behind the adytum was the room which, 
 inviolable under divine protection, was regarded as the wealthiest and securest 
 bank in the ancient world. 
 
 The image for which had been reared this incomparable shrine was so ancient 
 that it shared with the Athene of the Acropolis, the Artemis of Tauris, the 
 Demeter of Sicily, the Aphrodite of Paphos, and the Cybele of Pessinus, the 
 honour of being regarded as a Aioircrij "A-yoA/xa "an image that fell from 
 heaven." l The very substance of which it was made was a matter of dispute ; 
 some said it was of vine-wood, some of ebony, some of cedar, and some of 
 stone. 2 It was not a shapeless meteorite like the Kaaba at Mecca, or the 
 Hercules of Hyettus, 8 or the black-stone of Pessinus ; nor a phallic cone like 
 the Phoenician Aphrodite of Paphos ; * nor a mere lump of wood like the 
 Cadmean Bacchus ; 6 but neither must we be misled by the name Artemis to 
 suppose that it in any way resembled the quivered " huntress chaste and 
 fair" of Greek and Roman mythology. It was freely idealised in many of the 
 current representations, 8 but was in reality a hideous fetish, originally meant 
 for a symbol of fertility and the productive power of nature. She was 
 represented on coins which, as they bear the heads of Claudius and Agrip- 
 pina, must have been current at this very time, and may have easily passed 
 through the hands of Paul as a figure swathed like a mummy, covered with 
 monstrous breasts, 7 and holding in one hand a trident and in the other a club. 
 The very ugliness and uncouthness of the idol added to the superstitious awe 
 which it inspired, and just as the miraculous Madonnas and images of 
 Uomanisin are never the masterpieces of Raphael or Bernardino Luini, but 
 for the most part blackened Byzantine paintings, or hideous dolls like the 
 Bambino, so the statue of the Ephesian Artemis was regarded as far more 
 awful than the Athene of Phidias or the Jupiter of the Capitol. The Jewish 
 feelings of St. Paul though he abstained from *' blaspheming " the goddess 8 
 ~would have made him regard it as pollution to enter her temple ; but many 
 a time on coins, and paintings, and in direct copies, ho must have seen the 
 strange image of the great Artemis of the Ephesians, whose worship, like 
 that of so many fairer and more human idols, his preaching would doom to 
 swift oblivion. 8 
 
 1 Pliny (H. N. xvi. 79) and Athenagoras (Pro Chritt. 14) say it was made by Eudaeus, 
 the pupil of Daedalus. 
 
 1 Vitruv. ii. 9 ; Callim. Hymn Dian. 239. 3 Pausan. Lc. 24. 4 V. tupra, p. 196. 
 
 5 Pausan. ix. 12. See Guhl, JSphcsiaca, p. 185; Falkener, Ephesu*, 287. The 
 Chaevonean Zeus was a sceptre (Pausan. be. 40) ; the Cimmerian Mars, a scimitar 
 (Hdt. iv. 62). 
 
 6 E.y. t in the statue preserved in the Museo Borbouico at Naples, which, if we may 
 judge from coins, is a very unreal representative of the venerable ugliness of the actual 
 (statue. 
 
 7 woAiVao-Tos, multimarnma ; " omnium bestiarum et viventium nutrii " (Jer. Proem, 
 tn Kp. ad Eph.). 
 
 * Acts xir. 37, & /SXao-^toiWas TIJP feoi/ vfiur. 
 
 " What u become of the Temple of Diana ? Can a Trader of the earth be vanish^
 
 PAUL AT EPHK8U8. 359 
 
 Though the Greeks had vied with the Persians in lavish contributions for 
 the re-erection of the temple, the worship of this venerable relic was essen- 
 tially Oriental. The priests were amply supported by the proceeds of wide 
 domains and valuable fisheries, and these priests, of Megabyzi, as well as the 
 " Essen," l who was at the head of them, were the miserable Persian or 
 Phrygian eunuchs who, with the Melissae, or virgin-priestesses, and crowds of 
 idle slaves, were alone suffered to conduct the worship of the Mother of the 
 Gods. Many a time, in the open spaces and environs of Ephesus, must Paul 
 have seen with sorrow and indignation the bloated and beardless hideousness 
 of these coryphaei of iniquity. 2 Many a time must he have heard from the 
 Jewish quarter the piercing shrillness of their flutes, and the harsh jangling of 
 their timbrels ; many a time have caught glimpses of their detestable dances 
 and corybantic processions, as with streaming hair, and wild cries, and shaken 
 torches of pine, they strove to madden the multitudes into sympathy with 
 that orgiastic worship, which was but too closely connected with the vilest 
 debaucheries. 3 Even the Greeks, little as they were liable to be swept away 
 by these bursts of religious frenzy, seem to have caught the tone of these dis- 
 graceful fanatics. At no other city would they have assembled in the theatre 
 in their thousands to yell the same cry over and over again for " about the 
 space of two hours," as though they had been so many Persian dervishes or 
 Indian yogis. This senseless reiteration was an echo of the screaming 
 ulnlatus which was one of the characteristics of the cult of Diudymene and 
 Pessinus. 4 
 
 We are not surprised to find that under the shadow of such a worship 
 superstition was rampant. Ephesus differed from other cities which Paul 
 had visited mainly in this respect, that it was pre-eminently the city of 
 astrology, sorcery, incantations, amulets, exorcisms, and every form of magical 
 imposture. On the statue of the goddess, or rather, perhaps, on the inverted 
 pyramid which formed the basis for her swathed and shapeless feet, were 
 inscribed certain mystic formulae to which was assigned a magic efficacy. 
 This led to the manufacture and the celebrity of those "Ephesian writings," 
 
 like a phantom, without leaving a trace behind ? We now seek the temple in vain ; the 
 city is prostrate and the goddess gone " (Chandler ; see Sibyll. Orac. v. 293 305). The 
 wonder is deepened after seeing the massiveness of the superb fragments in the British 
 Museum. That the Turkish name Ai'a Solouk is a corruption of 'Ay/a ecaAdyov, and 
 therefore a reminiscence of St. John, is proved by the discovery of coins bearing this 
 inscription, and struck at Ayasaluk (Wood, p. 183). Perhaps St. John originally received 
 the name by way of contrast with the Theologi of the Temple. 
 
 1 The resemblance of the word and character to the " Essenes " is accidental. It 
 means "a king (queen) bee." 
 
 2 Quint, v. 12. What sort of wretches these were may be seen in Juv. vi. 512; 
 Prop. ii. 18, 15; Appuleius, Metamorph. 
 
 * Apollonius, in nis first address to the Ephesians, delivered from the platform of 
 the temple, urged them to abandon their idleness, folly, and feasting, and turn to the 
 study 01 philosophy. He speaks of these dances, and says *v\av n<v n-awa fwori V. /*f<rri 
 
 i avSpayvviav, fieg-ra. S< KTuiriav, <c.T.A_ (Philostr. Vit. Apoll. iv. 2, p. 141). He praises them, 
 
 however, for their philosophic interests, ko. (viii. 8, p. 339). Incense-burners, flute-players, 
 and trumpeters are mentioned in an inscription found by Chandler (Inter. Ant., p. 11). 
 
 * Hausrath, p. 342.
 
 btiU THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PA17L. 
 
 which were eagerly supplied by greedy imposture to gaping credulity. 
 Among them were the worda aekion, katasJeion, Use, tetras, damnameneut, 
 and aisia, 1 which for sense and efficiency were about on a par with the dariet, 
 dcrdarie*, tutatariee, or ista,pista, rista, which Cato the elder held to be a 
 sovereign remedy for a sprain,* or the sliavriri, vriri, iriri, riri, iri, ri, ac- 
 companied with knockings on the lid of a jug, which tho Rabbis taught as an 
 efficacious expulsion of the demon of blindness, 8 
 
 Stories, which elsewhere would hare been received with ridicule, at 
 Ephesus found ready credence. About the very time of St. Paul's visit it is 
 probable that the city was visited by Apollonhia of Tyana; and it is here that 
 his biographer Philcstratus places tho seeno of some of his exploits. One of 
 these is all the more interesting because it is said to have taken place in that 
 very theatre into which St. Paul, though in imminent peril of being torn to 
 pieces, could scarcely be persuaded not to enter. During his visit to Epliesus, 
 the thaumaturge of Tyana found the plague raging there, and in consequence 
 invited the population to meet him in tho theatre. When they were assem- 
 bled, he rose and pointed out to them a miserable and tattered old man a-j 
 the cause of the prevailing pestilence. Instantly th multitude seized atones 
 arid, in spitd of the old man's remonstrances, atoned him to death. When 
 the heaped stones were removed, they found the carcase of a Molossian 
 hound, into which the demon had transformed himself; 4 and on this spot 
 they reared a statue of Herakles Apotropaios ! Philoatratus did not write 
 iiis romance till A.D. 218, and his hero Apollonius has ben put forth by 
 medern infidels as a sort of Pagan rival to the Jesus of the Gospels. Let any 
 one read this wretched production, and judge ! The Pagan sophist, with all 
 his vaunted culture and irritating euphuism, abounds in anecdotes which 
 would have been regarded as pitiably foolish if they had been narrated by tha 
 unlettered fisherman of Galilee, strangers as they were to all cultivation, asd 
 writing as they did & century and a half before. 
 
 Another and a far darker glimpse of the Ephesus of this day may bo 
 obtained from the letter of the pseudo-Heraclitus. Some cultivated and abl 
 Jew, 5 adopting the pseudonym of the great ancient philosopher, wrote some 
 letters in which he is supposed to explain the reason why he was called " ths 
 weeping philosopher," and why he was never seen to laugh. In these he fully 
 justifies his traditional remark that the whole Ephesian population deserved 
 to be throttled man by man. He here asks how it is that their state flourishes 
 in spite of its wickedness ; and, in the inmost spirit of the Old Testament, he 
 sees in that prosperity the irony <md the curse of Heaven. For Artemis and 
 
 Clem. Alex. Strom, v. 46. 
 
 3 Onto, De Re Ruttiea Pr. 160 (gee Donaldson, Tarron., p. 234). 
 Abhoda Zara, f. 12, 2. 
 
 4 V'it. Apoll. iv. 10, p. 147. Alexander of Abonoteichoa, a much more objection: V 
 Impostor than Apollonius, lived till old age on the wealth got out of his dupes, ;.-;.> 
 seriously persuaded the world that the mother of hi* daughter wa* the goddess of ilu 
 inoon ! 
 
 1 The theory of Bernays U that the lttera were written by a Pagan, but ii 
 by a Jew.
 
 PAUL A.T EPHE8T7S. 361 
 
 her worship he has no scorn too intense. The dim twilight of hor auytum is 
 symbolical of a vileuess that hateth the light. He supposes that her image 
 is " stonen " in the contemptuous sense in which the word is used by Homer 
 i.e., idiotic and brutish. He ridicules the inverted pyramid on which she 
 stands. He says that the morals which flourish under her protection are 
 worse than those of beasts, seeing that even hounds do not mutilate each 
 other, as her Megabyzus has to be mutilated, because she is too modest to be 
 served by a man. But instead of extolling her modesty, her priests ought 
 rather to curse her for lewdness, which rendered it unsafe otherwise to ap- 
 proach her, and which had cost them so dear. As for tho orgies, and the 
 torch festivals, and the antique rituals, he has nothing to eay of them, except 
 that they are the cloak for every abomination. These things had rendered 
 him a lonely man. This was the reason why he could not langh. How could 
 he laugh when he heard the noises of these infamous vagabond priests, and 
 was a witness of all the nameless iniquities which flourished so rankly in con- 
 sequence of their malpractices the murder, and waste, and lust, and gluttony 
 and drunkenness ? And then he proceeds to moral and religious exhortations, 
 which show that we are reading the work of some Jewish and unconverted 
 A polios, who is yet an earnest and eloquent pvoclaimer of the one God and 
 the Noaehian law. 
 
 In this city St. Paul saw that " a great door and effectual was open to 
 him," though there were " many adversaries." l During his absence an event 
 had happened which was to be of deep significance for the future. Among the 
 myriads whom business or pleasure, or what is commonly called accident, had 
 brought to Ephesus, was a Jew of Alexandria named Apollonius, 8 or Apollos, 
 who not only shared the culture for which the Jews of that city were famous- 
 in tho age of Philo, but who had a profound knowledge of Scripture, and a 
 special gift of fervid eloquence. 3 He was only so far a Christian that he 
 knew and had accepted tho baptism of John; but though thus imperfectly ac- 
 quainted with the doctrines of Christianity, he yet spoke and argued in the 
 synagogue with a power and courage which attracted the attention of the 
 Jewish tent-makers Priscilla and Aquila. They invited him to their house, 
 and showed him the purely initial character of John's teaching. It may have 
 been the accounts of the Corinthian Church which he had heard from them 
 that made him desirous to visit Achaia, and perceiving how useful such a 
 ministry as his might be amoug the subtle and intellectual Greeks, thsy not 
 only encouraged his wish, 4 but wrote for him " letters of commendation " 5 to 
 the Corinthian elders. At Corinth his eloquence produced a great sensation, 
 and he became a pillar of strength to the brethren. He had so thoroughly 
 profited by that reflection of St. Paul's teaching which he had caught from 
 Priscilla and Aquila, that in his public disputations with the hostile Jews 
 ha proved from their own Scriptures, with an irresistible cogency, the 
 
 1 ICor. ivi. 9. SoinD. 
 
 s Acts xviii. 25, &iav *% T^u^an (cf. Rom. xii. 11). 
 
 4 vjwprjrlpa'Oi, 80. *Mv (Acts xvili. 27). 5 <rv<rT<mitT| rirofcj (2 Cor. iiL 1). 
 
 13
 
 3C2 THE LIFE A.KD WOEK OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Hossiabship of Christ, and thus was as acceptable to the Christians as ho was 
 formidable to the Jews. He watered what Paul had planted. 1 
 
 By the time of St. Paul's arrival, Apollos had already started for Corinth. 
 He had, however, returned to Ephesus before St. Paul's departure, and the 
 Apostle must have gazed with curiosity and interest on this fervid and gifted 
 convert. A meaner soul might have been jealous of his gifts, and all the 
 more so because, while less valuable, they were more immediately dazzling 
 and impressive than his own. St. Paul was of too noble a spirit to leave 
 room for the slightest trace of a feeling so common, yet so ignoble. Apollos 
 had unwittingly stolen from him the allegiance of some of his Corinthian con- 
 verts ; his name had become, in that disorderly church, a watchword of 
 faction. Yet St. Paul never speaks of him without warm sympathy and 
 admiration, 2 and evidently appreciated the high-mindod delicacy which made 
 him refuse to revisit Corinth, 3 in spite of pressing invitations, from the, 
 obvious desire to give no encouragement to the admiring partisans who had, 
 elevated him into unworthy rivalry with one so much greater than himself. 
 
 Ephesus, amid its vast population, contained specimens of every form of 
 belief, and Apollos was not the only convert to an imperfect and half -developed 
 form of Christianity. Paul found there, on his arrival, a strange backwater 
 of religious opinion in the persons of some twelve men who, like Apollos, 
 and being perhaps in some way connected with him, were still disciples of the 
 Baptist. Although there were some in our Lord's time who stayed with 
 their old teacher till his execution, and though the early fame of his preaching 
 had won him many followers, of whom some continued to linger on in 
 obscure sects, 4 it was impossible for any reasonable man to stop short at this 
 position except through ignorance. St. Paul accordingly questioned them, 
 and upon finding that they knew little or nothing of the final phase of John's 
 teaching, or of the revelation of Christ, and were even ignorant of the very 
 name of the Holy Spirit, he gave them further instruction until they were 
 fitted to receive baptism, and exhibited those gifts of the Spirit the speak- 
 ing with tongues and prophecy which were the accepted proofs of full and 
 faithful initiation into the Church of Christ. 6 
 
 For three months, in accordance with his usual plan, he was a constant 
 visitor at the synagogue, and used every effort of persuasion and argument to 
 ripen into conviction the favourable impressions he had at first created. St. 
 Luke passes briefly over the circumstances, but there must have been many 
 
 1 1 Cor. iii 6. There can be little reasonable doubt that Apollos was the author of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews. In reading that Epistle (which cannot be dealt with in this 
 volume) it is easy to see that, essentially Pauline as is much of its phraseology, the 
 main method is original, and would probably be more pleasing and convincing to Jews 
 than any which St. Paul was led to adopt. Some have seen a distinction between hia 
 pupils and St. Paul's in Titus iii. 14, oi ^/xeVepot, but see infra, ad loc. 
 
 * Tit. iii. 13, * 1 Cor. TV! 12. 
 
 * Sabacans, Mendaeans, &c. (Neander, Ch.. Hist. ii. 57). We find from the Clementine 
 Recognitions that there were some of John's disciples who continued to preach him <* 
 the Messiah. 
 
 * Cf. Heb. vt 4 &
 
 PAT/1, AT EPHESUS. 3f3 
 
 an anxious hour, many a bitter struggle, many an exciting debate, before tho 
 Jews finally adopted a tone not only of decided rejection, but even of so 
 fierce an opposition, that St. Paul was forced once more, as at Corinth, openly 
 to secede from their communion. We do not sufficiently estimate the paiu 
 which such circumstances must have caused to him. His life was so beset with 
 trials, that each trial, however heavy in itself, is passed over amid a multitude 
 that were still more grievous. But we must remember that St. Paul, though a 
 Chn?*ian, still regarded himself as a true Israelite, and ho must hav* felt, at 
 least as severely as a Luther or a Whiteficld, this involuntary alienation from 
 the religious communion of his childhood. We must conjecture, too, that it 
 was amid these early struggles that he once more voluntarily submitted to the 
 recognised authority of synagogues, and endured some of those five beatings 
 by the Jews, any one of which would have been regarded as a terrible episode 
 in an ordinary life. 
 
 As long as opposition confined itself to legitimate methods, St. Paul was 
 glad to be a' worshipper in the synagogue, and to deliver the customary 
 Midrash ; but when the Jews not only rejected and reviled him, but even 
 endeavoured to thwart all chance of his usefulness amid their Gentile neigh- 
 bours, he saw that it was time to withdraw his disciples from among them ; l 
 and, as their number was now considerable, he hired the school of Tyraimus 
 some heathen sophist of that not very uncommon name.* It was one of 
 those schools of rhetoric and philosophy wliich were common in a city like 
 Ephesus, where there were many who prided themselves on intellectual pursuits. 
 This new pkco of worship gave him the advantage of being able to meet the 
 brethren daily, whereas in the synagogue this was only possible three times a 
 week. His labours and his preaching were not unblessed. For tvr? full 
 years longer he continued to make Ephesus the centre of his missionary 
 activity, and, as tho fame of his Gospel began to spread, there can be little 
 doubt that he himself took short journeys to various neighbouring places, 
 trntil, in the strong expression of St. Luke, " all they that dwelt in Asia heard 
 the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks." 3 In Ephesus itself 
 his reputation reached an extraordinary height, in consequence of the unusual 
 works of power which God wrought by his hands. 4 On this subject he is 
 himself silent even by way of allusion, and though ho speaks to the Ephe- 
 siaii elders 6 of his tears, and trials, and dangers, he does not say a word as 
 
 1 Epametus (Rom. xvi. 5, leg. Aaias) was his first convert in Asia. 
 
 3 Jos. B. J. i. 26, 3 ; 2 Mace. iv. 40. It is very unlikely that this was a Beth 
 Midrash (Meyer), as it was St. Paul's object to withdraw from the Jews. There was a 
 Sophist Tyrannus mentioned by Suidas. The m/o* is spurious (n, A, B), which shows 
 that this Tyrannus was known in Ephesus (see Helusen, Paul us, 218). 
 
 3 Hence forty years later, inBithynia, Pliny (Ep. 96) writes, "Neque enim civitates 
 tan turn, sed vicos etiam atque agros superstitionis istius contagio pervay:ita est." 
 
 4 Acts xix. 11, Jvva/if i? ou TO? Tv\ovsaf. 
 
 s The " Epistle to the Ephesians," being a circular letter, naturally contains but few 
 ipccifio allusions which, if intelligible to one Christian community, would not have 
 been so to another. We should have expected such allusions in his speech ; but 
 "ouiittit Doctor gentium narrare miracula, narrat labores, narrat aerumna*, narrat
 
 384 TEE LIFE AND WOES Of St. PAUL. 
 
 to the signs and wonders which in writing to the Corinthians he distinctly 
 ckims. Although St. Paul believed that God, for the furtherance of the 
 Gospel, did allow him to work " powers " beyond the range of human expe- 
 rience, and in which he humbly recognised the work of the Spirit granted to 
 faith and prayer, yet he by no means frequently exercised these gifts, and 
 never for his own relief or during the sickness of his dearest friends. But 
 it was a common thing in Ephesus to use all kinds of magic remedies and 
 curious arts. Wo are not, therefore, surprised to hear that articles of dress 
 which had belonged to Paul, handkerchiefs which he had used, and aprons 
 with which he had been girded in the pursuit of his trade, 1 were assumed by 
 the Ephesians to have caught a magic efficacy, and were carried about to 
 sick people and demoniacs. St. Luke was not with the Apostle at Ephesns, 
 and enters into no details ; but it is clear that his informant, whoever he was, 
 had abstained from saying that this was done by St. Paul's sanction. But 
 since Ephesus was the head-quarters of diabolism and sorcery, the use of St. 
 Paul's handkerchiefs or aprons, whether authorised by him or not, was so far 
 overruled to beneficial results of healing as to prove the superiority of the 
 Christian faith in the acropolis or Paganism, and to prepare tho way for holy 
 worship in the stronghold of Eastern fanaticism and Grecian vice. He who 
 " followed not Jesus," and yet was' enabled to cast out devils in His name, 
 could hardly fail to be the prototype of others who, though they acted without 
 sanction, were yet, for good purposes, and in that unsearched borderland 
 which lies between the natural and the supernatural, enabled by God's provi* 
 dence to achieve results which tended to the furtherance of truth. 
 
 But lest any sanction should be given to false and superstitious notions, 
 wo can hardly fail to see in the next anecdote which St. Luke has preserved 
 for us a direct rebuke of mechanical thaumrturgy. Exorcism was a prac- 
 tice which had long been prevalent among the Jews, and it was often connected 
 with the grossest credulity and the most flagrant imposture.* Now there was 
 a Jewish priest of some distinction of the name of Sceva, 3 whose seven sons 
 wandered about from place to place professing to eject demons ; and on learn- 
 ing the reputation of St. Paul, and hearing doubtless of the cures effected by 
 the application of his handkerchiefs, they thought that by combining his name 
 with that of Jesus, they could effect cures in the most virulent cases, which 
 defeated even the ring and root of Solomon. 4 Encouraged possibly by some 
 apparent initial success so at least the story seems to imply two of these 
 
 tribulationes quae Paulo Paulique imitatoribua ipsis miraculis sunt clariores "(Nova- 
 rinus). 
 
 1 crovfapia, sudnria ; ^fiiiuVtfta, scmicinct-a. 
 
 2 Jos. Antt. viii. 2, 5. For this ridiculous jugglery, which seems to have deceived 
 Vespasian, see my Life of Christ, i. 237. The prevalence of Jewish exorcists ia attested 
 by Justin Martyr, Dial. 85. 
 
 3 Acts xix. 14, px'p* a general expression ; perhaps a head of one of the twenty- 
 four courses. 
 
 4 JOB. Antt. I.e. We find many traces of this kind of superstition in the Talmudio 
 writings : e.g., the belief that the Minim could cure the bites of serpents by the name 
 of Jesus (v. tupra, p. 63). In the ToUfith JAtt, the miracles of our Lord are ex-
 
 AT ErHESTJS. 365 
 
 seven itinerant impostors 1 visited a man who waa evidently a raving maniac, 
 but who had those sufficiently lucid perceptions of certain subjects which 
 many madmen still retain. Addressing the evil demon, they exclaimed, " We 
 exorcise you by Jesus, whom Paul preacheth." In this instance, however, the 
 adjuration proved to be a humiliating failure. The maniac astutely replied, 
 " Jesus I recognise, and Paul I know ; 2 but who are you ?" and then leaping 
 upon them with tho superhuman strength of madness, he tore their clothes 
 off their backs, and inflicted upon them such violent injuries that they were 
 glad to escape out of the house stripped and wounded. 
 
 So remarkable a story could not remain unknown. It spread like wildfire 
 among the gossiping Ephesians, and produced a remarkable feeling of dread 
 and astonishment. One result of it was most beneficial. We have had re- 
 peated occasion to observe that the early Christians who had been redeemed 
 from heathendom, either in the coarsenesses of slave-life or in the refined 
 abominations of the higher classes, required a terrible struggle to deliver 
 themselves by the aid of God's Holy Spirit from the thraldom of past cor- 
 ruption. The sternly solemn emphasis of St. Paul's repeated warnings 
 the actual facts which occurred in the history of the early churches show 
 conclusively that tho early converts required to be treated with extreme for- 
 bearance, while, at the same time, they were watched over by their spiritual 
 rulers with incessant vigilance. The stir produced by the discomfiture of the 
 Beni Sceva revealed the startling fact that some of the brethren in embracing 
 Christianity had not abandoned magic. Stricken in conscience, these secret 
 dealers in the superstitious trumpery of " curious arts " now came forward in 
 the midst of the community and confessed their secret malpractices. Nor 
 was it only the dupes who acknowledged the error. Even the deceivers came 
 forward, and gave the most decisive proof of their sincerity by rendering 
 impossible any future chicanery. They brought the cabalistic and expensive 
 books 3 which had been the instruments of their trado, and publicly burned 
 
 plained by an unutterably silly story as to the means by which He possessed himself of 
 the Shzmluimephoresk: or sacred name. Witchcraft had in all ages been prevalent among 
 the Jews (Ex. xxii. 18 ; 1 Sam. xxviii. 3, 9 ; Mio. v. 12) ; it continued to be so at the 
 Christian era, and it was necessary even to warn converts against any addiction to it 
 (Gal. v. 20 ; 2 Tim. iii. 13, yd^r). 
 
 1 In verse 16 the reading a^^oT.'po* of N> A, B, D, is almost certainly correct. They 
 were actuated by exactly tho same motives as Simon Magus, but had shown leac cun- 
 ning in trying to cany them out. 
 
 Acts SIX. 15, To* 'h}ffoC> yiypwericu Kail rw IlaOAov^tirurrafiai; Vulg., "Jesum novi t)t 
 
 Paiilum scio." 
 
 3 On these < ypafj^ara see the illustrations adduced by Wetstein. Some of them 
 were copies of the mystic words and n.vnos engraved in enigmatic formulae (<up<y/j.<iTuj<us 
 Eustath. in Od. xiv. p. 1864) on the crown, girdle, and feet of the statue of Artemis. 
 Whole treatises were written in explanation of them, wliich resemble certain Chinese 
 treatises. An addiction to magic, therefore, assumed almost necessarily a eecret 
 belief in idolatry. One of the titles of Artemis was Mvujos. Balbillus (Suet. Ner. 36) 
 and Maximus (Gibbon, ii. 291, ed. Milmau) were both Ephesian astrologers. Eustathius 
 (!.c. cf. Philostr, Vit. Apol. vii. 39) tells us that Crcssus was saved by reciting 
 them on the pyre, and that in a wrestling bout a Milesian, who could not throw 
 sn Ephesian, found that he had Ephesian incantations engraved on a die. When 
 this waz taken from him the Milesian threw him thirty times in succession.
 
 366 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAITL. 
 
 them. It was like the Monte dell a Pieta reared by the repentant Florentines 
 4t the bidding of Savonarola ; and so extensive had been this secret evil-doing, 
 that the value of the books destroyed by the culprits in this fit of penitence 
 was no less than fifty thousand drachms of silver, or, in our reckoning, about 
 2,030. 1 This bonfire, which must have lasted some time, 2 was so striking a 
 protest against the prevalent credulity, that it was doubtless one of the cir- 
 cumstances which gave to St. Paul's preaching so wide a celebrity throughout 
 all Asia. 
 
 This little handful of incidents is all that St. Luke was enabled to preserve 
 for us of this great Ephesian visit, which Paul himself tells us occupied a 
 period of three years. 3 Had we nothing else to go by, we might suppose that 
 until the final outbreak it was a period of almost unbroken success and pros- 
 perity. Such, however, as we find from the Epistles 4 and from the Apostle's 
 speech to the Ephesian elders, 6 was very far from being the case. It was 
 iudeed an earnest, incessant, laborious, house-to-house ministry, which carried 
 its exhortations to each individual member of the church. But it was a 
 ministry of many tears ; and though greatly blessed, it was a time of such 
 overwhelming trial, sickness, persecution, and misery, that it probably sur- 
 passed in sorrow any other period of St. Paul's life. We nmst suppose that 
 during its course happened not a few of those perils which he recounts with 
 such passionate brevity of allusion in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 
 Neither from Jews, nor from Pagans, nor from nominal Christians was he, 
 safe. He had suffered alike at the hands of lawless banditti and stately 
 magistrates ; he had been stoned by the simple provincials of Lystra, beaten 
 by the Roman colonists of Philippi, hunted by the Greek mob at Ephesus, 
 seized by the furious Jews at Corinth, maligned and thwarted by the Pharisaic 
 professors of Jerusalem. Bobbers he may well have encountered in the 
 environs, 8 as tradition tells us that St. John the Evangelist did in later days, 
 as well as in the interior, when he travelled to lay the foundation of various 
 churches. 7 Perils among his own countrymen we know befell him there, for 
 he reminds the elders of Ephesus of what he had suffered from the ambus- 
 cades of the Jews. 8 To perils by the heathen and in the city he must have 
 
 Hence the E<f>eVia ypawiara were sometimes engraved on seals ( Atlien. xii. 584). Kenan 
 says (p. 345) that the names of the " seven sleepers of Ephesus " are still a common 
 incantation in the East. 
 
 1 On the almost certain supposition that the "pieces of silver" were Attic drachms 
 of the value of about 9|d. If they were Roman denarii the value would he 1,770. 
 Classic parallels to this public abjuration of magic are quoted from Lir. xl. 29 ; Suet. 
 Aug. 31; Tac. Ann. xiii. 50; Agric. 2. 
 
 2 ica.TfKa.iav, impf. 
 
 3 Acts xx. 31 ; but owing to the Jewish method of reckoning any part of time to the 
 whole, the period did not necessarily much exceed two years. 
 
 * Chiefly those to the Corinthians. On the Epistle to " the Ephesians " see infra, p. 
 5 Acts xx. 1835. 2 Cor; xi. 26. 
 
 7 He had not, however, visited Laodicea or Colossre, where churches were founded by 
 Philemon and Epaphras (Col. i. 7; iv. 12 16). But he may well have made journeys to 
 .Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, &c. (See 1 Cor. xvi. 19.) 
 
 8 Acts xx. 19 ; which again shows the fragmentary nature of the narrative aa regard* 
 ll particulars of personal suffering.
 
 PAUL AT EPHESUS. 367 
 
 often been liable in the narrow streets. Of his perils among false brethren, 
 like Phygellus, and Hermogenes, and Alexander, we may see a specimen in 
 the slanders against his person, and the internecine opposition to his doctrine, 
 of which we shall meet with future proofs. Perils in the wilderness and in 
 the sea Avere the inevitable lot of one who travelled over vast districts in those 
 days, when navigation was so imperfect and intercourse so unprotected. It 
 was very shortly after his departure from Ephesus that he wrote of all 
 these dangers, and if, as is possible, he took more than one voyage from the 
 haA'en of Ephesus to various places on the shores of the Levant, it may have 
 been at this time that ho suffered that specially perilous shipwreck, in the 
 escape from which lie floated a day and a night upon the stormy waves. 1 And 
 all this time, with a heart that trembled with sympathy or burned with indig- 
 nation, 2 he was carrying out the duties of a laborious and pastoral ministry, 3 
 and bearing the anxious burden of all the churches, of which some, like the 
 churches of Corinth and Galatia, caused him the most acute distress. Nor 
 were physical cares and burdens wanting. True to hia principle of refusing 
 to eat the bread of dependence, 4 he had toiled incessantly at Ephosus to sup- 
 port, not himself only, but even Aristarchus and the others who were with 
 him ; and not even all his weariness, and painfulness, and sleepless nights of 
 mingled toil and danger, 5 had saved him from cold, and nakedness, and the con- 
 stant pangs of hunger during compulsory or voluntary fasts. 8 And while he 
 was taking his place like a general on a battle-field, with his eye on every 
 weak or endangered point ; while his heart was constantly rent by news of 
 the defection of those for whom lie would gladly have laid down his life ; 
 while a new, powerful, and organised opposition was working against him in 
 the very churches which ho had founded with such peril and toil; 7 while he 
 was being constantly scourged, and mobbed, and maltreated, and at the same 
 time suffering from repeated attacks of sickness and depression ; while he 
 was at once fighting a haud-to-haud battle and directing the entire campaign ;- 
 he yet found time to travel for the foundation or confirming of other churches, 
 and to write, as with his very heart's blood, the letters which should rivet the 
 attention of thousands of the foremost intellects, eighteen centuries after he 
 himself had been laid in the nameless grave. In these we find that at the 
 very hour of apparent success he was in the midst of foolishness, weakness, 
 shame " pilloried," as it were, " on infamy's high stage," the sentence of 
 death hanging ever over his head, cast down, perplexed, persecuted, troubled 
 on every side, homeless, buffeted, ill-provided with food and clothes, abused, 
 
 1 Whether a brief and unsatisfactory visit to Corinth was among these journeys is a 
 disputed point, which depends on the interpretation given to 2 Cor. i. 15, 1C ; xiii. 1, and 
 which will never be finally settled. A multitude of authorities may be quoted on both 
 sides, and fortunately the question is not one of great importanca 
 
 2 2 Cor. xi. 29. ' 3 Acts xx. 20, 31. * Acts xx. 34. s 2 Cor. xi. 27. 
 
 * And that, too, although the tents made at Ephesus had a special reputation, and 
 were therefore probably in some demand (Plut. Alcib. 12 ; Athen. xii. 47). 
 
 7 Perhaps tne Judaic Christians were more content to leave him alone while he was 
 working in Europe, and were only aroused to opposition by his resumption of work in 
 Aaia (Krenkel, Paulus, p. 183).
 
 368 THE LIFE A.ND WORK OF ST. PATTL, 
 
 persecuted, slandered, made as it were the dung and fiHh of all the world. 1 Nay, 
 more, he was in jeopardy not only every day, but every hour ; humanly speak- 
 ing, he had fought with wild beasts in the great voluptuous Ionic city; he was 
 living every day a living death. He tells us that he was branded like some 
 guilty slave with the stigmata of the Lord Jesus ; 8 that ho was being " Mlied 
 all the day long; 3 that ho was "in deaths oft;" * that he was constantly 
 carrying about with >nm the deadness of the crucified Christ; 6 his life aa 
 endless mortification, his story an inscription on a cross. What wonder if, 
 amid these afflictions, there were times when the heroic soul gave way? What, 
 wonder if he speaks of tears, and trembling, and desolation of heart, and 
 nttor restlessness ; of being pressed out of measure, above strength, despair- 
 ing of life itself, 6 tried almost beyond tho extreme of human endurance 
 without fightings, within fears ? What wonder if ho is driven to declare 
 that if this is all the life belonging to our hopo in Christ, he would be of 
 all men the most miserable ? T And yet, in the strength of the Saviour, how 
 triumphantly he stemmed the overwhelming tide of these afflictions ; in the 
 panoply of God how dauntlessly ha continued to fling himself into the 
 never-ending battle of a warfare which had no discharge. 8 Indomitable 
 spirit ! fiung down to earth, chained like a captive to the chariot- wheels of his 
 Lord's triumph, 9 haled as it wore from city to city, amid bonds and afflictions, 10 
 as a deplorable spectacle, amid the incenso which breathed through the streets 
 in token of tho victor's might he yet thanks God that he is thus a captive, 
 and glories in his many infirmities. Incomparable and heroic soul ! many 
 eaiute of God have toiled, and suffered, and travelled, and preached, and been 
 execrated, and tortured, and imprisoned, and martyred, in the cause of Christ. 
 Singly they towor above tho vulgar herd of selfish and comfortable men ; but 
 yet the collective labours of sonio of their greatest would not equal, nor would 
 their collective sufferings furnish a parallel to those of Paul, and very few of 
 them have been what he was a great original thinker, as well as a devoted 
 practical worker for his Lord. 
 
 But of this period we learn from the Acts only one closing scene, 11 and it 
 is doubtful whether even this is painted for us in colours half so terrible as tho 
 reality. Certain it is that somo of the allusions which we have been noticing 
 must bear reference to this crowning peril, and that, accustomed though ho was 
 to the daily aspect of danger in its worst forms, this particular danger and 
 tho circumstances attending it, which are rather hinted at than detailed, had 
 mado a most intense impression upon the Apostle's mind. 
 
 At the close of about two years, his restless fervour made him feel that ha 
 could stay no longor in the school of Tyrannus. He formed the plau of 
 starting after Pentecost, and visiting once more the churches of Macedonia 
 
 1 1 Coiv iv. 818 ; 2 Cor. iv. 8, 9. 2 Cor. i. 8. 
 
 z Gal. vi. 17. 7 1 Cor. xv. 19. 
 
 * Rom. viii. 36. 8 See Greg. Naz. Oral. ii. 3S 40. 
 
 * 2 Cor. 3d. 23. 2 Cor. ii. 1416. 
 
 * 2 Cor. iv. 10. 10 Acts xx. 23. 
 
 11 There are further hinti in the farewell speech to the Epherian elders (Act* xx. 1885).
 
 PAUL AT BPHESTTS. 369 
 
 and Achaia, which he had founded in his second journey, and of sailing from 
 Corinth to pay a fifth visit to Jerusalem, after which he hoped to see Home, 
 the great capital of the civilisation of the world. 1 In furtherance of this 
 purpose he had already despatched two of his little hand of fellow- workers, 
 Timothy and Erastus, to Macedonia with orders that they were to rejoin him 
 at Corinth. Erastus a if this be the chamberlain of the city was a person 
 of influence, and would have been well suited both to provide for the Apostle's 
 reception and to superintend the management of the weekly offertory, about 
 which St. Paul was at present greatly interested. The visit to Jerusalem was 
 rendered necessary by the contribution for the distressed Christians of that 
 city, which he had been collecting from the Gentile churches, and which he 
 naturally desired to present in person, as the best possible token of forgiveness 
 and brotherhood, to the pillars of the unfriendly community. This had not 
 been his original plan. 3 He had originally intended, and indeed had announced 
 his intention, in a letter no longer extant, 4 to sail straight from Ephesus to 
 Corinth, make his way thence by kind to the churches of Macedonia, sail back 
 from thence to Corinth, and so sail once more from Corinth to Jerusalem. 
 Weighty reasons, which we shall see hereafter, had compelled the abandon- 
 ment of this design. The ill news respecting the condition of the Corinthian 
 churches which he had received from the slaves of Chloe compelled him to 
 write his first extant letter to the Corinthians, in which ho tacitly abandons his 
 original intention, but sends Titus, and with him " the brother," to regulate 
 to the best of their power the gross disorders that had arisen. 6 Probably at 
 the same time he sent a message to Timothy uncertain, however, whether it 
 would reach him in time not to go to Corinth, but either to return to him or 
 to wait for him in Macedonia. The first Epistle to the Corinthians was written 
 about the time of the Passover in April, and probably in the very next month 
 an event occurred which, at the hist moment, endangered his stay and precipi- 
 tated his departure. 
 
 It was now the month of May, and nothing seemed likely to interfere with 
 the peaceful close of a troubled ministry. But this month was specially 
 dedicated to the goddess of Ephesus, and was called from her the Artemisian. 6 
 During the mouth was held the great fair called Ephcsia which attracted 
 an immense concourse of people from all parts of Asia, aiid was kept with all 
 possible splendour and revelry. The proceedings resembled the Christmas 
 iestivities of the middle ages, with their boy bishops and abbots of misrule. 
 The gods were personated by chosen representatives, who received throughout 
 the month a sort of mock adoration. There was an Alytarch, who represented 
 Zeus j a Grammateus, who played the part of Apollo; an Amphithales, who per- 
 
 l Cf. Eom. L 15 ; xv. 2328 ; Acts xix. 21. 
 
 i Eom. xvi. 23 ; 2 Tim. iv. 20, but there is no certainty in the matter. The name 
 was common. 
 
 3 2 Cor. i. 1C 23. V. infra, p. 3S3. 5 1 Cor. xvi. 57. 
 
 6 The decree dedicating the entire month to Artemis has been found by Chandler on 
 a slab of white marble near the aqueduct, and is given by Boeck, Corp. J?wcr. 2954. It 
 is nearly contemporary with the time of St. Paul, 
 13
 
 370 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 eonated Hermes ; and in the numberless processions and litanies, and sacrifices, 
 they paced the streets, and were elevated in public places, arrayed in robes of 
 pure white or of tissued gold, and wearing crowns which were set with car- 
 buncles and pearls. The theatre and stadium wore densely crowded by festive 
 throngs to listen to the musical contests, to watch the horse-races, and the 
 athletic exhibitions, or to look on with thrills of fiercer emotion at the horrible 
 combats of men and beasts. The vast expense of these prolonged festivities and 
 superb spectacles was entirely borne by the College of the ten Asiarchs, who 
 thus fulfilled tho same functions as those of the Curule jEdiles at Rome. They 
 were men of high distinction, chosen annually from the wealthiest citizens of 
 the chief cities of Asia, and it was their duty to preside over the games, and to 
 keep order in the theatre. The heavy pecuniary burden of the office was 
 repaid in honorary privileges and social distinctions. Their names were 
 recorded on coins and in public inscriptions, and the garlands and purple robes 
 which distinguished them during the continuance of the feast were the external 
 marks of tho popular gratitude. 1 
 
 During the sacred month the city rang with every sort of joyous sounds ; 
 gay processions were constantly sweeping to the famous temple ; drunkenness 
 and debauchery wore rife ; even through the soft night of spring tho Agora 
 hummed with the busy throngs of idlers and revellers. 2 It was inevitable that 
 at such a time there should be a recrudescence of fanaticism, and it is far from 
 improbable that the worthless and frivolous mob, incited by the Eunuch priests 
 and Hierodules of Artemis, may have marked out for insult the little congre- 
 gation which met in tho school of Tyrannus, and their well-known teacher. 
 This year there was a perceptible diminution in the fast and furious mirth of 
 the Artemisian season, and tho cause of this falling off was perfectly notorious. 8 
 Not only in Ephesus, but in all the chief cities of Proconsular Asia, deep 
 interest had been excited by the preaching of a certain Paulus, who, in the 
 very metropolis of idolatry, was known to be quietly preaching that they were 
 no gods which were made with hands. Many people had been persuaded to 
 adopt his views ; many more had so far at least been influenced by them as to 
 feel a growing indifference for mummeries and incantations, and even for 
 temples and idols. Consequently there arose in Ephesus " no small stir about 
 that way." Paul and his preaching, the brethren and their assemblages, were 
 in all men's mouths, and many a muttered curse was aimed at them by 
 Megabyzos and Melissae, and the hundreds of hangers-on which gather around 
 every great institution. At last this ill-concealed exasperation came to a head. 
 The chief sufferer from the diminished interest in the goddess and her 
 
 These particulars are mainly derived from the account of Malalaa. 
 
 Achill. Tat. 5. 
 
 * No one will be astonished at this who reads Pliny's account of the utter neglect into 
 which heathen institutions had fallen half a century after this time, in the neighbouring 
 jirovinee of Bithynia, as a direct consequence of Christian teaching, and that though the 
 < Christians were a persecuted sect. There, also, complaints came from the priests, the 
 purveyors of the sacrifices, and other people pecuniarily interested. They had $he 
 sai^city to see that their peril from Christianity lay in its universality,
 
 PAUL AT EPHESUS. 371 
 
 Hieromenia, had been a certain silversmith, named Demetrius, who sold to the 
 pilgrims little silver shrines and images in memorial of their visits to Ephesus ' 
 and her temple. They were analogous to the little copies in alabaster or silver 
 of the shrine of Loretto, and other famous buildings of Italy ; nor was it only 
 at Ephesus, but at every celebrated centre of Pagan worship, that the demand 
 for such memorials created the supply. Demetrius found that his trade waa 
 beginning to be paralysed, and since the emasculate throng of sacred slaves 
 and musicians dared not strike a blow for the worship which fed their lazy 
 vice, he determined, as far as he could, to stop the mischief. Calling together 
 a trades-union meeting of all the skilled artisans and ordinary workmen who 
 were employed in this craft, 2 he made them a speech, in which he first stirred 
 up their passions by warning them of the impending ruin of their interests, 3 
 and then appealed to their latent fanaticism to avenge the despised greatness 
 of their temple, and the waning magnificence of the goddess whom all Asia 
 and the world worshipped. 4 The speech was like a spark on inflammable 
 materials. Their interests wore suffering, 6 and their superstition was being 
 endangered; and the rage which might have been despised if it had only 
 sprung from greed, looked more respectable when it assumed the cloak oi 
 fanaticism. The answer to the speech of Demetrius was a unanimous shout 
 of the watchword of Ephesus, " Great is Artemis of the Ephesians ! " So 
 large a meeting of the workmen created much excitement. Crowds came 
 flocking from every portico, and agora, and gymnasium, and street. The whole 
 city was thrown into a state of riot, and a rush was made for the Jewish 
 quarter and the shop of Aquila. What took place we are not exactly told, 
 except that the life of the Apostle was in extremest danger. The mob was, 
 however, balked of its intended prey. Paul, as in the similar peril at Thos- 
 Balonica, was either not in the house at the time, or had been successfully 
 concealed by Priscilla and her husband, who themselves ran great risk of 
 being killed in their efforts to protect him. 6 Since, however, the rioters could 
 
 1 Called in<f>i&pvna.To. vat&uu aediculae. Chrysostom says T<DS us Kifiiapia. jiucpa. Similar 
 images and shrines are mentioned in Ar. Nub. 598 ; Dio. Sic. i. 15 ; iv. 49 ; Dion Cass. 
 xxxix. 20 ; Dion. Hal. ii. 22 ; Amm. Marcell. xxii. 13 ; Petron. 29. The custom is an 
 extremely ancient one. " The tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god llemphaii, " 
 which the Israelites took up in the wilderness, were of the same description. Little 
 images of Palbis (iroAAa&a TrepiaMrwftopa.) Demeter, &c., were in special request, and an 
 interesting earthenware aedicula of Cybele found at Athens is engraved in Lewin, i. 414. 
 Appuleius (Metam. xi.) says that at the end of the festival small silver images of Artemis 
 were placed on the temple steps for people to kiss. 
 
 3 We learn from numerous inscriptions that guilds and trades-unions (irvvepyamLai, 
 oT>juj3i<i<r) were common in Ionia (see Kenan, p. 355). " rf^vlrai, artifices nobiliores, 
 ipya.Ta.1, operarii " (Bengel). 
 
 3 Cf. Acts xvi. 19. 
 
 4 "Diana Ephesia, cujus nomen unicum, multiformi specie, ritu vario, nomine mul- 
 tijugo, totus veneratur orbit " (Appul. Metam. ii.). Pliny calls the temple " orbis terrarum 
 miraculum " (H. N. xxxvi. 14) ; and the image and temple are found on the coins of 
 many neighbouring cities. 
 
 5 Compare the case of the Philippians (Acts zvi. 19). They were, as Calvin says, 
 fighting for their "hearths" quite as much as their "altars," "ut scilicet culinam 
 habeant bene calentem." 
 
 6 Rom. xvi. 4,
 
 372 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 not find tho chief object of tbeir search, they seized two of his companions 
 Gaius of Macedonia, 1 and the faithful Aristarchus. 8 "With these two men in 
 their custody, the crowd rushed wildly into the vast space of the theatre, 3 
 which stood ever open, and of which the still visible ruins " a wreck of 
 immense grandeur " show that it was one of the largest in the world, and 
 could easily have accommodated 30,000 spectators. 4 Paul, wherever he lay 
 hidden, was within reach of coiainunieation from the disciples. Full of 
 anxiety for the unknown fate of his two companions, he eagerly desired to 
 make his way into the theatre and there address the rioters. There is, 
 perhaps, no courage greater than that which is required from one who, in 
 imminent danger of being torn to pieces, dares to face tho furious insults and 
 raging passions of an exasperated crowd. But the powers and the spirit of the 
 Apostle always rose to a great occasion, and though ha was so sensitive that 
 he could not write a severe letter without floods of tears, and so nervous that 
 he could scarcely endure to be left for even a few days alone, he was quite 
 capable of this act of supreme heroism. He always wished to be in the fore- 
 front of battle for his Master's cause. But his friends better appreciated the 
 magnitude of the danger. Gaius and Aristarchus were too subordinate to be 
 made scapegoats for the vengeance of the crowd ; but they were sure that the 
 mere appearance of that bent figure and worn aiid wasted face, which had 
 become so familiar to many of the cities of Asia, would be the instant signal for 
 a terrible outbreak. Their opposition was confirmed by a friendly message 
 from some of the Asiarchs, 6 who rightly conjectured the chivalrous impulse 
 which would lead the Apostle to confront the storm. Anxious to prevent 
 bloodshed, and save the life of one whose gifts and greatness they had 
 learnt to admire, and well aware of the excitability of an Ephesian mob, they 
 sent Paul an express warning not to trust himself into the theatre. 
 
 The riot, therefore, spent itself in idle noise. The workmen had, indeed, 
 got hold of Gaius and Aristarchus ; but as the crowd did not require theso 
 poor Greeks, whose aspect did not necessarily connect them with what was 
 generally regarded as a mere Jewish sect, they did not know what to do with 
 them. The majority of that promiscuous assemblage, unable to make any- 
 thing of the discordant shouts which were rising on every side, could only 
 guess why they were there at all. There was, perhaps, a dim impression that 
 some one or other was going to be thrown to tho wild beasts, and doubtless 
 among those varying clamours voices were not wanting like those with which 
 the theatre of Smyrna rang not many years afterwards at the martyrdom of 
 Polycarp of "Paul to the lions!" "The Christians to the lions!"' One 
 
 Not Gaius of Derbe (xx. 4) or "mine host " (Rom. xvi. 23). 
 
 5 Aristarchus of Thessalonica is mentioned in xx. 4 ; xxvii. 2 ; Col. iv. 10 ; Philem. 24. 
 8 Cf. Acts xii. 21 ; Tac. II. ii. 80 ; Cic. ad Fam. viii. 2 ; Corn. Nep. TwnoL iv. 2; 
 
 Jos. B. J. vii. 3, 3. The theatre was the ordinary scene of such gatherings. 
 4 Felloweu, Asia Minor, p. 274. "Wood says 25,000 (Ephct. p. 68). 
 
 6 It was the Asiarch Philip at Smyrna, who resisted the cry of the mob, Iva. tVo^jj 
 rioXuicdpTra) Xeoi/ro (Euseb. H. E, iv. 15). 
 
 6 See 1 Cor. iv. 9 ; 1 Cor. XT. 32 ; Act. Mart. Polycarp, 12. The stadium where the 
 Bestiarii fought wag near the theatre, and the Temple of Artemis was in full view of it.
 
 PAUL AT EPHE3U8. 373 
 
 thing, however, was generally known, winch was, that the people whose pro- 
 ceedings were the cause for the tumult were of Jewish extraction, and a 
 Greek mob was never behindhand in expressing its detestation for the 
 Jewish race. The Jews, on the other hand, felt it hard that they, who had 
 long been living side by side with the Ephesians in the amicable relations of 
 commerce, should share the unpopularity of a sect which they hated quite as 
 much as the Greeks could do. They were anxious to explain to the Greeks 
 and Romans a lesson which they could not get them to learn namely, that 
 tho Jews were not Christians, though the Christians might be Jews. Accord- 
 ingly they urged Alexander to speak for them, and explain how matters really 
 stood. This man was perhaps the coppersmith who, afterwards also, did 
 Paul much evil, and who would be likely to gain the hearing of Demetrius 
 and his workmen from similarity of trade. This attempt to shift tho odium 
 on the shoulders of tho Christians entirely failed. Alexander succeeded in 
 struggling somewhere to the front, and stood before the mob with outstretched 
 hand in the attempt to win an audience for his oration. But no sooner had 
 the mob recognised the well-known traits of Jewish physiognomy than they 
 vented their hate in a shout of " Great is Artemis l of the Ephesians!" which 
 was caught up from lip to lip until it was reverberated on every side by the 
 rocks of Prion and Coressus, and drowned all others in its one familiar and 
 unanimous roar. 
 
 For two hours, as though they had been howling dervishes, did this mongrel 
 Greek crowd continue incessantly their senseless yell. 2 By that time they 
 were sufficiently exhausted to render it possible to get a hearing. Hitherto 
 the authorities, afraid that these proceedings might end in awakening Roman 
 jealousy to a serious curtailment of their privileges, had vainly endeavoured to 
 stem the torrent of excitement ; but now, availing himself of a momentary 
 lull, the Recorder of the city either the mock officer of that name, who was 
 chosen by the Senate and people for tho Artemisia, or more probably the 
 permanent city official succeeded in restoring order. 8 It may have been all 
 
 It is, however, very unlikely that St. Paul actually fought with wild beasts. The ex- 
 pression was recognised as a metaphorical one (2 Tim. iv. 17), avb Svpt'as /ue'xpi Pw/-"i* 
 ^npioitaxS, (Ignat. Horn, c. 5) ; oloty eijpiW naxo^efla (Appian, Bell. Civ. p. 273). A legend 
 naturally attached itself to the expression (Niceph, H. E. ii. 25). The pseudo-Heraclitus 
 (Ep. vii.), writing about this time, says of the Ephesians, | avdpuTnav %>ia yeytn-dTes. 
 Moreover, St. Paid uses the expression in a letter written before this wild scene at Ephesus 
 had taken place. 
 
 1 1 preserve the Greek name because their Asian idol, who was really Cybele, had still 
 less to do with Diana than with Artemis. 
 
 2 They probably were so far corrupted by the contact with Oriental worship as to 
 regard their "vain repetitions in the light of a religious function " (see 1 Bangs xviii. 2G ; 
 Matt. vi. 7). Moreover, they distinctly believed that the glory, happiness, and perpetuity 
 of Ephesus was connected with the maintenance of a splendid ritual. On the discovered 
 inscription of the decree which dedicated the entire month of May to the Artemisian 
 Paneguris, are these concluding words : OVTU yap rl rb apeivov TTJ OpijancfMS yu'Oju.&Tjs ^ r<5Ais 
 
 illi.lv cr&otoripa Tt KOJ. eviat/uunv tit rbv irdvro. Stafitvei xpovov (Boeckh, 2,954). It is probable that 
 
 St. Paul may have read this very inscription, which seems to be of the age of Tiberius. 
 
 8 The Proconsul of Asia was practically autocratic, being only restrained by the dread 
 of being ultimately brought to law. Subject to hia authority the chief towns of Asia 
 were autonomous, managing their domestic affairs by the decisions of a Boul6 and
 
 374 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUIi. 
 
 the more easy for him, because one who was capable of making so admirably 
 skilful and sensible a speech could hardly fail to have won a permanent 
 respect, which enhanced the dignity of his position. " Ephesians !" he ex- 
 claimed, " what human being is there who is unaware that the city of the 
 Ephesians is a sacristan 1 of the great Artemis, and the Heaven-fallen ? 
 Since, then, this is quite indisputable, your duty is to maintain your usual 
 calm, and not to act in the precipitate way in which you have acted, 2 by 
 dragging here these men, who are neither temple-robbers, 3 nor blasphemers 
 of your goddess. 4 If Demetrius and his fellow-artisans have any complaint 
 to lod^e against any one, the sessions are going on, 6 and there are proconsuls;' 
 let them settle the matter between them at law. But if you are making any 
 further inquisition about any other matter, it shall be disposed of in the 
 regular meeting of the Assembly. 7 For, indeed, this business renders us liable 
 to a charge of sedition, since we shall be entirely unable to give any reasonable 
 account of this mass meeting." 
 
 The effect of this speech was instantaneous. 
 
 "He called 
 Across the tumult, and the tumult fell," 
 
 The sensible appeal of the " vir pietate gravis " made the crowd repent of 
 their unreasoning uproar, and afraid of its possible consequences, as the 
 Recorder alternately flattered, intimidated, argued, and soothed. It reminded 
 
 Ekklesia. The Recorder acted aa Speaker, and held a very important position. The 
 historic accuracy of St. Luke cannot be more strikingly illustrated than it is by one of 
 the Ephesian inscriptions in Boeckh, No. 2,960, which records how the " Avyustus-loving" 
 (<{>iAocrf'/3aoTos-) senate of the Ephesians, and its temple-adorning (fcuxdpo?) Demos conse- 
 crated a building in the Proconsulship (n-i a.v0vira.Tov) of Peducseus Priscinus, and by the 
 decree of Tiberius Claudius Italicus, the "Recorder" (ypaftnareus) of the Demos. 
 
 1 vtaiKopov, "temple-sweeper." It was an honorary title granted by the Emperor to 
 various cities in Asia, and often recorded on coins. 
 
 2 Acts xix. 36, Ka.Tt<TTa\ti.tvmis inrapxtiv ical ^ujSev wpoitfTts iroitiv. Cicero (pro FldCCo) 
 
 gives a striking picture of the rash and unjust legislation of Asiatic cities, "quum in 
 theatro imperiti homines rerum omnium rudes ignarique considerant " (cf. Tac. H. ii. 80). 
 
 3 Wood, p. 14. This, strange to say, was a common charge against Jews (see on 
 Rom. ii. 22). 
 
 4 Another striking indication that St. Paul's method as a missionary was not to shock 
 the prejudices of idolaters. Chrysostom most unjustly accuses the Recorder of here 
 making a false and claptrap statement. 
 
 4 iyopatot ayoiTou, " Conventus peraguntur " not as in E. V., "the law is open." Every 
 province was divided into districts (SKHK>JO-I?, conventus), which met at some assize town. 
 '' Ephesum vero, alterum lumen Asioe, remotiores conveniunt " (1'lin. H. N. v. 31). 
 
 * There was under ordinary circumstances only one Proconsul in any province. The 
 plural may be generic, or may mean the Proconsul and his assessors (consiliarii), as iy/noi/ 
 means "the Procurator or his assessors" in Jos. B. J. ii. 16, 1. But Basnage has 
 ingeniously conjectured that the allusion may be to the joint authority of the Imperial 
 Procurators, the knight P. Celer, and the freedman Helius. In the first year of Nero, 
 A.D. 54, they had, at the instigation of Agrippina, poisoned Junius Silanus, Proconsul 
 of Asia, whose gentle nature did not preserve him from the peril of his royal blood (Tac. 
 Ann. xiii. 1). As P. Celer at any rate did not return to Rome till the year A.D. 57, 
 it is conjectured that he and Helius may have been allowed to be Vice-Proconsuls till 
 this period by way of rewarding them for their crimes (Lewin, Fasti Sacri, 1806, 1838 ; 
 Biscoe, On the Acts, pp. 282285). 
 
 " There were three regular meetings of the Ausembly (fwo^oi itK\r;<ri<u) every month 
 (and see Wood, p. 50).
 
 PAUL AT EPHESUS. 3?5 
 
 them very forcibly that, since Asia was a senatorial, not an imperial province, 
 and was therefore governed by a Proconsul with a few officials, not by a 
 Propraetor with a legion, they were responsible for good order, and would 
 most certainly be held accountable for any breach of the peace. A day of 
 disorder might forfeit the privileges of years. The Recorder's speech, it has 
 been said, is the model of a popular harangue. Such excitement on the part 
 of the Ephesians was undignified, as the grandeur of their worship was nnim- 
 peached ; it was unjustifiable, as they could prove nothing against the men ; 
 it was unnecessary, as other means of redress were open ; and, finally, if 
 neither pride nor justice availed anything, fear of the Roman power 1 should 
 restrain them. They felt thoroughly ashamed, and the Recorder was now 
 able to dismiss them from the theatre. 
 
 It is not, however, likely that the danger to St. Paul's person ceased, in a 
 month of which he had spoiled the festivity, and in a city which was thronged, 
 as this was, with aggrieved interests and outraged superstitions. Whether 
 he was thrown into prison, or what were the dangers to which he alludes, or 
 in what way God delivered him " from so great a death," * we cannot tell. At 
 any rate, it became impossible for him to carry out his design of staying at 
 Ephesus till Pentecost. 3 All that we are further told is that, when the hubbub 
 had ceased, he called the disciples together, and, after comforting them, 4 bade 
 the Church farewell certainly for many years, perhaps for ever.* He set 
 out, whether by sea or by land wo do not know, on his way to Macedonia. From 
 Silas he had finally parted at Jerusalem. Timothy, Titus, Luke, Erastus, were 
 all elsewhere; but Gaius and Aristarchus, saved from their perilous position 
 in the theatre, were still with tihem, and he was now joined by the two 
 Ephesians, Tychicus and Trophimus, who remained faithful to him till the 
 very close of his career. 
 
 The Church which he had founded became the eminent Christian metro- 
 polis of a line of Bishops, and there, four centuries afterwards, was held the 
 great (Ecumenical Council which deposed Nestorius, the heretical Patriarch 
 of Constantinople. 6 But " its candlestick " has been for centuries " removed out 
 of his place ; " 7 the squalid Mohammedan village which is nearest to its site 
 does not count one Christian in its insignificant population ; 8 its temple is a 
 
 1 Hackett, p. 246. There was nothing on which the Romano looked with such jealousy 
 as a tumultuous meeting, " Qui coetum et conceutum fecerit capitals sit" (Sen. Conlrov. 
 iii. 8). The hint would not be likely to be lost on Demetrius. 
 
 * 2 Cor. i. 10. 
 
 s The period of his stay at Ephesus was rpttrCav oAiji/ (Acts xx. 31). The ruin called 
 "the prison of St. Paul" may point to a true tradition that he was for a time confined, 
 and those who see in Rom. xvi. 3 20, the fragment of a letter to Ephesus, suppose that 
 his imprisonment was shared by his kinsmen Andronicus and Juntas, who were " of note 
 among the Apostles," and earlier converts than himself. 
 
 4 Acts XX. 1, *-apa/caAc'<rat (A, B, D, E). 
 
 * It was only the elders whom he saw at Miletua. '/ovr-it* 
 
 * A.D. 431. 7 Rev. II. 5. 
 
 8 V. supra p. 358. See, for the present condition of Ephesus, Arundell, Seven Churches 
 of Asia, p. 27 ; Fellowes, Asia Minor, p. 274 ; Falkener, Ephesus and the Temple of 
 j>iana; and especially Mr. J. T. Wood's Discoveries at Ephesus. The site of the temple 
 has first been established with certainty by Mr. "Wood's excavation*.
 
 376 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAITI* 
 
 mass of shapeless ruins ; its harbour is s reedy pool ; the bittern booms amid 
 its pestilent and stagnant marshes ; and malaria and oblivion reign supreme 
 over the place where the wealth of ancient civilisation gathered around the 
 scenes of its grossest superstitions and its most degraded sins. " A noisy 
 flight of crows," says a modern traveller, " seemed to insult its silence ; we 
 heard the partridge call in the area of the theatre and the Stadium," l 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIL 
 
 CONDITIOK O THE CHURCH AT COEINTH. 
 
 " Hopes have precarious life ; 
 They are oft blighted, withered, snapt sheer off } 
 But faithfulness can feed on suffering, 
 And knows no disappointment." Spanish Gipsy, 
 
 No one can realise tne trials and anxieties which beset the life of the great 
 Apostle during his stay at Ephesus, without bearing in mind how grave were 
 the causes of concern from which he was suffering, in consequence of the 
 aberrations of other converts. The First Epistle to the Corinthians was 
 written during the latter part of his three years' residence at the Ionian 
 metropolis; 2 and it reveals to us a state of things which must have rent his 
 heart in twain. Any one who has been privileged to feel a deep personal 
 responsibility for some great and beloved institution, will best appreciate how 
 wave after wave of affliction must have swept across his sea of troubles as he 
 heard from time to time those dark rumours from Galatia and Corinth, which 
 showed how densely the tares of the enemy had sprung up amid the good 
 wheat which he had sown. 
 
 Apollos, on his return to Ephesus, must have told him some very un- 
 favourable particulars. St. Paul had now been absent from the Corinthians 
 for nearly three years, and they may well have longed as we see that they did 
 long for his presence with an earnestness which even made them unjust 
 towards him. The little band of converts mostly of low position, and some 
 of them of despicable antecedent? not a few of them slaves, and some of 
 them slaves of the most degraded rank were left in the midst of a heathen- 
 dom which presented itself at Corinth under the gayest and most alluring 
 aspects. It is not in a day that the habits of a life can bo thrown aside. Even 
 those among them whose conversion was most sincere had yet a terrible battle 
 to fight against two temptations: the temptation to dishonesty, which had 
 mingled with their means of gaining a livelihood ; and the temptation to sen- 
 suality, which was interwoven with the very fibres of their being. With 
 Christianity awoke conscience. Sins to which they had once lightly yielded 
 
 * See Chandler, pp. 109137. * Probably about April, A.D. S7,
 
 CONDITION OF THE CHDECH AT CORINTH. 377 
 
 as matters of perfect indifference, now required an intense effort to resist and 
 overcome, and every failure, so far from being at the worst a venial weakness, 
 involved the agonies of remorse and shame. And when they remembered the 
 superficially brighter and easier lives which they had spent while they were 
 yet pagans ;* when they daily witnessed how much sin there might bo with so 
 little apparent sorrow ; when they felt the burdens of their life doubled, and 
 those earthly pleasures which they had once regarded as its only alleviations 
 rendered impossible or wrong while as yet they were unable to realise the 
 exquisite consolation of Christian joy and Cliristian hope they were tempted 
 either to relapse altogether, or to listen with avidity to any teacher whose 
 doctrines, if logically developed, might help to relax the stringency of their 
 sacred obligations. While Paul was with them they were comparatively safe. 
 The noble tyranny of his personal influence acted on them like a spell ; and 
 with his presence to elevate, his words to inspire, his example to encourage 
 them, they felt it more easy to fling away all that was lower and viler, because 
 they could realise their right to what was higher and holier. But when he 
 had been so long away when they were daily living in the great wicked 
 streets, among the cunning, crowded merchants, in sight and hearing of 
 everything which could quench spiritual aspirations and kindle carnal desires; 
 when the gay, common life went on around them, and the chariot- wheels of the 
 Lord were still afar it was hardly wonderful if the splendid vision began to 
 fade. The lustral water of Baptism had been sprinkled on their foreheads; 
 they fed on the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ ; but, alas ! Corinth 
 was not heaven, and the prose of daily life followed on the poetry of their 
 first enthusiasm, and it was difficult to realise that, for them, those living 
 streets might be daily brightened with manna dews. Their condition was like 
 the pause and sigh of Lot's wife, as, amid the sulphurous storm, she gazed 
 back on the voluptuous ease of the City of the Plain. Might they no longer 
 taste of the plentiful Syssiiia on some festive day ? Might they not walk at 
 twilight in the laughing bridal procession, and listen to the mirthful jest ? 
 Might they not watch the Hieroduli dance at some lovely festival in the Tem- 
 ples of Acrocorinth ? Was all life to be hedged in for them with thorny 
 scruples ? Were they to gaze henceforth in dreaming phantasy, not upon 
 bright faces of youthful deities, garlanded with rose and hyacinth, but on the 
 marred visage of One who was crowned with thorns ? Oh, it was hard to 
 choose the kingdom of God ; hard to remember that now they were delivered 
 out of the land of Egypt ; hard for their enervation to breathe the eager and 
 difficult air of the pure wilderness. It was hard to give up the coarse and 
 near for the immaterial and the far ; hard not to lust after the reeking flesh- 
 pots, and not to loathe the light angel food ; hard to give up the purple wine 
 In the brimming goblet for the cold water from the spiritual rock ; hard to 
 
 . 
 l " In the young pagan world 
 
 Men deified the beautiful, the glad, 
 
 The strong, the boastful, and it came to nought ; 
 
 We have raised pain and Borrow into heaven " (Athelv/old).
 
 378 THE LIFE AND WOEK OV ST. PAUL. 
 
 curb and crucify passions which once they had consecrated under guise of 
 religion ; hard not to think all these temptations irresistible, and to see the 
 way of escape which God had appointed them for each ; hard to be bidden to 
 rejoice, and not to be suffered even to murmur at all these hardnesses of life. 
 And the voice which had taught them the things of God had now for so long 
 been eilent; for three years they had not seen the hand which pointed them to 
 Heaven. It was with some of them as with Israel, when Moses was on Sinai: 
 they sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play. Many, very many 
 some in shame and secrecy, others openly justifying their relapse by the devil- 
 doctrines of perverted truth had plunged once more into the impurity, the 
 drunkenness, and the selfishness, as though they had never heard the heavenly 
 calling, or tasted the eternal gift. 
 
 So much even Apollos must have told the Apostle ; and when he had 
 occasion, in a letter now lost l probably because it was merely a brief and 
 businesslike memorandum to write and inform them of his intended, but 
 subsequently abandoned, plan of paying them a double visit, and to bid them 
 contribute to the collection for the poor saints at Jerusalem, he had, in a 
 message which required subsequent explanation, briefly but emphatically 
 bidden them not to keep company with fornicators. 8 
 
 And now a letter had come from Corinth. So far from dwelling on the 
 ruinous disorders into which many members of the Church had fallen, it was 
 entirely self-complacent in tone ; and yet it proved the existence of much 
 doctrinal perplexity, and, in asking advice about a number of practical 
 subjects, had touched upon questions which betrayed some of the moral 
 and intellectual errors which the Church, in writing the letter, had so dis- 
 ingenuously concealed. 3 
 
 1. After greeting him, and answering him, hi words which he quotes, that 
 " they remembered him in all things, and kept the ordinances as he delivered 
 them," 4 they had asked him a whole series of questions about celibacy and 
 marriage, which had evidently been warmly discussed in the Church, and 
 decided in very different senses. Was married life in itself wrong, or if not 
 wrong, yet undesirable ? or, if not even undesirable, still a lower and less 
 worthy condition than celibacy ? When persons were already married, was it 
 their duty, or, at any rate, would it be saiutlier to live together as though they 
 were unmarried ? Might widows and widowers marry a second time ? Were 
 mixed marriages between Christians and heathens to be tolerated, or ought 
 a Christian husband to repudiate a heathen wife, and a Christian wife to leave 
 a heathen husband ? and ought fathers to seek marriages for their daughters, 
 or let tiiem grow up as virgins ? 
 
 2. Again, what were they to do about meats offered to idols P They had 
 
 1 The spurious letter of the Corinthians to St. Paul, and hia answer, preserved in 
 Armenian, are perfectly valueless. 
 
 2 Seel Cor. x.5 14. 
 
 * The interchange of such letters (nY^H) on disputed points of doctrine between the 
 synagogues was common, 
 1 Cor. zi. 2.
 
 CONDITION OP THE CHUECH AT COBINTH. 379 
 
 prefaced thoir inquiry on this subject with the conceited remark that " they 
 all had knowledge," * and had perhaps indicated their own opinion by the 
 argument that an idol was nothing in the world, and that all things were 
 lawful to their Christian freedom. Still, they wished to know whether they 
 might ever atteud any of the idol festivals ? The question was an important 
 one for the poor, to whom a visceratio 2 was no small help and indulgence. 
 Was it lawful to buy meat in the open market, which, without their knowing 
 it, might have been offered to idols ? Might they go as guests to their heathen 
 friends and relations, and run the risk of partaking of that which had been 
 part of a sacrifice ? 3 
 
 3. Then, too, a dispute had risen among them about the rule to be observed 
 in assemblies. Was it the duty of men to cover their heads ? Might women 
 appear with their heads uncovered ? And might they speak and teach in public ? 
 
 4. They had difficulties, also, about spiritual gifts. Which was the more 
 important, speaking with tongues or preaching ? When two or three began 
 at the same time to preach or speak with tongues, what were they to do ? 
 
 5. Further, some among them had been perplexed by great doubts about 
 the Resurrection. There were even some who maintained that by the Resur- 
 rection was meant something purely spiritual, and that it was past already. 
 This view had arisen from the immense material difficulties which surrounded 
 the whole subject of a resurrection of the body. Would Paul give them his 
 solution of some of their difficulties ? 
 
 6. He had asked them to make a collection for the poor in Judaea : they 
 would be glad to hear something more about this. What plans would he 
 recommend to them ? 
 
 7. Lastly, they were very anxious to receive Apollos once moro among 
 them. They had enjoyed his eloquence, and profited by his knowledge. 
 Would Paul try to induce him to come, as well as pay them his own promised 
 visit? 
 
 Such, we gather from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, were the in- 
 quiries of a letter which had been brought to the Apostle at Epheeus by 
 Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus. It was inevitable that St. Paul should 
 talk to these worthy slaves about the Church of which they were the delegates. 
 There was quite enough in the letter itself to create a certain misgiving in 
 
 1 1 Cor. viii. 1. 
 
 a Public feasts at funerals or idol festivals, c., Cic. Off. ii. 16 ; Liv. viii. 32, &c. 
 They played a large part in the joy and plenty of ancient life. Arist. Eth. viii. 9, 5 ; 
 Thuc. ii. 33. 
 
 3 The Jews had strong feelings on this subject (cf. Num. xxv. 2 ; Ps. cvi. 28 ; Tob. i. 
 10 14) ; but it is monstrous to say that St. Paul here teaches the violation of such 
 scruples, or that he is referred to in Rev. ii. 14. On the contrary, he says, " Even if 
 you as Gentiles think nothing of it, still do not do it, for the sake of others ; only the 
 concession to the weak need not become a tormenting scrupulosity." It is doubtful 
 whether even St. Peter and St. John would not have gone quite as far as this. So strict 
 were Judaic notions on the subject that, in the case of wine, for instance, not only did 
 a cask of it become undrinkable to a Jew if a single heathen libation had been poured 
 from it, but " even a touch with the presumed intention of pouring away a little to the 
 gods is enough to render it unlawful, ' This is called the law of fD>
 
 380 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 his mitid, and some of its queries woro sufficient to betray an excited state of 
 opinion. But -when ho came to talk with these visitants from Chloo's house- 
 hold, and they told him the simple truth, he stood aghast with horror, and 
 was at the same time overwhelmed with grief. Reluctantly, bit by bit, in 
 answer to his questionings, they revealed a state of things which added dark- 
 ness to the night of his distress*. 
 
 8. First of all, he learnt from them that the Church which he had founded 
 was split up into deplorable factions. 
 
 It was the result of visits from various teachers who had followed in the 
 wake of Paul, and built upon his foundations very dubious materials by way 
 of superstructure. " Many teachers, much strife," had been one of the wise 
 and pregnant sayings of the great Hillel, and it had been fully exemplified 
 at Corinth, where, in the impatient expression of St. Paul, they had had " ten 
 thousand pedagogues." The great end of edification had been lost sight of in 
 the violences of faction, and all deep spirituality had been evaporated in dis- 
 putatious talk. He heard sad rumours of " strifes, heartburnings, rages, 
 dissensions, backbitings, whisperings, inflations, disorderiiness." l 
 
 i. It became clear that even the visit and teaching of Apollos had done 
 harm harm which he certainly had not intended to do, and which, as a loyal 
 friend and follower of Paul, he was the first to regret. Paul's own preaching 
 to these Corinthians had been designedly simple, dealing with the great broad 
 fact of a Redeemer crucified for sin, and couched in language which made no 
 pretence to oratorical ornament. But Apollos, who had followed him, though 
 an able man, was an inexperienced Christian, and not only by the natural charm 
 of his impassioned oratory, but also by the way in which he had entered into 
 the subtle refinements so familiar to the Alexandrian intellect, had uninten- 
 tionally led them first of all to despise the unsophisticated simplicity of St. 
 Paul's teaching, and next to give the rein to all the sceptical fancies with 
 which their faith was overlaid. Both the manner and the matter of the fervid 
 convert had so delighted them that, with entire opposition to his own wishes, 
 they had elevated him into the head of a party, and had perverted his views 
 into dangerous extravagances. These Apollonians were so puffed up with 
 the conceit of knowledge, so filled with the importance of their own in- 
 tellectual emancipation, that they had also begun to claim a fatal moral h'bsrty. 
 They had distracted the Sunday gatherings with the egotisms of rival oratory j 
 had shown a contemptuous disregard for the scruples of weaker brethren ; 
 had encouraged women to harangue in the public assemblies as the equals of 
 men; were guilty of conduct which laid them open to the charge of the 
 grossest inconsistency ; and even threw the cloak of sophistical excuse over 
 one crime so heinous that the very heathen were ready to cry shame on the 
 offender. In the accounts brought to him of this Apollos-party, St. Paul 
 could not but see the most extravagant exaggeration of his own doctrines 
 the hilf truths, which ara ever the most dangerous of errors. If it was poa- 
 
 i 2 Cor. lii. 20.
 
 CONDITION OF THE CHUECH AT COEINTH. 381 
 
 sible to wrest the truths which he himself had taught into the heretical notions 
 which were afterwards promulgated by Marcion, his keen eye could detect in 
 the perversions of the Alexandrian eloquence of Apollos the deadly germs of 
 what would afterwards develop into Antinomian Gnosticism. 
 
 ii. But Apollos was not the only teacher who had visited Corinth. Some 
 Judaic Christians had come, who had been as acceptable to the Jewish mem- 
 bers of the Church as Apollos was to the Greeks. 1 Armed with commendatory 
 letters from some of the twelve at Jerusalem, they claimed the authority of 
 Peter, or, as they preferred to call him, of Kephas. They did not, indeed, teach 
 the necessity of circumcision, as others of their party did in Galatia. There 
 the local circumstances would give some chance of success to teaching which 
 in Corinth would have been rejected with contempt ; and perhaps these parti- 
 cular emissaries felt at least some respect for the compact at Jerusalem. But 
 yet their influence had been very disastrous, and had caused the emergence of 
 a Potrino party in the Church. This party the ecclesiastical ancestors of 
 those who subsequently vented their hatred of Paul in the Pseudo-Clemen- 
 tines openly and secretly disclaimed his authority, and insinuated disparage- 
 ment of his doctrines. Kephas, they said, was the real head of the Apostles, 
 and therefore of the Christians. Into his hands had Christ entrusted the keys 
 of the kingdom ; on the rock of his confession was the Church of the Messiah 
 to be built. Paul was a presumptuous interloper, whose conduct to Kephaa 
 at Antioch had been most unbecoming. For who was Paul ? not an Apostle 
 at all, but an unauthorised innovator. Ho had been a persecuting Sanhedrist, 
 and he was an apostate Jew. What had he been at Corinth ? A preaching 
 tent- maker, nothing more. Kephas, and other Apostles, and the brethren of 
 the Lord, when they travelled about, were accompanied by their wives or by 
 ministering women, and claimed the honour and support to which they were 
 entitled. Why had not Paul done the same ? Obviously because he felt the 
 insecurity of his own position. And as for his coming again, a weak, vacillat- 
 ing, unaccredited pretender, such as he was, would take care not to come 
 again. And these preachings of his were heretical, especially in their pro- 
 nounced indifference to the Levitic law. Was he not breaking down that 
 hedge about the law, tho thickening of which had boen the life-long task of 
 centuries of eminent Rabbis ? Very different had been the scene after 
 Peter's preaching at Pentecost ! It was tho speaking with tongues not mere 
 dubious doctrinal exhortation which was the true sign of spirituality. We 
 are more than sure that the strong, and tender, and noble nature of St. Peter 
 would as little have sanctioned this subterranean counter-working against the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, as Apollos discountenanced the impious audacities 
 which sheltered themselves under his name. 
 
 1 The circumstances of Corinth were very similar when Clement wrote them his first 
 Epistle. He had still to complain of that "strange and alien, and, for the elect of God, 
 detestable and unholy spirit of faction, which a few rash and self-willed persons 
 (irpoawira) kindled to such a pitch of dementation, that their holy and famous reputation, 
 BO worthy of all men's love, was greatly blasphemed " (Ep. ad. Cor, i.),
 
 382 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 iii. And then had come another set of Judaisers one man in particular 
 to whom the name of even Kephas was unsatisfactory. He apparently was- 
 or, what is a very different thing, he professed to be an adherent of James, 1 
 and to him even Peter was not altogether sound. He called himself a 
 follower of Christ, and disdained any other name. Perhaps he was one of 
 the Desposyni. At any rate, he prided himself on having seen Christ, and 
 known Christ in the flesh. Now the Lord Jesus had not married, and James, 
 the Bishop of Jerusalem, was unmarried ; and this teacher evidently shared 
 the Essene abhorrence of marriage. He it was who had started all the 
 subtle refinements of questions respecting celibacy and the married life. He 
 it was who gathered around him a few Jews of Ebionite proclivities, who 
 degraded into a party watchword even the sacred name of Christ. 2 
 
 9. Thus, as St. Paul now learnt fully for the first time, the Church of Corinth 
 was a scene of quarrels, disputes, partisanships, which, in rending asunder 
 its unity, ruined its strength. On all these subjects the Corinthians, in their 
 self-satisfied letter, had maintained a prudent but hardly creditable silence. 
 Nor was this all that they had concealed. They had asked questions about 
 spiritual gifts ; but 'it was left for the household of Chloe to break to St. 
 Paul the disquieting news that the assemblies of the Church had degenerated 
 into scenes so noisy, so wild, so disorderly, that there were times when any 
 heathen who dropped in could only say that they were all mad. Sometimes 
 half a dozen enthusiasts were on their legs at once, all pouring forth wild 
 series of sounds which no human being present could understand, except that 
 sometimes, amid these unseemly and might they not at times, with some of 
 these Syrian emissaries, be these half-simulated ecstasies, there were heard 
 words that made the blood run cold with shuddering horror. 3 At other 
 times, two or three preachers would interrupt each other in the attempt to 
 gain the ear of the congregation all at the same moment. Women rose to 
 give their opinions, and that without a veil on their heads, as though they 
 were not ashamed to be mistaken for the Hetairae, who alone assumed such an 
 unblushing privilege. So far from being a scene of peace, the Sunday ser- 
 vices had become stormy, heated, egotistic, meaningless, unprofitable. 
 
 10. And there was worse behind. It might at least have been supposed 
 that the A gapae would bear some faint traditional resemblance to their name, 
 and be means of reunion and blessedness worthy of their connexion with the 
 Eucharistic feast ! Far from it ! The deadly leaven of selfishness display- 
 
 We cannot for a moment believe that Peter and James really approved of the 
 methods of these men, because to do so would have been a flagrant breach of their own 
 compact (Gal. ii. 9). But it is matter of daily experience that the rank and file of 
 parties are infinitely less wise and noble than their leaders. 
 
 2 About the Christ party there have been three main views : (1) That they were 
 adherents of James (Storr, &c.) ; (2) that they were neutrals, who held aloof from all parties 
 (Eichhorn, &c. ) ; (3) that they were a very slight modification of the Peter-party (Baur, 
 Paul. i. 272 292). It is remarkable that to this day there is in England and America 
 a sect, which, professing to disdain human authority, usurps the exclusive name of 
 " Chriatians " (see Schaff . Apost. Ch. i. 339). 
 
 3 1 Cor. xii. 3 (cf. 1 John ii. 22 ; iv. 13) ; 'A
 
 CONDITION OF THE CHUECH AT COEINTH. 88S 
 
 ing itself in its two forms of sensuality and pride had insinuated itself even 
 into these once simple and charitable gatherings. The kiss of peace could 
 hardly be other than a hypocritical form between brethren, who at the very 
 moment might be impleading one another at law before the tribunal of a 
 heathen Praetor about some matter of common honesty. The rich brought 
 their luxurious provisions, and greedily devoured them, without waiting for 
 any one ; while the poor, hungry-eyed Lazaruses half -starved slaves, who 
 had no contributions of their own to bring watched them with hate and 
 envy as they sat furnishing and unrelieved by their full-fed brethren. Greedi- 
 ness and egotism had thus thrust themselves into the most sacred unions ; 
 and Ihe besetting Corinthian sin of intoxication had been so little restrained 
 that men had boon soon to stretch drunken hands to the very chalice of the 
 Lord! 
 
 11. Last and worst, not only had uncleanness found its open defenders, so 
 that Christians were not ashamed to be seen sitting at meat amid the lasci- 
 vious surroundings of heathen temples, but one prominent member of the 
 Church was living in notorious crime with his own stepmother during the 
 lifetime of his father ; and, though the very Pagans execrated this atrocity, 
 yet he had not been expelled from the Christian communion, not even made 
 to do penance in it, but had found brethren ready, not merely to palliate his 
 offence, but actually to plume themselves upon leaving it unpunished. This 
 man seems to have been a person of distinction and influence, whom it was 
 advantageous to a Church largely composed of slaves and women to count 
 among them. Doubtless this had facilitated his condonation, which may have 
 been founded on some antinonian plea of Christian liberty; or on some Rabbinic 
 notion that old ties were rendered non-existent by the new conditions of a 
 proselyte ; or by peculiarities of circumstance unknown to us. But though 
 this person was the most notorious, ho was by no moans the only offender, and 
 there were Corinthian Christians even many of them who wore impeiii- 
 tently guilty of uncleaimess, fornication, and lasci riousness. 1 In none of 
 his writings are the Apostle's warnings against this sin the besetting sin of 
 Corinth more numerous, more solemn, or more emphatic. 2 
 
 Truly, as he heard this catalogue of iniquities while he listened to the dark 
 tale of the shipwreck of all his fond hopes which he had learnt to entertain 
 during the missionary labour of eighteen mouths the heart of St. Paul must 
 have sunk within him. He might well have folded his hands in utter despair. 
 He might well have pronounced his life and his preaching a melancholy 
 failure. He might well have fled like Elijah into utter solitude, and prayed, 
 " Now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers." 
 But it was not thus that the news affected this indomitable man. His heart, 
 indeed, throbbed with anguish, his eyes were streaming with tears, as, having 
 heard to the bitter end all that the slaves of Chloe had to tell him, he pro- 
 ceeded to make his plans. First, of course, his intended brief immediate 
 
 2 Cor, *ii, 2L > 1 Cor. T. 11 ; ri. 15-18 ; x. 8 ; xv. 33, 34,
 
 384 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 yisit to Corinth must be given up. Neither he nor they were yet in a mood 
 in wLicli their meeting could be otherwise than infinitely painful He must 
 at once despatch Titus to Corinth to inform them of his change of plan, to 
 arrange about the collection, and to do what little he could, before rejoining 
 him at Troas. He must also despatch a messenger to Timothy to tell him not to 
 proceed to Corinth at present. And then he might have written an apocalyptic 
 letter, full of burning denunciation and fulminated anathemas ; he might have 
 blighted these conceited, and lascivious, and quarrelsome disgracors of the name 
 of Christian with withering invectives, androUed over their trembling consciences 
 thunders as loud as those of Sinai. Not such, however, was the tone he adopted, 
 or the spirit in which he wrote. In deep agitation, which he yet managed 
 almost entirely to suppress, summoning all the courage of his nature, forgetting 
 all the dangers and trials which surrounded him at Ephesus, asking God for the 
 wisdom and guidance which he so sorely needed, crushing down deep within 
 him all personal indignations, every possible feeling of resentment or egotism 
 at the humiliations to which he had personally been subjected, he called 
 Sosthenes to his side, and flinging his whole heart into the task immediately 
 before him, began to dictate to him one of the most astonishing and eloquent 
 of all his letters, the first extant Epistle to the Corinthians. Varied as are 
 the topics with which it deals, profound as were the difficulties which iiad 
 been suggested to him, novel as were the questions which he had to face, 
 alienated as were many of the converts to whom he had to appeal, we see at 
 once that the Epistle was no laborious or long-polished composition. En- 
 lightened by the Spirit of God, St. Paul was in possession of that insight 
 which sees at once into the heart of every moral difficulty. He was as capable 
 of dealing with Greek culture and Greek sensuality as with Judaic narrow- 
 ness and Judaic Pharisaism. He shows himself as great a master when he 
 is applying the principles of Christianity to the concrete and complicated 
 realities of life, as when he is moving in the sphere of dogmatic theology. 
 The phase of Jewish opposition with which he has here to deal has been modified 
 by contact with Hellenism, but it still rests on grounds of ezternalisni, and 
 must be equally met by spiritual truths. Problems however dark, details 
 however intricate, bocoino lucid and orderly at onco in tho light of external 
 distinctions. In teaching his converts St. Paul had no need to burn the mid- 
 night oil in long studies. Even his most elaborate Epistles were in reality 
 not elaborate. They leapt like vivid sparks from a heart in which the fire 
 of love to God burnt until death with an ever brighter and brighter flame. 
 
 1. His very greeting shows th.3 fulness of his heart. As his authority had been 
 impugned, he calls himself " an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God," and 
 addresses them as a Church, as sanctified in Christ Jesus, and called to be saints, 
 uniting with them in. the prayer for grace and peace all who, whatever their differ, 
 ing shades of opinion or their place of abode, call upon the name of our Lord Jesus 
 Ciiriflt, both theirs and ours. 1 Thus, in his very address to them, lie strikes the 
 
 i "Est enim haec periculosa tentatio nullam Ecclesiam putare ubi non apparent perfects 
 puritas" (Calvin). The absence of fixed ecclesiastical organisation is clew, as fie addresses tt$
 
 CONDITION OP THE CHTJECH AT CORINTH. 385 
 
 kav-note of his own claim to authority, and of the unity and holiness which they so 
 deeply needed. " Observe, too," says St. Chrysostom, " how he ever nails them 
 down to the name of Christ, not mentioning any man either Apostle or teacher 
 but continually mentioning Him for whom they yearn, as men preparing to awaken 
 those who are drowsy after a debauch. For nowhere in any other Epistle ia the 
 name of Christ so continuously introduced ; here, however, it is introduced frequently, 
 and by means of it ho weaves together almost his whole exordium." 1 
 
 2. Although he has united Sosthonos* with him in the superscription, he 
 continues at once in the first person to tell them that ho thanks God always for the 
 grace given them in. Christ Jesus, for the eloquence and knowledge with which 
 they were enriched in Hun, so that in waiting for the Apocalypse of Christ, they 
 were behindhand in no spiritual gift ; and as the testimony of Christ was confirmed 
 among them, so should Christ confirm them to be blameless unto the end, since God 
 was faithful, who had called them unto the communion of His Son Jesus Christ our 
 Lord.* 
 
 3. That communion leads him at once to one of the subjects of which hia heart- 
 is full. He has heard on indisputable authority, and not from one person only, of 
 schisms and strifes among them, and he implores them by the name of Christ to 
 strive after greater unity in thought and action. 4 They were saying, " I am cf 
 Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Kephas, and I of Christ." What! has Christ been 
 parcelled into fragments r 6 Some of them called themselves his party ; but had hs 
 been crucified for thorn ? had they been baptised into Aw namo ? It may be that 
 Apollos, fresh from his discipleship to John's baptism, had dwelt very prominently 
 on the importance of that initial rite ; but so liable were men to attach importance 
 to the mere human minister, that Paul, like his Master, had purposely abstained 
 from administering it, and except Crispus and Gaius and, as he afterwards recalls, 
 Stephanas and his household ho cannot remember that he has baptised any of them. 
 Christ had sent him not to baptise, but to preach ; and that not in wisdom of utter- 
 ance, that Christ's cross might not bo rendered void. The mention of preaching 
 brings him to the aberrations of the Apollonian party. They had attached immense 
 importance to eloquence, logic, something which they called and exalted as wisdom. 
 He shows them that they were on a wholly mistaken track. Such human wisdom, 
 such ear-flattering eloquence, such superficial and plausible enticements, he had 
 deliberately rejected. Of human wisdom he thought little. It lay under the ban 
 of revelation. 6 It had not led the world to the knowledge of God. It had not 
 saved the world from the crucifixion of Christ. And, therefore, he had not preached 
 to them about the Logos, or about JEons, or in Philonian allegories, or with philo- 
 sophical refinements. He had offered neither a sign to the Jews, nor wisdom to the 
 Greeks. What he had to preach was regarded by the world as abject foolishness 
 it was the Cross it was the doctrine of a crucified Messiah, which was to the Jews 
 revolting ; of a crucified Saviour, which was to the Greeks ridiculous ; but it pleased 
 
 entire community, and holds no " bishops " responsible for the disorders, and fox carrying out the 
 axcommunication. 
 
 1 1 Cor. i. 13. The name of Christ occurs no less than nino times iu the first nine verses. 
 
 * Whether the Sosthencs of Acts xviii. 17, who may have been subsequently converted (Wetst. 
 H. 57(5), or an unknown brother, we do not know. He may have been one of the bearers of the 
 Corinthian letter to Ephcsus ; " ona ef ths seventy, and afterwards Bishop of Colophon " (Euseb. 
 H . B. i. 12). 
 
 * 1. 49. Observe the perfect sincerity of tho Apostle, lie desires, aa always, to thank God 
 on behalf ef his converts ; here, however, ho has no moral praise to imply. Tho Corinthians have 
 received rioh spiritual blessings and ebaowittjfaitf. but he CPU not speak of thorn as he does cf tiia 
 Thessalouians or Philippians. 
 
 * Ver. 10, vot KOI . . . yv<uLi.-r>, " iutus in crcdeudis, et Bfintentia prolati in agendis " (Bengel). 
 
 * It is deeply instructive to observe that St. Paul here refuses to eater Into the differences of 
 view from which the parties sprang. He does not care to decide which section of wrangling 
 " theologians " or " churchmen " is right and which is wrong. He denounces the tpMt of party as 
 a sin and a shame where unity between Christians is the first of duties and the greatest of 
 advantages. 
 
 6 i. 20. rov <rvfTi)j K. T, &,, but is Is, zxziU, IS (of. Ps. xlviii, 13), " wktn is he v:ha ooitnttth 
 & toirsrs } "
 
 336 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 God to save believers by the foolishness (in the world's view) of the thing preached, 1 
 and it was to those who were in the way of salvation the wisdom and the power of 
 God. They wore not the wise, and the mighty, and the noble of the world, but, as 
 a rule, the foolish, and the weak, and the despised. 2 It was not with the world's 
 power, but with its impotences ; not with its strength, but with its feebleness ; not 
 with its knowledge, but with its ignorance ; not with its rank, but its ignobleness ; 
 not with kings and philosophers, but with slaves and women, that its divine forces 
 were allied ; and with them did God so purpose to reveal His power that no glory 
 could accrue to man, save from the utter abasement of human glory. That was 
 why Paul had come to them, not with rhetoric, but with the simple doctrine of 
 Christ crucified ; s not with oratorio dignity, but in weakness, fear, and trembling ; 
 not with winning elocution, but with spiritual demonstration and spiritual power 
 so that man might be utterly lost in God, and they might feel the origin of their 
 faith to be not human but divine. 4 
 
 4. Yet thev must not be misled by his impassioned, paradox into the notion that 
 the matter and method of his teaching was really folly. On the contrary, it was 
 wisdom of the deepest and loftiest kind only it was a wisdom of God hidden from 
 the wise of the world ; a wisdom of insight into things which eye hath not seen nor 
 ear heard, and which had never set foot on human heart,* but which were revealed 
 to him by that Spirit which alone searcheth the depths of God, 8 and which he had 
 taught in words not learnt from wisdom, but from that same Spirit of God, com- 
 bining spirituals with spirituals. 7 And this spiritual wisdom was, to the natural 
 man, 8 folly, because it could be only discerned by a spiritual faculty of which the 
 natural man was absolutely devoid. It was to him what painting is to the blind, or 
 music to the deaf. 9 But the spiritual man possesses the requisite discernment, and, 
 sharing the mind of Christ, is thereby elevated above the reach of merely natural 
 judgment. 
 
 5. And then, with wholesome irony, he adds that this divine condition, which 
 was earthly folly, he could only teach them in its merest elements ; in its perfection 
 it was only for the perfect, but they, who thought themselves so wise and learned, 
 were in spiritual wisdom fleshen babes, needing milk such as he had given them, 
 not meat, which they being fleslily were still too feeble to digest. 10 These might 
 soem hard words, but while there were envy, and strife, and divisions among them, 
 how could they be regarded as anything but fleshy and unspiritual P Paul and 
 Apollos ! who were Paul and Apollos but mere human ministers ? Paul planting, 
 Apollos watering neither of them anything in himself, but each of them one 
 in their ministry, and each responsible for his own share in it. God only gave the 
 harvest. " God's fellow- workers are we ; God's acre, God's building are ye." Paul, 
 
 1 i. 21, tiii TTJ? niapia.s roC *7)pu'y|u.aTo, not "the foolishness of preaching" (icypJe<a<;). In 23, 24 
 " cross," " Btumblingblock," " folly," " power " would be respectively nceel, mitcol, mashcal, secel, 
 an-! some see in it a sign that St. Paul had in his thoughts a Syriac paronomasia (Winer, N. T. 
 Grumm., E. T., p. 658). 
 
 * A needful warning to " Corinthios non minus las ci via, quam opuUntid, tt philosophiac studio 
 insignes " (Cic. Dt Leg. Ayr. ii. 32). 
 
 J All the more remarkable because " a Corinthian style " meant " a polished style " (Wetst. 
 orf Joe.). 
 
 * i. 19 ; H. 5 ; cf. Jer. ix. 23, 24 ; Isa. xxxiii. 18, Is freely cited from the LXX. 
 
 * Possibly a rogue echo of Isa. Ixiv. 4 (cf. Hi. 15, and Ixv. 17) ; or from some lost book (Chrys.) 
 like the " Revelation of Elias," iiri unpSidv aveftrj, 37 V? rfrf. Both explanations are possible, for 
 the lost book may hare echoed Isaiah. A modern theory regards the words as liturgical. 
 
 8 Ver. 10. The attempt to make Rev. ii. 24 an ironical reference to this is most baseless. 
 ' Ver. 13, wvevnariKolt ircfufiartxa (rvvKpiVotres, others render it " explaining spiritual things to 
 spiritual men " (Gen. xl. 8 ; Dan. v. 12 ; LXX.) or " in spiritual words." 
 
 * Ver. 14, I^VYIKOC, " homines solius auimae et caruis " (Tert. Dejejun. 17). 
 
 * ii. 6 16. lie refutes the Alexandrian teaching by accepting its very terms and principle 
 " mystery," " initiated," " spiritual man," Ac., but showing that it is an eternal universal, reality, 
 not some apprehension of particular men (see Maurice, Unity, p. 40S). 
 
 " iii. 2, o-opicirot ; 4, <rapKi*otf . A severe blow at Alexandrian conceit. He has to treat them 
 not as adepU but as novices, not as hierophants but as uninitiated, not a " theologians," but ad 
 ratechnmens, fur tht wry rrxunn tli.it they thought o much of the mselvet (cf. the exactly analogous 
 of our Lord in John ix. 41).
 
 CONDITION OF THE CHTJBCH AT COEINTH. 387 
 
 as a wise master-builder, has laid the foundation ; others were building on it all 
 sorts of superstructures. But the foundation was and could be only one namely, 
 Christ and the gold, silver, precious marbles, logs, hay, stubble, built on it should 
 be made manifest in its true quality in God's ever- revealing fire, 1 and if worthless, 
 should be destroyed, however sincere the builder might be. If his superstructure 
 was sound, he would be rewarded ; if perishable, it would be burnt in the consuming 
 flame, and he should suffer loss, though he himself, since he had built on the true 
 foundation, would be saved as by fire. 1 Did they not know then that they were a 
 temple, a holy temple for the spirit of God ? If any man destroy God's temple, God 
 shall destroy him. And human wisdom might destroy it, for before God human 
 wisdom was folly. The mere human wisdom of this or that favourite teacher has 
 nothing to do with the real building. If a man wanted Divine wisdom, let him 
 gain it by the humble paths of what was regarded as human folly. How unworthy, 
 then, to be boasting about mere human teachers how unworthy was it of their own 
 immense privilege and hope when all things were theirs Paul, Apollos, Kephas, 
 the universe, life, death, the immediate present, the far future all theirs, and they 
 Christ's, and Christ God's. Their party leaders were but poor weak creatures at 
 the best, of whom was required one thing only faithfulness. As for himself ha 
 regarded it as a matter utterly trivial whether he were judged by their tentative 
 opinions or by man's insignificant feeble transient day;* nay, he even judged not 
 himself. lie was conscious iiidi-od of no sin as regards his ministry; 4 but even on 
 that he did not rely as his justification, depending only on the judgment of the Lord. 
 " So then be not ye judging anything before the due time until the Lord come, who 
 shall both illuminate the crypts of darkness and reveal the counsels of the heart." 
 Then, and not till then, shall the praise which he deserves, and no other praise, 
 accrue to each from God.* 
 
 6. He had, with generous delicacy, designedly put into prominence his own 
 name and that of Apollos (instead of those of Kephas or the Jerusalem emissary) aa 
 unwilling loaders of factions which they utterly deprecated, that the Corinthians 
 might learn in their case not to estimate them above the warrant of their actual 
 words,' and might see that he was actuated by no mere jealousy of others, when he 
 denounced their inflated exasperation amongst themselves in the rival display of 
 what after all, even when they existed, where not intrinsic merits, but gifts of God. r 
 And what swelling self-appreciation they showed in all this party spirit ! For 
 them the hunger, and the poverty, and the struggle, are all over. What plentitude 
 and satiety of satisfaction you have gained ; how rich you are ; what thrones you 
 sit on ; and all without us. Ah, would it were really so, that we might at least 
 share your royal elevation 1 For the position of us poor Apostles is very different. 
 " God, I think, displayed us last as condemned criminals, 3 a theatric spectacle to the 
 universe, both angels and men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in 
 Christ ; we weak, but ye strong ; ye glorious, but we dishonoured. Up to this very 
 
 1 iii. IS, an-oKoAvirrerai, By calling this & vraeseni futuroKxnt, and not recognising the normal, 
 unceasing operation of the moral laws of God, commentators have missed a great truth (cf. Matt. 
 Iii. 10 ; Col. iii. 6 ; Eph. v. fi). 
 
 * St. Paul does not care to make his metaphor " run on all fours." The general application in 
 sufficient for him. (See Keruss, Let Xjpttres, t. 189.) 
 
 * ir. 8, rn.raxpi.8ia. An onakn'jw was an examination preliminary to trial. ij*i<'pc this 
 forcible expression has been explained M a Hebraism (Jer. xvii. 16), a Cilicitm (Jer. oti Alyat. 10), 
 and a Latlnism (diem dicere, &c., Grot.). 
 
 * Ver. 4. outer . . . iu.a.vrta <n!foiia, " I am conscious of no guilt " (" Nil conseire sibi," Hor. 
 Ep. I. i. 61). " I know nothing by myself," in this sense is old English. " I am norry that each 
 fault can b proved by the queen " (Cranmer, Letter to Henry VIII.). 
 
 * iv. 14. 
 
 ' iv. 6. The word bpovilv is omitted by th chief Uncials. I take nit vwip 5 -ycypmrrai to be a 
 sort of proverb, like " keep to your written evidence." Throughout this section St. Paul's mind is 
 full of the word " inflation " (4>v<ri.ov<rtt ; ver. 18, i^vo-iciftjcrav ; 19, irefyvaiKiiivtav ; v. 2, tra^va-uait.ivoi. ; 
 viii. 1, rj yiWis- fviTioi ; xiii. 4, >) ymf v ^va-i0r<u). This is because when St. Paul comes to 
 them, he is afraid of finding this vice of a conceited theology. 2 Cor. xil. 20, 4>vo-iw<m{ . Else where 
 the word only occur* in Col. ii. 18. 
 
 ' if. 7, T W <rJ JiaitpiVft ; 
 
 * IT. 9. ws nriSoi-aTtovf, " velutt Stftiarloi" Tert. Dt Fwfie. 14).
 
 3S8 THS LIFE AND TVOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 hour we both hunger and thirst, and are ill-clad, 1 and aro buffeted, and are hustled 
 from place to place, and toil, -working with our own hands ; being abused, we bless ; 
 being persecuted, we endure ; being reviled, we entreat : as refuse of the universe 2 
 are we become, the offscouring of all things till now." These are bitter and ironical 
 words of contrast between you and us, I know ; but I write not as shaming you. I 
 am only warning you as my beloved children. For, after all, you are my children. 
 Plenty of teachers, I know, have followed ma ; but (and here comes one of his 
 characteristic impetuosities of expression) even if you have a myriad pedagogues 8 
 in Christ however numerous, or stern, or authoritative you have not many 
 fathers. It was I who begot you through the Gospel in Christ Jeans, and I there- 
 fore entreat you to follow my example ; and on this account I sent you my beloved 
 and faithful son Timothy, to remind you of my invariable practice and teaching. 4 
 Do not think, however, that I am afraid to confront in person the inflated opposition 
 of some who say that I do not really moan to come myself. Come I will, and that 
 soon, if the Lord will ; and will ascertain not what these inflated critics say, but 
 what they arc; not their power of talk, but of action. " But what will ye ? Am I 
 to come to you with a rod, or in love and the spirit of gentleness P"* 
 
 7. One thing at least needs the rod. A case of incest of a son taking his 
 father's wife BO gross, that it does not exist even among the heathen, 8 is absolutely 
 notorious among you, and instead of expelling the offender with mourning and 
 shame, you oh ! strange mystery of the invariable connexion between sensuality 
 and pride have been inflated with sophistical excuses about the matter.* " I, at 
 any rate, absent in body, but present in spirit, have already judged as though 
 actually present the man who acted thus in this thing, in the name of our Lord 
 Jesus ChrLst you being assembled together, and my spirit which is present with 
 you, though my body is absent with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to hand 
 over such a man to Satan, for destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved 
 in the day of the Lord Jesus Christ." 8 If any passage of the letter was written 
 with sobs, which are echoed in his very words, as Sosth&nes wrote them down from 
 his lips, it is this. He summons up the scene and sentence of excommunication. 
 He is absent, yet he is there ; and there, with the power of Christ, he pronounces 
 the awful sentence which hands over the offender to Satan in terrible mercy, that by 
 destruction of hia flesh he may bo saved in the spirit. And then he adds, " The 
 subject of your self-glorification is hideous. 9 Know ye not that a little leaven 
 leaveneth the whole lump ? Purge out then at once the old leaven, that ye may be 
 a new lump, as ye are (ideally) unleavened. 10 For indeed our Passover is slain n 
 
 Cf. 3 Cor. xi. 27. 
 
 * irepiKdUfapfiara, purgamenta, '" things rile, and worthless, and to be flung awav," not " piaeular 
 offerings," ro;'^rj(xo. The Scholiast on Ar. Pint. 456, says, that in famines and plagues It -was an 
 ancient Greek and Roman custom to wipe off guilt by throwing wretches into the sea, with the 
 words " Bewmi our j/erifwma,." The reference here is probably less specific, but of. Prov. mn, 13 
 *\$~\3 (L2QC-), Tob. v. IS. iyia a-epA^ia <rov became (from this view) & common Christian expression 
 (Wordsworth, ad lot.). 
 
 * iV. 15, 7T<u5a-yu>yoi"? 
 
 * St. Paul liad already gent him, before the necessity had arisen for the more immediate despatch 
 of Titus ; but he seems to have countermanded t!;e order, uncertain, however, whether the mcssen- 
 got would reach him in time, and ratlier expecticg that Timothy would arrive among them before 
 himself (" if TimotheiiB come," xvl 10). In any ca.ss the Corinthians would have hoard that 
 Timothy had been sent to come to them through Macedonia, and Paul's enemies drew very 
 unfavourable inferences from tbLj. 
 
 iv. 621. 
 
 * The oi'o/iifrrai, "ia named," of cmrtext is spurious, being omitted in ^, A, B, C, D, E, P, G. 
 AM to tho fact Illustrated by tho almost local trsgfdy of Tlirp o'.ytus, scs C'ic. pro Cluent. 5, " mulieris 
 acelus inodibile et praeter hauc unarn in omui vita maudittuii" (Wetst. ad Joe.). 
 
 i This might seem inconceivable ; but v. tupra, p. 388. 
 
 * It was the last awful, reluctant declaration, that a man who has wilfully chosen an evil 
 
 for UB," virep ji>r i-s a doctrinal gloss 
 
 lot found in A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
 
 CONDITION OP THE CHURCH AT COEIXTH. 889 
 
 Christ. Let us, then, keep tho feast, not with the old leaven, neither with leaven 
 of vice and wickedness, but with unleavenodness of sincerity and truth." * 
 
 And here he pauses to explain a clause in his last Epistle which had excited 
 surprise. In it he had forbidden them to associate with fornioators. This had led 
 them to ask the astonished question 2 whether it was really their duty to go out of 
 the world altogether ? His meaning was, as he now tells them, that if any Chrittian 
 wero notoriously guilty, either of fornication or any ether deadly sin, 3 with such 
 they were not to associate, not even to sit at table with thorn. They really need 
 not have mistaken his meaning on this point. What had he, what had they, to do 
 with judging the outer world ': This passage reads like a marginal addition, and he 
 adds the brief, uncompromising order, "Put away at once that wicked* man from 
 among yourselves." 4 
 
 8. The allusion to judging naturally leads him to another point. Dare they, the 
 destined judges of the world and of angels, go to law about mere earthly trifles, and 
 that before the heathen? Why did they not rather set up the very humblest 
 members of the Church to act as judges in such matters ? Shame on them ! So 
 wise and yot no one of them wise enough to bo umpire in mere trade disputes ? 
 Better by far have no quarrels among themselves, but suffer wrong and loss; but, 
 alas ! instead of this some of them inflicted wrong and loss, and that on their own 
 brethren. Then follows a stern warning the unj ust should not inherit tho kingdom 
 of God " Be not deceived" the formula by which ha always introduces his most 
 solemn passages neither sensual sinners in all their hideous varieties, nor thieves, 
 nor over-reachers, nor drunkards, nor rovilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the 
 kingdom of God. "And these abject things some of you wore;* but ye washed 
 yourselves, but ye wore sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus, and the Spirit of our God." It is evident that some of them were liable to be 
 deceived ; that they liked to be deceived on this point, and they seem to have boldly 
 said that the Christian is free, that " all things are lawful" to him because he is no 
 longer under the law, but under grace. " All things are lawful to me." Yes, says 
 St. Paul, but all things are not expedient. " All things are lawful to me." Yes, but 
 I will not become the slave of the fatal tyranny of anything. The case of meats, 
 which perhaps they adduced to show that they might do as they liked, irrespective 
 of the Mosaic law, was not a case in point. They were a.5td<popa matters 01 indif- 
 ference about which each man might do as ho liked ; they, and the belly which 
 assimilated them, were transient things, destined to be done away with. Not BO the 
 body ; that was not erented for fornication, but for tho Lord, and as God had raised 
 Christ BO should He raise the bodies of Christ's saints. And then thus casually as 
 it were in this mere passing reference he lays down for all time the eternal princi- 
 ples which underlie the sacred duty of chastity. lie tolls them that their bodies, 
 their members, are not their own, but Christ's ; that the union with Christ 13 
 destroyed by unions of uncleanness ; that sensuality is a sin against a man's own 
 body ; that a Christian's body is not his own, but a temple of the indwelling Spirit, 
 and that he is not his own, but bought with a price. " Therefore," he says, feeling 
 that he had now laid down truths which should be impregnable against all scepticism, 
 " glorify God in your body." 8 
 
 9. This paragraph, touching as it has done on the three topics of chastity, meats 
 offered to idols, ana the resurrection, introduces very naturally his answers to their 
 inquiries on these subjects, and nobly wise they are in their charity, their wisdom, 
 their large-heartedneas. He is not speaking of marriage in the abstract, but of 
 
 * V. 19. * V. 10, r o^tiAerc apa, r. T. A. 
 
 Ver. 11, "OP KL idolater." Evidently as In z. 7 ; CoL Hi. 5 ; otherwise how could he be a 
 Christian? Unless he is thinking of iome hybrid Christian of the type of Constantine, who " bowed 
 in the house of Rimmon." 
 
 * v. 913, 'EopaT*. The al (omitted in , A, B, C, V, O) is spurious, ani spoils the character- 
 istic abruptness. 
 
 * vt 11, TO.VTO. rive? f,Tt. 
 
 6 Ti. 120. The words which follow in our version, K<U T irvfjficwi i/xay, Snrd. ttmro 
 tK, omitted in , A, B, C, D, E, F, O. . " '
 
 890 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 marriage regarded with reference to the near advent of Christ, and relating to th 
 circumstances and conditions of the most corrupt city of ancient Greece. The 
 Corinthian letter seems to have been written by those members of the Church who, 
 partly it may be in indignant revolt against the views of the small faction which 
 had adopted Antinomian opinions, seem to have regarded celibacy as the only perfect 
 form of life. In the abstract, somewhat hesitatingly, and with the confession that 
 here he is not sure of his ground, and is therefore offering no authoritative decision, 
 St. Paul on the whole agrees with them. 1 " He quotes, with something of approval, 
 their dictum that the maiden life is the best, 2 and utters the wish that all had the 
 same spiritual grace* the charisma of continence as he himself. But since this 
 was not the case, as a permitted remedy against the universal prevalence of un- 
 chastity, he recommended (but not by way of distinct injunction) that Christians 
 should live together, and with no long ascetic separations, in the married state. 4 As 
 regards widowers 5 and widows their celibacy for the rest of their lives would be an 
 honourable state, but immediate marriage would be better than long-continued 
 desires.' Divorce had been discouraged by Christ himself, and on that analogy he 
 pronounced against any voluntary dissolution of unions already existing between 
 Pagans and Christians, since the children of such unions were holy, and therefore 
 the unions holy, and since the believing wife or husband might win to the faith 
 the unbelieving partner. The general rule which he wished all Christians to 
 observe was that they should abide in the state in which they were called, 
 whether circumcised or uncircumcised, since " circumcision is nothing, and 
 uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping of the commandments of God." 7 Even 
 if a Christian were a slave and might obtain bis freedom, it would be better 
 for him to brook slavery, 8 seeing that earthly relations were utterly insignificant 
 
 1 " If we compare the letter of Gregory the Great to Augustine (in Bede), in answer to inquiries 
 not altogether dissimilar, respecting the Anglo-Saxon converts, we see at once how immeasurably 
 more decisive and minute the Pope Is than the Apostle" (Maurice, Unity, p. 423). The chapter ia 
 the best manual for the din-tor duiit-mtium, because it teat-lies him " that he must not give himself 
 airs of certainty on points where certainty is not to be had" (id. 429). See Kuencn, Profeten, ii. 67 
 ttq., and Lord Lyttelton in Contemp. Rev. xxl. p. 91". 
 
 ' vti. 1, KoXoo dfffpun-ai yvvcucbf ^ airrrcrOat. St. Jerome's characteristic comment is that " If It 
 Is good for a man not to toich a woman, It must be bad to do so, and therefore marriage is, to say 
 the least, inferior to celibacy." Si Paul's own distinct permission, and in some cases injunction, to 
 marry, might have shown him hpw false and dangerous are the results which spring from the undue 
 pressure of incidental words (Eph. v. 24 ; 1 Tim. ii. 15, 4c.) St. Paul does not say "good" (a-yoflov), 
 but "fair" (which he afterwards limits by the present need, ver. 26), as we might say, " there is in 
 holy celibacy a certain moral beauty." Hence Jerome's " Suspecta est mihi bonitas rei quam mag- 
 nitude alterius mail tnaluin cogit esse infer! us" (adv. Jovin. i. 9) is a mistake. Celibacy is ta\ov, 
 but there are tome for whom marriage is even xoAAiov. See for the use of xoAos Matt, xvill. 8, xxvl. 
 24 ; 1 Tim. L 8. It is curious to see the ascetic tendency at work in vii. 3 (o^>iXoM<i^v Wav, and 
 6, nij vijcrmo xai, and crxoAa<njr* and oWpxiprtfc for ^re). The true readings are found In k, A, B, 0, 
 D, F, though not followed in our version. 
 
 3 vii. 7, C.'Au, but in later years his deliberate decision OouXo/uu) wag that younger widowf 
 should marry (1 Tim. v. 14). 
 
 * TiL 17. 
 
 * roif ayoifioic, . rupra, pp. 45, 46. 
 
 ' Ver. 9, yofujavu (aor.), >) irvpoucrtfcu (pree.). 
 
 1 1 Cor. vu. IS, 19. The M>! jri<rir<i<r0u> refers to a method of obliterating the sign of the covenant 
 adopted by apostate Jews in times of persecution (1 Mace. i. 15 ; Jos. Antt. xii. 5, 1), and which a 
 Christian might be tempted to adopt to save him from that ridicule which the manners of ancient 
 life brought upon Jews (Mart. xvii. 29). The Rabbis decided that one who had done this must be 
 re-circumcised. R. Jehudah denied this, because of the danger; but the wise men replied that it 
 had been frequently done with no injurious results in the days of Bar-Coziba (YebhamAth, t. 72, 1 ; 
 Buztorf, Ice. Cluild., 8. v. -r co , methooklm = recutiti). 
 
 * 1 Cor. vii. 21, oAA' fi cat jurourcu (Xtvdcpof ytvtvOtu, p.aAAor XP1< r < u - I have taken iotiXeif U 
 the word to be understood with Chrysostorn. Theodoret, Luther, Rungel, De Wette, Meyer, &e. ; cf. 
 1 Tim. ri. 2. I take this view i. Because the whole argument turns on the desirability of itaying 
 in the present condition, whatever it is, with a view to the nearness of the day of the Lord. ii. 
 Because this was the view arrived at also by the lofty Stoic moralists who, like Bptctetus, knew that 
 even a slave could live a noble life (Epictet. DUsert. iii. 20 ; Erich, x., xxxii.). Earthly conditions 
 were but a xpij<rit ^tamfiinr; cf. CoL iii. 22. iii. Because St. Paul may have been thinking at the 
 lomcnt of the Christian slaves of Christian masters who would Lie treated aa bro 
 
 , 
 
 yp-r)<7flai, rather implies the continuance of an existing th-iu the acceptance of a new condition. 
 Otherwise we can hardly imagine his giving such advice. sin't ' a "w is to abide in his 
 
 thers, iv. Because 
 a new condition. 
 in his calling if ii
 
 CONDITION OF THK CHURCH AT COBINTH. 391 
 
 when regarded from the spiritual standpoint. 1 As to virgins he could only 
 give his opinion that, considering the present distress, and the nearness of the end, 
 and the affliction which marriage at such a period brought inevitably in its train, it 
 was better for them not to marry. Marriage, indeed, he told them distinctly, waa 
 no sin, but he wished to spare them the tribulation it involved ; he did not wish 
 them, now that the time was contracted, 3 and the fleeting show of the world waa 
 passing away, to bear the distracting burden of transient earthly ani human cares, 
 or to use the world to the full,* but to let their sole care be fixed on God.* If then 
 a father determined not to give his maiden daughter in marriage, he did well ; but 
 if a lover sought her hand, and circumstances pointed that way, he was not doing 
 wrong in letting them marry." Widows might re-marry if they liked, but in ac- 
 cordance with the principles which he had been laying down, he thought they would 
 be happier if they did not. It was but his wish and advice ; he asserted no Divine 
 authority for it ; yet in giving it he thought that he too had as other teachers had 
 claimed to have the spirit of God. 8 
 
 10. As to the pressing question a question which bore on their daily life 7 about 
 meats offered to idols, he quotes, but only by way of refutation, their self-satisfied 
 remark that they "all had knowledge" knowledge at the best was a much smaller 
 thing than charity, and the very claim to possess it was a proof of spiritual pride 
 and ignorance. If they knew that an idol was nothing in the world, and their 
 conscience as to this matter was quite clear and strong, it was no sin for them 
 personally to eat of these sacrifices ; but if others, whose consciences were weak, 
 saw them feasting in idol temples, and were led by this ostentatious display of 
 absence of scruple 8 to do by way of imitation what they themselves thought wrong, 
 then this knowledge and liberty of theirs became a stumbling-block, an edification 
 of ruin, 9 a source of death to the conscience of a brother ; and since thus to smite 
 the sick conscience of a brother was a sin against Christ, he for one would never 
 touch flesh again while the world lasted rather than be guilty of putting a fatal 
 difficulty in a brother's path. 10 
 
 be not hurtful to faith and morals" (Aug. ad Gal. H. 11); but that could hardly be said of slavery. 
 " Impudicitia ... in servo uccessifcis" (Sen. Uontrov. iv., I'raef.). " Enfants, ils grandissaient en 
 desordre ; vieillards, ils mouraient souvent <lans la misere " (Wallon, De I'Esclayage, i. 332). 
 
 1 vii. 10 24. Verses 17 24 are a little digression on the general principle that it is best to 
 remain contentedly in our present lot. In ver. 23 he says, with a fine play on words, " You are slaves 
 in one sense ; do uot become so in another." 
 
 Ver. 29, <rvvrr<i\ii.fvos. 
 
 1 Ver. 31, Karaxpuntvoi ; cf. ix. 12. 18. ii.iptfj.vq, niiraptSpov, aircprira<rrw; ; cf. Luke 3C. 41. 
 
 Alone of nations the Jews implied the sanctity of marriage by every name that they gave it. 
 Kiddvshin from kadosh, "to sanctify ;" mekadesh, " a bridegroom," &c. The phrase Hare ath mekoo- 
 desheth It, " Behold tliou art sanctified for mo," la still addressed by the bridegroom to the brida 
 (Rahbinowicz, Ltgislat. Criminelle du Talmud, p. 227). 
 
 vii. 25. On the rights of Jewish fathers over their unmarried daughters see Ktt\ihh6tH, f. 46, 2. 
 They were so absolute that he might even *// his daughter (A'l'MuyAin. M l> ; Ketiihhnth, 46 h). When 
 however she reached the "flower of her age," she might refuse any husband given her l>efore she 
 was really nulile. Her refusal was technically called mit'm -.v^(Yel,luanoth, 107 J>). bhe niyJU even 
 be married while yet a kttanal i.e., not yet twelve. When she reached that age she was called 
 naarah (mrj), and six months later was held to have reached her full maturity, and become a bag- 
 roth, rvnj}- See the Talmndic authorities in Rabbinowicz, Trad, des Traitfs Synhedrin, <Cc., Legis- 
 lation Criminelle du Talmud, p. 214 ; Weill, La Femmt Juive, pp. 1114. On the car* for widows, 
 id. p. 72. 
 
 vii. 140. 
 
 7 To this day the Jewish slaughterer, who must pass a coarse of study, practically decides what 
 is clean (thor) and unclean (t&mf). When he has discovered that an animal has no legal blemish he 
 attaches to it a leaden seal with the word ' ' lawful " (kdehAr) on it ; (Disraeli, Cent ut of J uJaim, 158 ; 
 Diet. Bibl. s. v. Pharisee* ; McCaul, Old Paths, 380 3S6, 396 i02 ; . tupra, p. 245. 
 
 Ver. 10. Such feasts were often in temples : 
 
 " Hue illia curia temp] urn, 
 Hue lacris eedei epulia; bin r.riVtx caeco 
 P.Tpcttils loliti rtrc oiliBidcre mi>u." (-#. vii. 174J 
 Cf. Hdt. 1. 81 ; Judg. IT. 27 ; 2 Kings xix. 37. 
 
 Tert. De Pratscr. Haer. 8. 
 
 10 viii. 1 13. Here, as usual, St. Paul shows himself transcendently superior to the Rabbis. 
 In Alhoda Za.ro. t. 8, 1, R. Ishmael lays down the rule that if Israelites " outside the. land " are
 
 392 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 11. And at this point begins a remarkable digression, which, though a digression, 
 iudirectly supported the position which some of his adversaries had impugned, and 
 though personal in its details, is, in Paul's invariable manner, made subservient to 
 eternal truths. They might object that by what he had said he was curtailing their 
 liberty, and mating tho conscience of the weak a fetter upon the intelligence of the 
 strong. Well, without putting their objection in so many words, he would show 
 themthat he practised what he taught. He, too, was free, and an Apostle, their 
 Apostle at any rate, and had every right to do aa the other Apostles did the 
 Desposyni, and Kephas himself in expecting Churches to support them and their 
 wives. 1 That right he even defends at some length, both by earthly analogies of 
 the soldier, husbandman, and shepherd, 2 and by a happy Rabbinic midrash on the 
 non-muzzling of the ox that treadeth out tho corn ; s and by tho ordinary rules of 
 gratitude for benefits received ; 4 and by the ordinance of the Jewish Temple, 5 and 
 the rule of Christ; 6 yet plain as the right was, and strenuously as he maintained it, 
 he had never availed himself of it, and, whatever his enemies might say, he never 
 would. He must preach the Gospel ; he could not help himself ; his one reward 
 would be the power to boast that lie had not claimed his rights to the fuU, but had 
 made the Gospel free, and so removed a possible source of hindrance. Free, then, 
 aa he was, he had made himself a slave (as in one small particular he was asking 
 them to do) for the sake of others ; a slave to all, that he might gain the more ; 
 putting himself in their place, meeting their sympathies, and even their prejudices, 
 half way ; becoming a Jew to the Jews, a legalist to legalists, without law to those 
 without law (never, however, forgetting his real allegiance to the law of Christ)/ 
 weak to the weak, all things to all men in order by alf means to save somo. And if 
 he thus denied himself, should not they also deny themselves ? 8 In their Isthmian, 
 games each strove to gain the crown, and what toil and temperance they endured to 
 win that fading wreath of pine ! Paul did the same. He ran straight . <3 goal. 
 Ho aimed straight blows, and not in feint, at the enemy ; * nay, he even ;kened 
 his body with blows, and led it about as a slave, 10 lest in any way after a^ -ng as 
 herald to others he himself should be rejected from the lists. 11 
 
 If he had to strive so hard, could the y afford to take things so easily P The 
 Israelites had not found it so in the wilderness ; they, too, were in a sense baptised 
 unto Moses in the cloudy pillar and the Eed Sea waves ; 12 they, too, in a sense par- 
 took of the Eucharist in eating the heavenly manna, and drinking of the sym " ilic 
 following rock ; 18 yet how many 14 of them fell because of gluttony, and idolatry, ^nd 
 
 tsked to a Gentile funeral they " eat of the sacrifices of the dead," even if they take with them thsir 
 own food and are waited on by their own servants. In confirmation of which hard and bigoted da- 
 cision he refers to Ex. xxxiv. 15, from which ha inferred that the acceptance of the invitation was 
 equivalent to eating the sacrifice. R. Joehanan the Choronite would not eat moist olives, even in a 
 time of famine, if bundled by an am haarets, because they might hava absorbed water, and so 
 become unclean (YelHanoth, f. 15, 2). 
 
 I I have here endeavoured to make clear the by no means obvious connexion of thought which 
 runs through these chapters. Possibly there may have been some accidental transposition. Those 
 who consider 2 Cor. vi. 14 vii. 1, to be misplaced, find an apt space for it here. 
 
 * IT. 7. is. 810. * 11, 12. * 13. 14. 
 
 7 He describes the concessions (<royicaTa0a(ric) of love. " Paulus non fuit aaomus, nedum 
 antinomus" (Bengel). "The Lawless" is the name by which be is covertly calumniated in the 
 spurious letter of Peter to James (CUmcntinss, ch. ii.). 
 
 In these paragraphs exhortations to the general duty of self-denial are closely mingled with 
 the arguments in favour of the particular self-denial concession to the weak which he Is urging 
 'throughout this section. " In the one party faith was not strong enough to beget a liberalising 
 knowledge, not strong enough, in the other to produce a brotherly love" (Kling). 
 
 His was no shain fight (o-x ta^aWa) ; he struck anything rather than the air (is ovie if pa &4p*n>). 
 The B.V. renders as though it were OVY w; pa Stpuv. Cf. yEn. v. 446, and Wetst. ad loc. 
 
 10 vroiriafw; lit., "blacken with blows under the eyes, as in a fight." " Lividum facio corpus 
 ineum et in servitutem rodigo" (Ircn. iv. 7). 
 
 II lx. 1 27 ; Mipvt'of, the Christian herald of the laws of the, contest, is alao a candidate in it. 
 l * FiduciA verbi Mosu commiscrant se aqnis (Melanethon). 
 
 u *. 4 xi. 1. Th division of chapters here stops a verse too short. OB St. Paul's spiritualisa- 
 tton and praotioal application of Old Testament history, gee sttura, PP. 3783. For other instances 
 toe v. T ; GaL IT. M : Heb. vil. Ac.). 
 
 u x. a. Twenty-t?w thousand." Perhaps a o-#LV^a pmtpwucbi' for 24,000 (Num. sxv. 9}.
 
 CONDITION OF THE CfitTRCH A.T COfclNTH. 393 
 
 iust, and rebellion, and murmuring, and were awful warnings against overweening 
 eetf -confidence ! Yea, the path of duty was difficult, but not impossible, and no 
 temptation waa beyond human power to resist, because with the temptation God 
 provided also the escape. Let them beware, then, of all this scornful indifference 
 about idolatry. As the Eucharist united them in closest communion with Christ, 
 and with one another, so that by all partaking of the one bread they became one 
 body and one bread, so the partaking of Gentile sacrifices was a communion with 
 demons, 1 The idol was nothing, as they had urged, but it represented an evil spirit: 8 
 and fellowship with demons was a frightful admixture with their fellowship in 
 Christ, a dangerous trilling with their allegiance to God. He repeats once more 
 that what ia lawful ia not always either expedient or edifying. Let sympathy, not 
 selfishness, be their guiding principle. Over-scrupulosity was not required of them. 
 They might buy in the market, they might eat, at the private tables of the heathen, 
 what they would, and ask no questions ; but if their attention was prominently drawm 
 to the fact that any dish waa part of an idol-offering, then though they might urge 
 that "the earth waa the Lord's, and the fulness thereof," and that it was hard for 
 them to be judged, or their liberty abridged in a purely indifferent act, which they 
 might even perform in a religious spirit still let them imitate Paul's own example, 
 which he had just fully explained to them, which was, indeed, Christ's example, and 
 consisted in being absolutely unselfish, and giving no wilful offence either to Jews 
 or Gentiles, or the Church of God. 
 
 In this noble section of the Epistle, so remarkable for its tender consideration 
 and its robust good sense, it is quite clear that the whole sympathies of St. Paul are 
 theoretically with the strong, though he seems to fool a sort of practical leaning to 
 the ascetic side. He does not, indeed, approve, under any circumstances, of an 
 ostentatious, defiant, insulting liberalism. To a certain extent the prejudices even 
 the absurd and bigoted prejudices of the weak ought to be respected, and it was 
 selfish and wrong needlessly to wound them. It was above all 'wrong to lead them 
 by example to do violence to their own conscientious scruples. But when these 
 scruples, and this bigotry of the weak, became in their turn aggressive, then St. 
 Paul quite sees that they must be discouraged and suppressed, lest weakness should 
 lay down the law for strength. To tolerate the weak was one thing ; to let them 
 tyrannise was quite another. Their ignorance was not to be a limit to real know- 
 ledge ; their purblind gaze waa not to bar up the horizon against true insight ; their 
 slavish superstition waa not to fetter the freedom of Christ. In matters where a 
 little consideratocess and self-denial would save oSence, there the strong should give 
 up, and do less than they might ; but in matters which affected every day of every 
 year, like the purchase of meat in the open market, or the acceptance of ordinary 
 invitations, then the weak must not attempt to be obtrusive or to domineer. Some, 
 doubtless, would use hard words about these concessions. They might charge St. 
 Paul, as they had charged St. Peter, with violating the awful and fiery law. They 
 might call him " the lawless one," or any other ugly nick-name they liked ; he waa 
 not a man to be "feared with bugs," or to give up a clear and certain principle to 
 avoid an impertinent and senseless clamour. Had he been charged with controver- 
 
 1 Cf. 2 Cor. vi. 14 sea. Evil spirits occupied a large part of the thoughts and teaching of Jewish 
 Rabbis ; e.g., Lilith, Adam's first wife, was by him the mother of all demons (Psachim, f. 112, 2). Ag 
 the Lord's Supper puts the Christian in mystical union wiin Christ, so partaking of idol feasts puts 
 the partaker into symbolic allegiance to devils. Pfleiderer con pares the Greek legend that by eating 
 & fruit of the nether world a man is given over to it (PaiMnlsm, I. 239). 
 
 8 The heathen gods as idols were tlSui\a, Elilvm, supposititious, unreal, imaginary ; but tn 
 another aspect they were demons. The Rabbis, in the same way, regard idols from tiro points <4 
 view viz., as dead material things, and as demons. " Callest thou an idol a dog?" said "a philoso- 
 pher" to Rabban Gamaliel. " An idol is really something." " What is it?" asked Gamaliel. "Thew 
 was once a conflagration in our town," said the philosopher, " and the temple of the idol remaitia.J 
 Intact when every house was burnt down." At this remark the Rabban is silent (Abhoda, Za.ro, t 5^ 
 SV Almost in the very words of St Paul, onan once said to R. Akibha, " Both thou and I know 
 that an idol hath nothing in it ;" but he proceeds to ask how it ia that miracles of healing are un- 
 doubtedly wrought at idol shrines ? Akibha makes the healing a mere accidental coincidence with 
 the time when the chastisements would naturally have been withdrawn (Athoda Zara, t. 55, 1). 
 14
 
 394 TflE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. FATTL. 
 
 ting the wise and generous but local and temporary agreement which has been 
 exalted into "the decree of the Council of Jerusalem," he would have quietly 
 answered that that was but a recommendation addressed to a few predominantly 
 Jewish Churches; that it did not profess to have any universal or permanent 
 authority ; and that he was now arguing the case on its own merits, and laying 
 down principles applicable to every Church in which, as at Corinth, the Gentiles 
 formed the most numerous element. 
 
 12. A minor point next claimed his attention. Some men, it appears, had sat 
 with covered heads at their assemblies, and some women with uncovered heads, and 
 they had asked his opinion on the matter. Thanking them for their kind expres- 
 sions of respect for his rules and wishes, he at once decides the question on the 
 highest principles. As to men it might well have seemed perplexing, since the 
 Jewish and the Eoman custom was to pray with covered, and the Greek eustom to 
 to pray with uncovered, heads. St. Paul decides for the Greek custom. Christ is 
 the head of the man, and man might therefore stand with unveiled head before God, 
 and if he veiled his head he did it needless dishonour, because he abnegated the high 
 glory which had been bestowed on him by Christ's incarnation. Not so with the 
 woman. The head of the woman is the man, and therefore in holy worship, in the 
 presence of the Lord of her lord, she ought to appear with veiled head. 1 Nature 
 itself taught that this was the right decision, giving to the woman her veil of hair, 
 and teaching the instinctive lesson that a shorn head was a disgrace to a woman, as 
 long hair, the sign of effeminacy, was a disgrace to a man. The unveiled head of 
 the man was also the sign of his primeval superiority, and the woman having been 
 'the first to sin, and being liable to be seduced to sin, ought to wear " power on her 
 head because of the angels."* Man and woman were indeed one in Christ, but for 
 that very reason these distinctions of apparel should be observed. At any rate, 
 St. Paul did not mean to enter into any dispute on the subject. If nature did 
 not teach them that he had decided rightly, he could only refer them to the 
 authority of custom, and that ought to be decisive, except to those who loved 
 contentiousness. 1 
 
 13. Then follows a stern rebuke all the sterner for the self-restraint of its twice- 
 repeated "I praise you not" for the shameful selfishness and disorder which they 
 had allowed to creep into the love-feasts which accompanied the Supper of the Lord 
 especially the gluttony, drunkenness, and ostentation of the wealthier members of 
 the community, and the contemptuous indifference which they displayed to the needs 
 and sensibilities of their poorer neighbours. The simple narrative of the institution 
 and objects of the Supper of the Lord, which he had received from the Lord and 
 delivered unto them, and the solemn warning of the danger which attended ita 
 profanation, and which was already exhibited in the sickness, feebleness, and deaths 
 of many among them, is meant to serve as a remedy against their gross disorders. 
 He tells them that the absence of a discrimination (SidKptons) in their own hearts had 
 rendered necessary a judgment (icpl(j.a) which was mercifully meant as a training 
 
 1 For tamaian, see Stanley, Corinth, ad tee. The attempts to read exiousa, &c., are absurd. The 
 word may be a mere colloquialism, and if so we may go far astray in trying to discover the explana- 
 tion of it If St. Paul invented it, it may be a Hebraism, or be meant to Imply her own true power, 
 which rests in accepting the sign of her husband's power over her. Chardin says that in Persia a 
 veil is the sign that married women " are under subjection." Compare Milton's 
 
 "She as a yell down to the slender waist 
 Her unadorned goUlcn tresses wore . . 
 As the vine waves Us tendrils, which implied. 
 Subjection, but required with gentle sway, 
 And by ber yielded, by him best received." 
 
 See Tert De Vel. Virg. 7, 17 ; and in illustration of Chrysostom's view there alluded to. we Tob. xtL 
 12 ; Ps. exxxviii. 1 (LXX.); Epb, Hi. 10. 
 
 * For the explanation of this allusion v, infra, Excursus IV. 
 
 * xi. 117. The hist phrase interesting as showing St Paul's dislike to needless and disturb- 
 ing innovations is like the Rabbinic phrase, " Our Halacha is otherwise :" yourcuatom is a Thekanah, 
 or novelty, a ertri (BaWw Uetiia, t. 113).
 
 CONDITION Ot THE CHURCH At CORINTH. 395 
 
 ) to save them from final condemnation (xa.TdKpiiJ.ci). 1 All minor matters 
 about \vhich they may have asked him, though they kept back the confession of this 
 their shame, are left by the Apostlo to be regulated by himself personally on his 
 arrival.* 
 
 14. The next three chapters of which the thirteenth, containing the description 
 of charity, is the most glorious gem, even in the writings of St. Paul are occupied 
 with the answer to their inquiries about spiritual gifts. Amid the wild disorders 
 which we have been witnessing we are hardly surprised to find that the Glossolalia 
 had been terribly abused. Some, we gather either because they had given the reins 
 to the most uncontrollable excitement, and were therefore the impotent victims of 
 any blasphemous thought which happened for the moment to sweep across the 
 troubled horizon of their souls; or from some darkening philosophical confusion, 
 which endeavoured to distinguish between the Logos and Him that was crucified, 
 between the Man Jesus and the Lord Christ ; or perhaps again from some yet un- 
 solved Jewish difficulty about the verse " Cursed is he that hangeth on a tree ;"* 
 amid their unintelligible utterances, had been heard to exclaim, Anathema lesou*, 
 " Jesus is accursed ;'' and, having as yet very vague notions as to the true nature of 
 the " gift of tongues," the Corinthians had asked Paul in great perplexity what they 
 were to think of this ? His direct answer is emphatic. \Vhcn they were the igno- 
 rant worshippers of dumb idols they may have been accustomed to the false inspira- 
 tion of the Pythia, or the Sibyl the possessing mastery by a spiritual influence 
 which expressed itself in the broken utterance, and streaming hair, and foaming lip, 
 and which they might take to be the spirit of Python, or Trophonius, or Dis. But 
 now he lays down the great principles of that " discernment of spirits," which 
 should enable them to distinguish the rapt utterance of divine emotion from the 
 mechanical and self -induced frenzy of feminine feebleness or hypocritical supersti- 
 tion. Whatever might be the external phenomena, the utterances of the Spirit were 
 one in import. No man truly inspired by Him could say, " Anathema is Jesus ; " * or 
 uninspired by Him could say from the heart, " Jesus is the Lord." The charismata, 
 or gifts, were different ; the "administrations" of them, or channels of their working, 
 were different ; the operations, energies, or effects of them were different ; but the 
 source of them was One one Holy Ghost, from whom they are all derived ; one 
 Lord, by whom all true ministries of them are authorised; one God, who worketh 
 all their issues in all who possess them. 5 And this diverse manifestation of one 
 Spirit, whether practical wisdom or scientific knowledge ; whether the heroism of 
 faith with its resultant gifts of healing, or energies of power, or impassioned utter- 
 ance, or the ability to distinguish between true and false spiritual manifestations ; 
 or, again, kinds of tongues, or the interpretation of tongues, 6 were all subordinated 
 to one sole end edification. And, therefore, to indulge in any conflict between gifts, 
 any rivalry in their display, was to rend asunder the unity which reigned supreme 
 through this rich multiplicity ; to throw doubt on the unity of their origin, to ruin 
 the unity of their action. The gifts, whether healings, helps, governments, or 
 tongues, occurred separately in different individuals ; but each of these whether 
 
 1 These distinctions, so essential to the right understanding of the passage, are hopelessly 
 obliterated in the E.V., which also swerves from its usual rectitude by rendering ij "and" instead 
 of "or" inver. 27, thatit might not seem to sanction " communion in one kind." The "unworthily" 
 In ver. 29 is perhaps a gloss, though a correct one. The K\U>II*VOV, " broken," of ver. 24 seems to have 
 been tampered with from dogmatic reasons. It is omitted in m, A, B, C, and D reads Opvirroiievov, 
 perhaps because of John xix. 36. 
 
 xi. 1734. i Deut xxi. 23. 
 
 * Perhaps a gross and fearful abuse of the principle Involved in 2 Cor. v. 16, as though people of 
 spiritual intuitions were emancipated from the mere acknowledgment of Jesus. One could easily 
 expect this from what we know of the " everlasting Gospel " In the thirteenth century, and of similar 
 movements in different times of the Church (Maurice, Unity, 445). How startling to these illuminati 
 to be told that the highest operation of the Spirit was to acknowledge Jesus I 
 
 * James i. 17. 
 
 * rii. 8 10. I have indicated, without dwelling on, the possible classification hinted at by the 
 trtp* (9, 10), as contrasted with the & niv and aM. "Knowledge (yvwats) as distinguished from 
 
 ," deals with "mysteries" (xiii. 2; xv. 51 ; viii. passim).
 
 396 THB LIS-B AND WOEK OS 1 ST. PAtJL. 
 
 Apostle, or prophet, or teacher was but a baptised member of the one body of 
 Christ ; and by a fresh application of the old classic fable of Menenius Agrippa, he 
 once more illustrates the fatal results which must ever spring from any strife 
 between the body and its members. 1 Let them covet the better gifts and tongues, 
 in which thev gloried most, he has studiously set last and yet he is now about to 
 point cut to them a path more transcendent than any gifts. And then, rising on the 
 wings of inspired utterance, he pours forth, as from the sunlit mountain heights, 
 his glorious hymn to CHRISTIAN LOVE. Without it a man may speak with human, 
 aye, and even angelic tongues, and yet have become but as booming gong or clang- 
 ing cymbal.* "Without it, whatever be his unction, or insight, or knowledge, or 
 mountain-moving faith, a man is nothing. Without it he may dole away all hia 
 possessions, and give bis body to be burned, yet is profited nojhing. Thoa follows 
 that description of love, which should be written in letters oi gold on every 
 Christian's heart its patience, its kindliness ; its freedom from envy, vaunting self- 
 assertion, 8 inflated arrogance, vulgar indecorum ; its superiority to self-seeking ; its 
 calm control of temper ; its oblivion of wrong ; its absence of joy at the wrongs of 
 others ; its sympathy with the truth ; its gracious tolerance ; its trustfulness ; its 
 hope ; its endurance.* Preaching, and tongues, and knowledge, are but partial, and 
 thall be done away when the perfect has come ; but love is a flower whose petals 
 never fall off.* Those are but as the lispings, and emotions, and reasonings of a 
 child ; but this belongs to the perfect manhood, when we shall see God, not as in the 
 dim reflection of a mirror, but face to face, and know him, not in part, but fully, 
 even as now we are fully known. Faith, and hope, and love, are all three, not 
 transient gifts, but abiding graces ; but the greatest of these the greatest because 
 it is the root of the other two ; the greatest because they are for ourselves, but love 
 is for others ; the greatest because neither in faith nor in hope is the entire and 
 present fruition of heaven, but only in the transcendent and illimitable blessedness 
 of "faith working by love;" the greatest because faith and hope are human, but 
 love is essentially divine the greatest of these is love. 7 
 
 15. On such a basis, so divine, so permanent, it was easy to build the decision 
 about the inter-relation of spiritual gifts ; easy to see that preaching was superior 
 to glossolaly ; because the one was an introspective and mostly unintelligible exercise, 
 the other a source of general advantage. The speaker with tongues, unless he could 
 also interpret, or unless another could interpret for him his inarticulate ecstacies, 
 did but utter indistinct sounds, like the uncertain blaring of a trumpet or the con- 
 fused discordances of a harp or flute. Apart from interpretation " tongues" were a 
 mere talking into air. They were as valueless, as completely without significance, 
 as the jargon of a barbarian. Since they were so proud of these displays, let them 
 pray for ability to interpret their rhapsodies. The prayer, the song of the spirit, 
 should be accompanied by the assent of the understanding, otherwise the "tongue" 
 was useless to any ordinary worshipper, nor could they claim a share in what was 
 said by adding their Ainen* to the voice of Eucharist. Paul, too and he thanked 
 
 1 xil. 131. See a noble passage in Maurice, !7y,469, seq., contrasting this conception with 
 the artificial view of society in Hobbes' Leviathan. The absolute unity of Jews and Gentiles (ver. 13) 
 exhibited in baptism and toe Lord's Supper, whence it resulted that the Jews would henceforth be 
 but " a dwindling majority in the Messianic kingdom," was, with the Cross, the chief Btvuiibling- 
 block to the Jews. 
 
 ' "Ephyreia aera" (Virg. Georg. 1L 464); Corinthian brass (Plin. H. N. 34, 2, 8). 
 
 * Ver. 4,ov irepirtpoJeTot. Perperus, "abraggart." "Heavens! howI/iowioif(eVer?iU(><a'o-a/iJjJ') 
 before my new auditor, Pompeius 1" (Cio. ad Alt. i. 14). 
 
 * Kiii. 5, " does not reckon the wrong." The opposite of " all his faults observed, set in a note- 
 book." 
 
 * Ver. 7, rrrfy means "bears," "endures." Its classic meaning Is "holds water;" and this is 
 also true of love with its gracious reticences and suppressions, oufiev fiou'avtrov iv ay an^ (Clem. Rom.). 
 
 ' Ver. 8, oiStnoTt cxiriirret. So we may understand the metaphor, as in James i. 11, crrt 
 (Tsa. xrviii. 4) ; others prefer the classic sense, "is never hissed off the stage ; " has its part to play 
 on the stage of eternity. 
 
 1 xil. 1 xiii. 13. 
 
 * xiv. I6,wttfpsi TO 'Ajuijv, "He who gays Amen la greater than be who blesses" (BtracMth, 
 yiii. 8),
 
 CONDITION OF THE CHTTECH AT CORINTH. 39? 
 
 Gkd that he was capable of this deep spiritual emotion was more liable to the im- 
 pulse of gloseolaly than any of them; 1 yet so little did he value it we may evsn 
 Bay so completely did he disparage it as a part of public worship that after telling 
 them that he had rather speak five intelligible words to teach others than ten 
 thousand words in " a tongue," 1 he bids them not to be little children in intelligence, 
 but to be babes in vice, and quotes to them, in accordance with that style of adapta- 
 tion with which his Jewish converts would have been familiar, a passage of Isaiah, 8 
 in which Jehovah threatens the drunken priests of Jerusalem that since they would 
 not listen to the simple preaching of the prophet, he would teach them and that, 
 too, ineffectually by conquerors who spoke a tongue which they did not understand. 
 
 tFrom this he argues that "tongues" are not meant for the Church at all, but are a 
 sign to unbelievers; and that, it exercised ia the promiscuous way which was coming 
 into vogue at Corinth, would only awaken, even in unbelievers, the contemptuous 
 remark that they were a set of insane fanatics, whereas the effect of preaching might 
 be intense conviction, prostrate worship, and an acknowledgment of the presence of 
 God among them. 4 
 
 16. The disorders, then, in the Corinthian Church had sprung from the selfish 
 struggle of each to show off his own special gift, whether tongue, or psalm, or teach- 
 ing, or revelation. If they would bear in mind that edification was the object of 
 werii'dp, such scenes would not occur. Only a few at a time, therefore, were to 
 spe :k witfc tongues, and only in case some one could interpret, otherwise they were 
 to suppress the impulse. Nor were two people ever to be preaching at the same time. 
 If the rivalry of unmeaning sounds among the glossolalists had been fostered by 
 eoine Syrian enthusiast, the less intolerable but still highly objectionable disorder of 
 rival preachers absorbed in the "egotism of oratory" was an abuse introduced by 
 the admirers of Apollos. In order to remedy this, he lays down the rule that if one 
 preacher was speaking, and another felt irresistibly impelled to say something, the 
 first was to cease. It was idle to plead that they could not control themselves. The 
 spirits which inspire the true prophet are under the prophet's due control, and God 
 is the author, not of confusion but of peace. Women were not to speak in church 
 at all ; and if they wanted any ezplanations they must ask their husbands at homo. 
 This was the rule of all Churches, and who were thev that they should alter these 
 wise and good regulations ? Were they the earliest Church ? Were they the only 
 Church ? A true preacher, a man truly spiritual, would at once recognise that these 
 were the commands of the Lord ; and to invincible bigotry and obstinate ignorance 
 Paul has no more to say. The special conclusion is that preaching is to be encou- 
 raged, and glossolaly not forbidden, provided that it did not mtprf ero with the general 
 rule that everything is to be done in decency and order. It is, however, extremely 
 probable that the almost contemptuous language of the Apostle towards "the 
 tongues" a manifestation at first both sacred and impressive, but liable to easy 
 simulation and grave abuse, and no longer adapted to serve any useful function 
 tended to suppress the display of emotion which he thus disparaged. Certain it ia 
 that from this time forward we hear little or nothing of " the gift of tongues." It 
 or something which on a lower level closely resembled it has re-appeared again 
 and again at different places and epochs in the history of the Christiam Church. It 
 scorns, indeed, to be a natural consequence of fresh and overpowering religions 
 emotion. But it can be so easily imitated by the symptoms of hysteria, and it leads 
 to consequences BO disorderly and deplorable, that except as a rare and isolated 
 phenciiianoa it haa been generally discountenanced by that seaso o tho neccssity 
 
 1 Why does he thank God for a gift which he is rating so low a an element of worship ? Because 
 the highest value of it was tubJKtivt. He who was capable of it was, at any rate, not dei-l : hi 
 heart was not petrified ; he was not past feeling ; he could feel the direct influence of the Bpiiil o! 
 God upon Jiis spirit. 
 
 ' "Rather half of ten of tho edify ing sort than a thonaand times ten of the other" (Beeser). 
 
 itv. SI, Iv T<? vo^w. So Ps. Ixsxii. ia quoted as "the Law" in John x. 31. On iUs pas 
 v. twpra, p. SO. 
 
 sir. l-2.
 
 898 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAtTI 
 
 for decency and order which the Apostle here lays down, anl which has been 
 thoroughly recognised by the calm wisdom of the Christian Church. The control 
 and suppression of the impassioned emotion which expressed itself in glossolaly is 
 practically its extinction, though this in no way involves the necessary extinction of 
 the inspiring convictions from which it sprang. 1 
 
 17. Then follows the immortal chapter in which he confirms their faith in the 
 resurrection, and removes their difficulties respecting it. If they would not nullify 
 their acceptance of the Gospel in which they stood, and by which they were saved, 
 they must hold fast the truths which he again declares to them, that Christ died for 
 our sins, was buried, and had been raised the third day. He enumerates His appear- 
 ances to Kephas, to the Twelve, to more than five hundred at once of whom the 
 majority were yet living, to James, to all the Apostles ; last, as though to the abor- 
 tive-born, even to himself. 2 " For I am the least of the Apostles, who am not 
 adequate to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. Yet by 
 the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace towards me has not proved in vain, 
 but more abundantly than all of them I laboured yet. not I, but the grace of God 
 which was with me ; whether, then, it be I or they, so we preach, and so ye 
 believed." * 
 
 If, then, Christ had risen, whence came the monstrous doctrine of some of them 
 that there was no resurrection of the dead ? The two truths stood or fell together. 
 If Christ had not risen, their faith was after all a chimera, their sins were unf orgiven, 
 their dead had perished ; and if their hope in Christ only was a hope undestined to 
 fruition, they were the most pitiable of men. But since Christ had risen, we also 
 shall rise, and as all men share the death brought in by Adam, so all shall be quick- 
 ened unto life in Christ. 4 But each in his own rank. The firstfruits Christ ; then 
 His redeemed at His appearing, when even death, the last enemy, shall be reduced 
 to impotence ; then the end, when Christ shall give up His mediatorial kingdom, 
 and God shall be all in all. And if there were no resurrection, what became of their 
 practice of getting themselves baptised for the dead? 6 And why did the Apostles 
 brave the hourly peril of death ? By his boast of them in Christ he asseverates 
 that his life is a daily dying. And if, humanly speaking, he fought beasts at 
 Ephesus, 8 what would be the gain to him if the dead rise not ? The Epicureans 
 would then have some excuse for their base sad maxim, " Let us eat and drink, for 
 to-morrow we die." Was it intercourse with the heathen that produced their 
 dangerous unbelief ? Oh, let them not be deceived ! let them beware of this 
 dangerous leaven ! " Base associations destroy excellent characters." Let them 
 awake at once to righteousness out of their drunken dream of disbelief , and break off 
 the sinful habits which it engendered ! Its very existence among them was an 
 ignorance of God, for which they ought to blush. 7 
 
 i Jdv. 26-40. 
 
 * xv. 8, r<f inrpiaiLari. (cf. Num. xil. 12, LXX. ; see also Ps. lyill. 8). 
 
 * xv. 112 (cf. Epict. Diss. iii. 1, 80). 
 
 * " Even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Here is one of the antinomies which St. Paul 
 leaves side by side. On the one hand, "lift; in Christ" is co-extensive with "death in Adam ;" on 
 the other, only those who are " in Christ" shall be made alive. Life here can hardly mean less than 
 salvation. But it is asserted of all universally, and Adam and Christ are contrasted as death and 
 life. Certainly in this and other places the Apostle's language suggests the natural conclusion that 
 " the principle which has come to actuality in Christ is of sufficient energy to quicken all men for the 
 resurrection to the blessed life " (Baur, Paul. ii. 219). But if we desire to arrive at a rigid eschato- 
 logical doctrine we must compare one passage with another. See Excursus XXI., "Theology and 
 Antinomies of St. Paul." 
 
 s Perhaps this is only a passing argumentumad Juminem; if so it shows St. Paul's large tolerance 
 that he does not here pause to rebuke so superstitious a practice. It needs no proof that "baptism 
 for the dead" means " baptism for the dead," and not the meanings which commentators put into it, 
 who go to Scripture to support tradition, not to seek for truth. 
 
 6 Of course metaphorically, or he would have mentioned it in 2 Cor. xi. His three points in 29 
 34 are if there be no resurrection (1) why do some of you get yourselves baptised to benefit your 
 relatives who have died uubapt.ised ? -(2) Why do we live in such self-sacrifice ? (:<) What possibility 
 would there be of resisting Ei>ii;urcu views of life tiuotu{ men in general f 
 
 1 JY. 12-25.
 
 CONDITION OV THE CHUBCH AT COBINTH. 399 
 
 And aa for material difficulties, Paul does not merely fling them aside with a 
 " Senseless one ! " but says that the body dies as the seed dies, and our resurrection 
 bodies shall differ as the grain differs with the nature of the sown seed, or as one 
 star differs from another in glory. The corruption, the indignity, the strengthless- 
 ness of the mortal body, into which at birth the soul is sown, shall be replaced by 
 the incorruption, glory, power of the risen body. The spiritual shall follow the 
 natural ; the heavenly image of Christ's quickening spirit replace the earthly image 
 of Adam, the mere living souL 1 Thus in a few simple words does St. Paul sweep 
 away the errors of Christians about the physical identity of the resurrection-body 
 with the actual corpse, which have given rise to so many scornful materialist objec- 
 tions. St. Paul does not say with Prudentius . . 
 
 "He nee dente, nee ungne 
 Vraodatum redimet patefacti foen Kpulcri;" 
 
 but that " flesh and blood" cannot enter into the kingdom of God ; that at Christ's 
 coining the body of the living Christian will pass by transition, that of the dead 
 Christian by resurrection, into a heavenly, spiritual, and glorious body. 3 
 
 The body, then, was not the same, but a spiritual body ; so that all coarse 
 material difficulties were idle and beside the point. In one moment, whether quick 
 or dead, at the sounding of the last trumpet, we should be changed from the 
 corruptible to incorruption, from the mortal to immortality. " Then shall be 
 fulfilled the promise that is written, Death is swallowed up into victory. Where, O 
 death, is thy sting ? where, O death, thy victory ?* The sting of death is sin, the 
 power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who is giving us the victory through 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my brethren beloved, prove yourselves steadfast, 
 immovable, abounding in the work of the Lord always, knowing that your toil ia 
 not fruitless in the Lord." 4 
 
 So ends this glorious chapter the hope of millions of the living, the consolation 
 for the loss of millions of the dead. And if, as we have seen, Paul was the most 
 tried, in this life the most to be pitied of men, yet what a glorious privilege to him 
 in his trouble, what a glorious reward to him for all his labours and sufferings, that 
 he should have been so gifted and enlightened by the Holy Spirit as to be enabled 
 thus, incidentally as it were, to pour forth words which rise to a region far above 
 all difficulties and objections, and which teach us to recognise in death, not the 
 curse, but the coronation, not the defeat, but the victory, not the venomous serpent, 
 
 1 xv. 35 50. In this chapter there is the nearest approach to natural (as apart from wrcMUctural 
 and agonistic) metaphors. Dean Howson (Charact. of St. P. 6) point* out that there is more imagery 
 from natural phenomena in the single Epistle of St. James than in all St. Paul's Epistles put 
 together. 
 
 Ver. 52. " The dead shall be raised, we (the living) shall be changed." Into the question of 
 the intermediate state St. Paul, expecting a near coming of Christ, scarcely enters. Death was 
 Koiiiacrdat, resurrection was <rvi>&ota.<r8f)v<u.. Did he hold that there was an intermediate provisional 
 building of God's which awaited us in heaven after the stripping off of our earthly tent t The nearest 
 allusion to the question may be found in 2 Cor. v. ; 14 (Pfleiderer, L 261). 
 
 Swart (not o^T)), M A, B, C, D, E, P, G. 
 
 4 xv. 60 58. " It is very evident that the Apostle here regards the whole history of the world 
 and men as the scene of the conflict of two principles, one of which has sway at first, but is then 
 attacked and conquered, and finally destroyed by the other. The first of these principles is death ; 
 the history of the world begins with this, and comes to a close when death, and with death the 
 dualism of which history U the development, has entirely disappeared from it" (Baur, Paul. ii. 225). 
 In this chapter the only resurrection definitely spoken of is a resurrection "hi Christ" On fb&final 
 destiny of those who are now perishing (ajroAAufww>i) St Paul never touches with any deflniteness. 
 But he speaks of the final conquest of death, the last enemy where " death " seems to be used in its 
 deeper spiritual and scriptural sense ; he says (Rom. viii. 19 23) that "the whole creation (iraou ij 
 KTIO-IS) shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of 
 God ; " he contrasts the universality of man's disobedience with the universality of God's mercy ; ha 
 says where sin abounded there grace did much more abound (Rom. v. 20) ; he speaks of God's will to 
 bestow universal favour commensurate with universal sin (Rom. xi. 32) ; he dwells on the solution of 
 dualism in unity and the tending of all things into God (tit O.VTOV TO. wdvra, Rom. xi. 3036) ; hig 
 whole splendid philosophy of history consists in showing (Rom. Gal. passim) that each lower and 
 sadder stage and moment of man's condition is a necessary means of achieving the higher ; and he 
 says that God, at last, " shall bo all in all." Whatever antinomies may be left unsolved, let Christians 
 <My -weigh thgB truth*
 
 '400 TBTB LIFE AITD WORK OP BT. FA.VL. 
 
 but tile vetted aagel, not the worst enemy, but the greatest birthright of mankind. 
 Not by denunciation of unorthodoxy, not by impatient crushing of discussion, not by 
 the stunning blows of indignant authority, does he meet an unbelief even so strange, 
 and so closely affecting the very fundamental truths of Christianity, as a denial of 
 t&o resurrection ; but by personal appeals, by helpful analogies, by calm and lofty 
 reasoning, by fervent exhortations, by the glowing eloquence of inspired convictions. 
 Anathema would have been worse than useless ; at excommunication he does not 
 BO much aa hint ; but the refutation of perilous error by the presentation of ennobling 
 truth has won, in the confirmation of the faith, in the brightening of the hope oi 
 centuries, its high and permanent reward. 
 
 Let us also observe that St. Paul's inspired conviction of the Resurrection rests, 
 like all his theology, on the thought that the life of the Christian is a life " in Christ." 
 On Plato's fancies about our reminiscence of a previous state of being he does not 
 touch ; but for the unfulfilled ideas on which Plato builds he offers the fulfilled ideal 
 of Christ. He founds no arguments, as Kant does, on the failure of mankind to 
 obey the " categorical imperative" of duty ; but he points to the Sinless Man. He 
 does not follow the ancients in dwelling on false analogies like the butterfly ; nor is 
 he misled like hia very ablest contemporaries and successors by the then prevalent 
 fable of the Phoenix. He does not argue from the law of continuity, or the inde- 
 structibility of atoms, or the permanence of force, or the general belief ef mankind. 
 But his main thought, his main argument is Ye are Christ's, and Christ is risen ; 
 if ye died with him to sin, ye shall also live with him to righteousness here, and 
 therefore to glory hereafter. The life ye now live is lived in the faith of the Son of 
 God, and being eternal in its very nature, contains in itself the pledge of its own 
 inextinguishable vitality. He teaches us alike in the phenomena of human sin and 
 of human sanctity to see the truth of the Resurrection. For tho forgiveness of sin 
 Christ died ; for the reward and the hope and the support of holiness he lives at the 
 right hand of God. He does not so much argue in favour of the Eesurrection a9 
 represent it, and make us feel its force. The Christian's resurrection from the death 
 of sin to the life of righteousness transcends and involves the lesser miracle of his 
 resurrection from the sleep of death to the life of heaven. 
 
 18. The Epistle closes with practical directions and salutations. He establishes 
 a weekly offertory, as he had done in Galataa, for the saints at Jerusalem. He tella 
 them that he will either should it be worth while tako it himself to Jerusalem, 
 or entrust it with commendatory letters from them, to any delegates whom they 
 might approve. He announces without comment his altered, intention of not taking 
 them en route as he went to Macedonia, as well as on his return, and so giving them 
 a double visit, but tells them that he should come to them by way of Macedonia, and 
 probably spend the winter with them, that they might help Ixim on his further 
 journey ; and that he means to remain in Ephesus till Pentecost, because a great 
 door is open to him, and there are many adversaries. 
 
 Timothy will perhaps come to them. If so they are not to despise hia youth, or 
 alarm his timidity by opposition, but to aid his holy work, and to help him peacefully 
 on his way to the Apostle with those who accompanied him. They had asked that 
 Apollos might visit them. St. Paul had done his best to second their wishes, but 
 Apollos though holding out hopes of a future visit declined to come at present, 
 actuated in all probability by a generous feeling that, under present circunistaneoi, 
 Ilia visit would do more harm than good. 1 
 
 Then a brief vivid exhortation. ""Watch! stand in the faith I be men! bo 
 strong ! let all your affairs be in love." 
 
 Then a few words of kindly eulogy of Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus of 
 whom Stephanas had been the earliest Achaian convert who devoted themselves to 
 ministry to the saints, and by their visit had consoled Afor his absence from them, 
 and them by eliciting this Epistle. He urges thorn to pay due regard and deference 
 to all such true labourers. It is not impossible that these few words may have been 
 
 .:)'.' 7=. ,i ' .lir i'.ftfatvi ||--t '*'' 
 
 1 zvt U>.MA-{fM dow not mean " Apollos' will," but (probably) "God's irilL*
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE COSINTHIANS. 401 
 
 added by an afterthought, lest the Corinthians should suppose that it was from these 
 especially if they were of Chloe's household that St. Paul had heard such dis- 
 tressing accounts of the Church, and so should he inclined to receive them badly on 
 their return. Then the final autograph salutation : 
 
 "The salutation of me, Paul, with my own hand ; " but before he can pen the 
 final benediction, there is one more outburst of strong and indignant feeling. " If 
 any one loveth not the Lord, let him be Anathema ; 1 Maranatha, the Lord is near. 
 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you." That would have been the 
 natural ending, but he had had so much to reprobate, so many severe thinga to Bay, 
 that to show how unabated, in spite of all, was his affection for them, he makes the 
 .unusual addition, " My love be with you oil in Christ Jesus. Amen." s So ends the 
 longest and, in some respects, the grandest and most characteristic of his Epistles. 
 He had suppressed indeed all signs of the deep emotion with which it Lad I^en 
 written ; but when it was despatched he dreaded the results it might produce- 
 dreaded whether he should have said too much ; dreaded the possible alienation, by 
 any over-severity, of those whom he had only desired to win. His own soul was au 
 quivering with its half -stifled thunder, and he was afraid lest the flash which he had 
 sent forth should scathe too deeply the souls at which it had b*?en hurled. He would 
 even have given much to recall it, 3 and awaited with trembling anxiety the earliest 
 tidings of the manner in which it would be received. But God overruled all for 
 good ; and, indeed, the very writings which spring most naturally and spontaneously 
 from a noble and sincere emotion, are often those that produce the deepest impres- 
 sion upon the world, and are less likely to be resented at any rate, aro more likely 
 to be useful than the tutored and polished utterances which are carefully tamed 
 down into the limits of correct conventionality. Not only the Church of Corinth, 
 but the whole world, has gained from the intensity of the Apostle's feelings, and the 
 impetuous spontaneity of the language in which they were expressed. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIIL 
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 
 
 "There are three crowns : the crown of the Law, the crown of the Priesthood, and 
 the crown of Royalty : but the crown of a good name mounts above thsin all." Pi,*,-Le 
 AbJitik, iv. 19. 
 
 WHEN St. Paul left Ephesus he went straight to Troas, with tho same high, 
 motive by which he was always actuated that of preaching tho Gospel cf 
 Christ. 4 He had visited the town before, but his stay there had been 
 shortened by the imploring vision of tho man of Macedon, which had decided 
 his great intention to carry the Gospel into Europe. But though his preaeh- 
 
 1 I cannot pretend to understand what St. Paul exactly meant by this. Commentators call it aa 
 "Imprecation ; T * bat such an " imprecation" does not seem to ms like St. Paul. Anathema is the 
 Hebrew cherem of Lev. xxvii. 29 ; Num. xxi. 2, 3 {Hannah) ; Josh. vi. 17. Bat the later Jews used 
 ft for " excommunication," whether of the temporary sort (nidui) or the severe. The severest form 
 was calted Shematha. The Fathers mostly take it to mean " excommunication" here, and in Gal. i. 
 8, 9, and soms seo in Maranatha an allusion to Shem atha (the name eometh). But probably thcaa 
 are after-thoughts. It is a sudden expression of deep feeling ; and that it is less terrible tlian it 
 sounds we may hope from 1 Cor. v. 5 ; 1 Tim. i 20, where the object is amendment, not wrath. For 
 "anathematise" see Matt. xxvi. 74 ; Acts xxiii. 12. 
 
 * The subscription is, as usual, spurious. It arose from a mistaken inference from xvi. 5. Tho 
 letter itself shows that it was written in Ephesus (xvi. .8), and though Stephanos, Fortunatus, and 
 Achaiaeus may have been its bearora, Tunotheus could not have been. 
 
 2 Cor. vii. 8. * 2 Gor. 11. 12, 13. 
 
 H*
 
 402 THE LIFE A.ND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 ing was now successful, and "a door was opened for him in the Lord," 1 he 
 could not stay there from extreme anxiety. " He had no rest for his spirit, 
 because he found not Titus his brother." Titus had been told to rejoin him 
 at Troas ; but perhaps the precipitation of St. Paul's departure from Ephesus 
 had brought him to that town earlier than Titus had expected, and, in the 
 uncertain navigation of those days, delays may easily have occurred. At any 
 rate, he did not come, and Paul grew more and more uneasy, until in that 
 intolerable oppression of spirit he felt that he could no longer continue his 
 work, and left Troas for Macedonia. There, at last, he met Titus, who 
 relieved his painful tension of mind by intelligence from Corinth, which, 
 although chequered, was yet on the main point favourable. From Titus he 
 learnt that his change of plan about the visit had given ground for tin- 
 favourable criticism, 2 and that many injurious remarks on his character and 
 mode of action had been industriously disseminated, especially by one Jewish 
 teacher. 3 Still, the effect of the first Epistle had been satisfactory. It had 
 caused grief, but the grief had been salutary, and had issued in an outburst of 
 yearning affection, lamentation, and zeal. 4 Titus himself had been received 
 cordially, yet with fear and trembling. 5 The offender denounced in his letter 
 had been promptly and even severely dealt with, 6 and all that St. Paul had 
 said to Titus in praise of the Church had been justified by what he saw. 7 
 Accordingly, he again sent Titus to them, 8 to finish the good work which he 
 had begun, and with him he sent the tried and faithful brother " whose praise 
 is in the Gospel through all the Churches ;" 8 and this time Titus was not 
 only ready but even anxious to go. 10 
 
 In what town of Macedonia St. Paul had met with Titus, and also with 
 Timothy, we do not know. Great uncertainty hangs over the details of their 
 movements, and indeed all the events of tliis part of the journey are left in 
 obscurity : we can only conjecture that during it St. Paul had even travelled 
 as far as Illyricum. 11 At some point in the journey, but probably not at 
 Philippi, as the subscription to the Epistle says because, as is evident from 
 the Epistle itself, he had visited most of the Churches of Macedonia, 12 he 
 wrote his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. From it we learn that, whatever 
 may have been in this region the special nature of his affliction whether 
 grievous sickness, or external persecutions, or inward anxieties, or apparently 
 all of these combined his stay in Macedonia had suffered from the same 
 overwhelming distress which had marked the close of his residence in Ephesus, 
 
 1 The use of this expression by St. Luke is one of the many interesting traces of Ma 
 personal intercourse with St. Paul. (See 1 Cor. xvi. 9.) 
 
 2 2 Cor. i. 17. ii- 510. 
 iii. 1 ; v. 11 ; vii. 2, 3 ; r. 10 ; xi. 1820. 7 vii. 14. 
 
 4 yii. 611. 8 v iii. 6. 
 
 * vii. 13, 15. viii. 18, 23. 
 
 10 viii. 17. That there was a slight unwillingness the first time seems to be shown by 
 the way in which St. Paul felt himself obliged to encourage him in his mission. 
 
 11 Rom. rv. 19. 
 
 12 2 Cor. viii. 1 ; ix. 2. Philippi, on the other hand, would be the first city which he 
 vould reach.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 403 
 
 and which had driven him out of Troas. 1 The Churches were themselves in a 
 state of affliction, which Paul had naturally to share, 2 and he describes his 
 condition as one of mental and physical prostration : " Our flesh had no rest, 
 but we are troubled on every side ; from without fightings, from within 
 fears." * And this helps to explain to us the actual phenomena of the letter 
 written amid such circumstances. If HOPE is the key-note of the Epistle to 
 the Thessalonians, JOY of that to the Philippians, FAITH of that to the 
 Romans, and HEAVENLY THINGS of that to the Ephesians, AFFLICTION is 
 the one predominant word in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 4 The 
 Epistles to the Thessalonians contain his views on the Second Advent ; the 
 Epistle to the Galatians is his trumpet-note of indignant defiance to retro- 
 grading Judaisers ; the Epistle to the Romans is the systematic and, so to 
 speak, scientific statement of his views on what may be called, in modern 
 language, the scheme of salvation ; the Epistle to the Philippians is his out- 
 pouring of tender and gladdened affection to his most beloved converts ; the 
 First Epistle to the Corinthians shows us how he applied the principles of 
 Christianity to daily life in dealing with the flagrant aberrations of a most 
 unsatisfactory Church ; his Second Epistle to the Corinthians opens a window 
 into the very emotions of his heart, and is the agitated self-defence of a 
 wounded and loving spirit to ungrateful and erring, yet not wholly lost or 
 wholly incorrigible souls." 5 
 
 And this self-defence was not unnecessary. In this Epistle we find St. 
 Paul for the first time openly confronting the Judaising reaction which 
 assumed such formidable dimensions, and threatened to obliterate every 
 distinctive feature of the Gospel which he preached. It is clear that in some 
 of the Churches which he had founded there sprang up a Judaic party, whose 
 hands were strengthened by commendatory letters from Jerusalem, and who 
 not only combated his opinions, but also grossly abused his character and 
 motives. By dim allusions and oblique intimations we trace their insidious 
 action, and in this Epistle we find ourselves face to face with them and their 
 unscrupulous opposition. It differs greatly from the one that preceded it. 
 St. Paul is no longer combating the folly of fancied wisdom, or the abuse of 
 true liberty. He is no longer occupied with the rectification of practical dis- 
 orders and theoretical heresies. He is contrasting his own claims with those 
 of his opponents, and maintaining an authority which had been most rudely 
 and openly impugned. 
 
 It is not impossible that the attack had boon suggested by St. Paul's 
 
 viii. 2. s iv. 812. * vii. 5. 
 
 < e.\c>s, e\i'BoM<u (2 Cor. i. 4, 6, 8 ; ii. 4 ; iv. 8 ; viii. 13). 
 
 * " The Apostle pours out his heart to them, and beseeches them, in return, not for 
 a cold, dry, critical appreciation of his eloquence, or a comparison of his with other 
 doctrines, but the sympathy of churchmen, if not the affection of children." Parts of 
 ,the Epistle, taken alone, might seem to be " almost painfully personal," and we "might 
 ' have thought that the man had got the better of the ambassador. But when we learn 
 how essentially the man and the ambassador are inseparable, then the 'folly,' the 
 boasting, the shame, are not mere revelations of character, but revelations of the close 
 bonds by which one man is related to another " (JIaurice, Unity, 488).
 
 404 tKJS LI'E AND VfORK OF ST. 
 
 sentence on the incestuous offender. 1 His caso seems to have originated a 
 quarrel among the Corinthian Christians, of whom some sided with him and 
 some with his father. It is clear upon the face of things that we do not know 
 all the circumstances of the case, since it is all but inconceivable that, had 
 there been no extenuating fact, he should have found defenders for a crime 
 which excited the horror of the very heathen. Even those who placed' 
 sensuality on the same level as eating meats offered to idols, and therefore 
 regarded it as a matter of indifference whose view St. Paul so nobly refutes 
 in his first Epiatle could not have sided with this person if there were no 
 palliating element in his offence. And, indeed, if this had not been the case, 
 he would scarcely have ventured to continue in Church membership, and to 
 be, with his injured father, a frequenter of their love-feasts and partaker in 
 their sacraments. It may be quite true, and indeed the allusions to him in the 
 Second Epistle show, that he was weak rather than wicked. But even this 
 would have been no protection to him in a wrong on which Gallic himself 
 would have passed a sentence of death or banishment, and which the Mosaic 
 law had [punished with excision from the congregation. 3 There must there- 
 fore have been something which could be urged against the heinonsness of his 
 transgression, and St. Paul had distinctly to tell the Corinthians that there 
 was no personal feeling mixed up with Ids decision. 3 His words had evidently 
 implied that the Church was to be assembled, and there, with his spirit 
 present with them, to hand him over to Satan, so that judgment might come 
 on his body for the salvation of his soul. That is what he practically tells the 
 Church to do. Did they do it P It seems to be at least doubtful. That they 
 withdrew f rom his communion is certain ; and the veiy threat of excommuni- 
 cation which hung over him accompanied, as he and the Church thought 
 that it would be, with supernatural judgments was sufficient to plunge him 
 into the depths of misery and penitence. Sickness and death were at this 
 time very prevalent among the Corinthian converts, and St. Paul told them 
 that this was a direct punishment of their profanation of the Lord's Supper. 
 It is clear that the offender was not contumacious, and in his Second Epistle 
 St. Paul openly forgives him, and remits his sentence, apparently on the 
 ground that the Corintliians had already done so. In fact, since the desirorl 
 end of the man's repentance, and the purging of the Church from all com- 
 plicity with or immoral acquiescence in his crime had been attained without 
 resorting to extreme measures, St. Paul even exhorts the Corinthians to 
 console and forgive the man, and, in fact, restore him to full Church mem- 
 bership. Still, it does seem as if they had not exactly followed the Apostle's 
 
 1 The theory that the offender of the second Epistle is an entirely different person, 
 alluded to in some lost intermediate letter, seems to me untenable, in spite of the con- 
 eensus of eminent critics (De Wette, Bleek, Credner, Olshausen, Neander, Ewald, &c. ), 
 vv ho, iu some form or other, adopt such a hypothesis. I see nothing inconsistent with 
 the older view either in the tone of 1 Cor., or the effect it produced, or in St. Paul's 
 excitement, or m the movements of Titus, or in the language about the offence. Bat I 
 have not space to enter more fully into the controversy. 
 
 ' Lev. ii. 11 ; Dcut. xjvii. 20. * 2 Cor. vil 11, J|,
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 405 
 
 advice, and as if tlio party opposed to him had, BO to speak, turned upon him 
 and repudiated his authority. They said that he had not come, and he would 
 not como. It was all very well to write stern and threatening letters, but it 
 was not by letters, but by the exercise of miraculous power, that Kephas had 
 avenged the wrongs of the Church and of the Spirit on Ananias and Sap- 
 phira, and on Suaon Magus. Paul could not do this. How could it bo 
 expected of a man so mean of aspect, so vacillating in purpose, so inefficient 
 in speech ? It was not Paul who had been chosen as the twelfth Apostle, nor 
 was ho an Apostle at all. As the abuses among his followers showed that 
 his teaching was dangerous, so his inability to rectify them was a proof that 
 his authority was a delusion. Tha very fact that ho had claimed no support 
 from his converts only marked how insecure he felt his position to be. What 
 the Church really wanted was the old stringency of the Mosaic Law; 
 some one from Jerusalem ; some true Apostle, with his wife, who would rule 
 them with a real supremacy, or at least some emissary from James and the 
 brethren of the Lord, to preach " another Gospel," more accordant with, the 
 will of Jesus Himself. 1 Paul, they implied, had never known Jesus, and 
 misrepresented Him altogether ; 2 for He had said that no jot or tittle of the 
 law should pass, and that the children's bread should not bo cast to dogs. 
 Paul preached himself, 3 and indeed seemed to be hardly responsible for what 
 ho did preach. He waa half demented ; and yet there was some method in 
 his madness, which showed itself partly in self-importance and partly in 
 avarice, both of which were very injurious to the interests of his followers.* 
 What, for instance, could be more guileful and crafty than his entire conduct 
 about this collection which he was so suspiciously eager to set on foot ? * He 
 had ordered them to get up a subscription in his first letter; 8 had, in 
 answer to their inquiries, 7 directed that it should be gathered, as in the Gala- 
 tian Churches, by a weekly offertory, and had, since this, sent Titus to 
 stimulate zeal in the matter. Now certainly a better emissary could not 
 possibly have been chosen, for Titus was himself a Greek, and therefore well 
 fitted to manage matters among Greeks ; and yet had visited Jerusalem, so 
 that he could speak from ocular testimony of the distress which was prevalent 
 among the poorer brethren ; and had further been present at the great meet- 
 ing in Jerusalem at which Paul and Barnabas had received the special request 
 to be mindful of the poor. Yet even this admirably judicious appointment, 
 and the transparent independence and delicacy of mind which had made Paul 
 with an insight into their character which, as events showed, was but too 
 pi-escient entirely to refuse all support from them, was unable to protect 
 him from the coarse insinuation that this waa only a cunning device to hide 
 his real intentions, and give him a securer grasp over their money. Such 
 
 See Hausrath, p. 420. 2 Cor. xi. 4. 2 Cor. xii. 5. 
 
 * V. 13, eir yip e i<nr>tiev' si. 1, KJK\OV qvfl\s:<r8e uovfiixpiSf Ti rq o<po<rvvij$* 16, fiq TIS fit 
 {off, a^pova ttvai (cf. xii- 6). 
 
 6 sil. 16. vvapxw n-aioupyo? S6\i? fyiSs ftopor. Evidently the quotation of a slander, 
 which he proceeds to refute. 
 
 * The one DO longer extant 7 1 Cor, xvi. 1 4-
 
 406 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 were the base and miserable innuendoes against which even a Paul had 
 deliberately to defend himself ! Slander, like some vile adder, has rustled iu 
 the dry leaves of fallen and withered hearts since the world began. Even 
 the good are not always wholly free from it, and the early Christian Church, 
 so far from being the pure ideal bride of the Lord Jesus which we often 
 imagine her to be, was (as is proved by all the Epistles) in many respects as 
 little and in some respects even less pure than ours. The chrisom-robe of 
 baptism was not preserved immaculate either in that or in any other age. 
 The Church to which St. Paul was writing was, we must remember, a com- 
 munity of men and women of whom the majority had been familiar from the 
 cradle with the meanness and the vice of the poorest ranks of heathenism in 
 the corruptest city of heathendom. Their ignorance and weakness, their past 
 training and their present poverty, made them naturally suspicious ; and 
 though we cannot doubt that they were morally the best of the class to which 
 they belonged, thoiigh there may have been among them many a voiceless 
 Epictetus a slave, but dear to tho immortals and though their very re- 
 ception of Christianity proved an aspiring heart, a tender conscience, an 
 enduring spirit, yet many of them had not got beyond the inveteracy of life- 
 long habits, and it was easy for any pagan or Judaic sophister to lime their 
 " wild hearts and feeble wings." But God's mercy overrules evil for good, 
 and we owe to the worthless malice of obscure Judaic calumniators the lessons 
 which we may learn from most of St. Paul's Epistles. 1 A trivial characteristic 
 will often show better than anything else the general drift of any work, and 
 as we have already pointed out the prominence in this Epistle of the thought 
 of " tribulation," so we may now notice that, though " boasting " was of all 
 things the most alien to St. Paul's genuine modesty, the most repugnant to 
 his sensitive humility, yet the boasts of his unscrupulous opponents so com- 
 pletely drove him into the attitude of self-defence, that the word " boasting " 
 occurs no less than twenty -nine times in these few chapters, while it is only 
 found twenty-six times in all the rest of St. Paul's writings. 3 
 
 The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and those to the Galatians and 
 Romans, represent the three chief phases of his controversy with Judaism. 
 In the Epistle to the Galatians he overthrew for ever the repellent demand 
 that the Gentiles should be circumcised ; in the Epistle to the Romans he 
 established for ever the thesis that Jews and Gentiles were equally guilty, and 
 could be justified only by faith, and not by works. In both these Epistles he 
 establishes, from different points of view, the secondary and purely dis- 
 ciplinary functions of the law as a preparatory stage for the dispensation of 
 free grace. In both Epistles he shows conclusively that instead of the falso 
 tL>(4 .^.t..;. i. .Jj ;,..' ^-a"'x :;' c~- .? -r .< -5*' 
 
 1 The authenticity of the letter has never been questioned. The tliree main divisions 
 are : i. viL Hortatory and retrospective, with an under-current of apology, viii. , ix. 
 Directions about the contribution, x. xiii. Defence of his Apostolic position. The 
 more minute analysis will be seen as we proceed. But it is the least systematic, as tue 
 i'irst is the most systematic of all his writings. 
 
 J Especially in 2 Cor. x., ii., xii. This finds Its illustration In the proiiinence of 
 ' ' inflation " in 1 Cor. passim ; but only elsewhere in Col. ii. 18.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE COIUXTHIAN3. 407 
 
 assertion that " it is in vain to be a Christian without being a Jew," should bo 
 substituted the very opposite statement, that it is in vain to be a Christian if, 
 as a Christian, one relies on being a Jew as well. But, however irresistible 
 his arguments might be, they would be useless if the Judaists succeeded in 
 impugning his Apostolic authority, and proving that he had no right to be 
 regarded as a teacher. The defence of his claims was, therefore, very far 
 from being a mere personal matter; it involved nothing less than a defence of 
 the truth of his Gospel. Yet this defence against an attack so deeply wound- 
 ing, and so injnriotis to his cause, was a matter of insuperable difficulty. His 
 opponents could produce their " commendatory letters," and, at least, claimed 
 to possess the delegated authority of the Apostles who had lived with Jesus 
 (2 Cor. iii. 1 18). This was a thing which Paul could not and would not do. 
 He had not derived his authority from the Twelve. His intercourse with 
 them had been but slight. His Apostolate was conferred on him, not 
 mediately by them, but immediately by Christ. He had, indeed, " seen the 
 Lord " (1 Cor. ix. 1), but on this he would not dwell, partly because his direct 
 intercourse with Christ had been incomparably smaller than that of a Peter 
 or a James ; and partly because he clearly saw, and wished his converts to see, 
 that spiritual union was a thing far closer and more important than personal 
 companionship. To two things only could he appeal : to the visions and 
 revelations which he had received from the Lord, above all, his miraculous 
 conversion ; and to the success, the activity, the spiritual power, which set a 
 seal of supernatural approval to his unparalleled ministry. 1 But the first of 
 these claims was deliberately set aside as subjective, both in his own lifetime 
 and a century afterwards. 2 The difficulty of convincing his opponents on this 
 subject reflects itself in his passion, a passion which rose in part because it 
 forced upon him the odious semblance of self-assertion. His sole irresistible 
 weapon was " the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." 
 
 I will now proceed to give an outline of this remarkable letter, which, 
 from the extreme tension of mind with which it was written, and the constant 
 struggle between the emotions of thankfulness and indignation, 8 la more 
 difficult in its expressions and in its causal connections than any other. The 
 kbouring style, the interchange of bitter irony with pathetic sincerity, the 
 manner in which word after word now " tribulation," now "consolation," 
 now " boasting," now " weakness," now "simplicity," now " manifestation," 
 takes possession of the Apostle's mind serve only to throw into relief the 
 
 * 2 Cor. ii. 14 ; iii. 2 ; xi. 2123 ; 1 Cor. be. 1 ; xv. 10, &c. 
 
 * Pr. Clement. Ifom. XVil. 13, SC<J. JTW? 81 <roi xoi iruTTtvtroiJitv O.VT& , . . ; jris 8e <ro< <r* 
 <u<J>07) OTTOTJ O.VTOV TOL jfarria TTJ iiiaaxaAi'a tppoveii; ; 
 
 3 But, as Dean Stanley observes (Cor., p. 348), " the thankfulness of the first part is 
 darkened by the indignation of the third, and even the directions about the business of 
 the contribution are coloured by the reflections both of his joy and of his grief. And in 
 all those portions, though in themselves strictly personal, the Apostle is borne away into 
 the higher region in which he habitually lived, so that this Epistle becomes the most 
 striking instance of what is the case more or less with all his writings, a new philosophy 
 of life poured forth not through systematic treatises, but through occasional bursts of 
 human feeling."
 
 408 
 
 frequent bursts uf impassioned eloquence. The depth of tenderness winch is 
 here revealed towards all who were noblo and true, may serve as s measure 
 for the insolence and wrong which provoked in the concluding chapters so 
 stern an indignation. Of nil the Epistles it 13 the one -winch enables ns to 
 look deepest into the Apostle's heart. 
 
 Another characteristic of the letter has been observed by tho quick insight 
 of Bengel. " The whole letter," he says, " reminds H3 of an itinerary, but 
 interwoven with the noblest precepts," "Tho very stages of his journey are 
 impressed upon it," says Dean Stanley, "the troubles at Ephesns, the anxiety 
 of Troas, tho consolations of Macedonia, tho prospect of moving to Corinth." 1 
 
 After the greeting, in which he associates Timothy who was probably his 
 amanuensis with himself, and with brief emphasis styles himself an 
 " Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God," he begins the usual expression 
 of thankf uliicss, in which the words " tribulation " and " consolation " are 
 inextricably intertwined, and in which ha claims for the Corinthians a union 
 with him in both. 
 """< 1 lf!/ f * ' ': l ;.''f t * - YJ'hfc"/!'?!'"" 1 *' - : ' !t"*'t uBZTtiftFJtfO 'i 1 '".' ;:; 
 
 " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of 
 mercies, and God of all consolation, who consoleth. us in all our tribulation, that we 
 may bo al-lo to console those in all tribulation, by the consolation wherewith 
 v/e are ourselves consoled by God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound towards 
 us, so by Christ aboundeth also our consolation. But whether we are troubled, it 
 is for your consolation and salvation which worketh in the endurance of the same 
 sufferings which we also suffer, and our hope is sure on your behalf ; 3 or whether 
 V.-C- are consoled, it is for your consolation and salvation, knowing that as ye ara 
 ^uvtakers of the sufferings, eo also of the consolation." 3 
 
 He then alludes to the fearful tribulation, excessive and beyond his strength, 
 whether caused by outward enemies or by sickness, through which he has just 
 passed in Asia, which has brought him to the verge of despair and of the grave, in 
 order that be may trust solely in Him who raiseth the dead. "Who from such a 
 death rescued us, and will rescue, on whom we have hoped that even yet will Hs 
 rescue." And as it was the supplication of many which had won for him this great 
 charism, ho asks that their thanksgivings may be added to those of maay, and that 
 their prayers may still be continued in his behalf. 4 
 
 For however vils might be the insinuations against Kim, he is proudly conscious 
 cf tho simplicity 8 and sincerity of his relations to all men, and especially to them, 
 " not in carnal wisdom, but in the grace of God." Some had suspected him of 
 writing private letters and secret messages, of intriguing in fact with individual 
 members of his congregation ; but he tells them that ho wroto nothing except what 
 they are now reading, and fully recognise, as he hopes they will continue to 
 recognise, and even moro fully than heretofore, even as some of them 6 already 
 recognised, that they and he are a mutual subject of boasting in the day of the 
 Lord. Thit was the reason why ho had originally intended to pay them two visits 
 instead of one. Had he then been guilty of the levity, the fickleness, the caprice 
 
 1 The thread of the Epistle is historical, but It is interwoven with digressions. The brokaa 
 threads of narrative will be found in i. 8, 15 ; ii. 1, 12, 13; vii. 5 ; via. 1; is. 2; xiii. 1. 
 1 Verse 6. This is the position of these words in most uncial*. 
 1 " Coromanlo sanctorum," Phil. li. 26 (Bengel). 
 
 * 1. 1 11 ; i. 8. <rre efo.mjpijSfjt'flu, though generally he was aircpovpevos ov* fairopovn, 
 Iv. 8. d4jji/x row fiaraTov to the question, " How will it all end T " the only answer seemed to b* 
 "Daath." Koff inrtppo>*r,i>, iv. 17 ; Rom. vii. 13 ; 1 Cor. xii. 31 ; Gal. I. 13. 
 
 * i. 12. airAorfc, iu answer to the charge of duplicity, ts a characteristic word erf thl* 
 (viii. 2 ; is. 11, 13 ; xi. 8) ; but here, H, A, B, 0, K, read ay>T^r4. 
 
 ' i. 14, ana /Mpovt,
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 409 
 
 with which he had been charged in changing his plan? Did the "Yes, yes "of 
 his purposes mean much the same thing as " No, no," like the mere shifting feeble- 
 ness of an aimless man F 1 Well, if they choso to say this of him as a man, at any 
 rate, there was one emphatic " Yes," one- unalterable fixity and affirmation about 
 him, and that was his preaching of Christ. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, preached 
 by him and Silvanus and Timotheus, had proved Himself to be not " Yes " and 
 "No; "but in Him was God's infinite " Yes," and therefore also the Christian's 
 everlasting Amen to all God's promises. 2 Ho who confirmed all of them alike into 
 the Anointed (efr xP lc " ro *')> an ^ anointed them (xpi'<ras), was God, who also eet His 
 seal on them, and gave them in their hearts tho earnest of His Spirit. 3 Ho called 
 God to witness upon his own BOU! that it waa with a desire to spare them that he 
 no longer ciime * to Corinth. And then, conscious that jealous eyes would dwell on 
 every phrase of his Irtter, and if possible twist its meaning against him, ho tells 
 them that by using tho expression " sparing them," ho does'not imply any claim to 
 lord it over their faith, for faith is free and by it they stand; but that ho is speaking 
 as a fellow- worker of their joy, and therefore he had decided that his secona visit to 
 them should not b in grief. 5 Was it natural that he should like to grieve those 
 who caused him joy, or be grieved by those from whom he ought to receive joy ? 
 His joy, he felt sure, was theirs also, and therefore he had written to them instead 
 of coming ; and that previous letter sad as were its contents had not been written 
 to grieve them, but had been written in much tribulation and compression of heart 
 and many tears, that they might recognise how more abundantly he loved them. 
 Grief, indeed, there had been, and it had fallen on him, but it had not come on him 
 only, but partly on them, and he did not wish to press heavily on them all. 6 And 
 the sinner who had caused that common grief had been sufficiently censured by the 
 reprobation of the majority of them ; 7 so that now, on the contrary, they should 
 forgive and comfort him, that a person such as he was guilty, disgraced, but now 
 sincerely penitent may not be swallowed up by his excessive grief. Let them 
 no.w assure him of their love. The object of 'the former letter had been fulfilled 
 iu testing their obedience. If they forgave (as they had partially done already, in 
 not strictly carrying out his decision), so did he ; " and what I have forgiven, if 
 
 1 I have IUVCT been even approximately satisfied with any explanation of this passage. 
 St. Chiysostoia makes it mean, " Did I show levity, or do I plan after tho flesh that tho yea with 
 ine must be always yea, and the nay always nay, as it is with a man of the world who makes Ids 
 plans independently of God's over-ruling of them ? " As there are no emphatic affirmations in the 
 case, Matt. v. 37, James v. 12, throw no light on the passage, unless sorna such words had been 
 
 V, with N, A, B, C, D, F, Q. 
 
 3 appojSiy, earnest-money, part-payment, ffpoxarapoAi} ; an ancient (Jfaw Gen. jcoEviil. 17, 18 ; 
 arfliabo Plant. Rud. Prol. 46) and modern word (Pr. arrhes) made current fey Semitic commerce. 
 (Cf. oircpxJ), Bom. viii. 23.) 
 
 4 t 23. Here, and as, I believe, In it. 1 and xiii. 1, lie speaks of his intended visit as a real 
 one. The B. V. mistakes ofcito, "no longer," for OVTOJ, "not yet; "but the expression really 
 illustrates the much-disputed verses to which I have referred, and inclines me to tho opinion tLat 
 St. Paul had not visited Corinth more than once when this letter was written. But the question is 
 one of very small importance, though so much has been written on it. 
 
 5 Lit,, " not again to come to you in grief," as he would be doing i/he had visited them once in 
 
 carried it out, would have been in grief had been a real visit. The ird\iv is even omitted in D, E, 
 P, G. Theocloret, who ought to know what Greek means, takes ira\.w Z\9w merely in the sense of 
 " re-visit," separating it from ev AUBTJ altogether. 
 
 6 This is another of those ambiguous expressions due to tho emotion of the writer and the 
 delicacy of the subjects of which he is treating, and his desire to be kind and just though there was 
 so much to blame about which it is impossible to feel any certainty of the exact explanation. I 
 have partly followed the view of St. Chrysostom. 
 
 1 Some had evidently been recalcitrant. In ii. 6 the word for " punishment is cmrijuut, not 
 KoAaaisor Ti^copia ; but the general meaning is that of punishment (Wisd. iii. 10. Philo, ircct a.S\a>v 
 Kui liriTiiuuv, " on rewards and punishments," . _....
 
 410 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 I have forgiven anything, 1 is for your sakes, in the presence* of Christ, that we 
 may not be over-reached by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his devices." * 
 
 Well, he did not come to them, and he did write, and what was the consequence? 
 His anxiety to know the effect produced by his letter and change of plan was so 
 intense, that it almost killed him. Successful as was the opening which he found 
 for the Gospel of Christ at Troas, he abandoned his work there, because he could 
 not endure the disappointment and anguish of heart which the non-arrival of Titus 
 caused him. He therefore went to Macedonia. There at last he met Titus, but he 
 omits to say so in his eagerness to thank God, who thus drags him in triumph in 
 the service of Christ. Everywhere the incense of that triumph was burnt; to 
 gome it was a sweet savour that told of life, to others a sign of imminent death. 
 St. Paul is so possessed by the metaphor that he does not even pause to disentangle 
 it. He is at once the conquered enemy dragged in triumph, and the incense burned 
 in sign of the victor's glory. The burning incense is a sign to some of life ever- 
 renewed in fresh exultation ; to others of defeat ever deepening into death. To him- 
 self, at once the captive and the sharer in the triumph, -it is a sign of death, and of 
 daily death, and yet the pledge of a life beyond life itself. 4 And who is sufficient 
 for such ministry ? For he is not like the majority 5 the hucksters, the adultera- 
 ters, the fraudulent retailers of the Word of God, but as of sincerity, but as of God 
 in the presence of God he speaks in union with Christ.' 
 
 Is this self-commendation to them ? Does he need letters of introduction to 
 them ? 7 And here, again, follows one of the strangely mingled yet powerful meta- 
 phors so peculiar to the greatest and most sensitive imaginations. " Ye are our 
 Epistle," says St. Paul, " written on our hearts, recognised and read by all men, 
 being manifestly an Epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not mth ink, but 
 with the spirit of the living God ; not on stonen tablets, but on fleshen tablets 
 hearts." 8 He does not need a commendatory letter to them; they are themselves 
 his commendatory letter to all men; it is a letter of Christ, of which he is only the 
 writer and carrier ; ' and it is not engraved on granite like the Laws of Moses, but 
 on their hearts. Thus they are at once the commendatory letter written on 
 Paul's heart, and they have a letter of Christ written on their own hearts by the 
 Spirit, and of that letter Paul has been the human agent. 10 
 
 It was a bold expression, but one which sprang from a confidence which Christ 
 inspired, and had reference to a work for God. That work was the ministry of the 
 New Covenant not of the slaying letter but of the vivifying spirit," for which 
 
 1 li. 10. The best reading seems to be 5 Kexaptoviai, ci n xapio>ai, y, A, B, C, F, O. 
 Evidently we are here in the dark about many circumstances ; but we infer that St. Paul's sentence 
 of excommunication, as ordered in his former letter, had not been carried out, partly because some 
 opposed it, but also in part because the man repented in consequence of his exclusion from tha 
 communion of the majority of the Church. St. Paul might have been angry that his plain order 
 had been disobeyed by the Church as such ; but, on the contrary, he is satisfied with their partial 
 obedience, and withdraws his order, which timely repentance had rendered needless. 
 
 * Cf. Prov. viii. 30, LXX. 
 . i. 12 ii. 11. 
 
 4 On this metaphor, v. infra, Excursus III. The last great triumph at Rome had been that of 
 Claudius, when Caradoc was among the captives. 
 
 5 ii. 17. oi iroXXot is a strong expression, but oi Xoiirol, "the rest," the reading of D, B, F, Q, 
 J, Is still more impassioned. It is possible that this may have been softened into the other reading, 
 Just as oi iroAAol has been softened into jroAAoi. We must remember how many and diverse were 
 the elements of error at Corinth conceit, faction, Pharisaism, licence, self-assertion; and St. Paul 
 (Rom. v.) seems to use oi iroAAol peculiarly 
 
 ii. 1217 (cf. Isa. i. 22, LXX.). 
 
 7 iii. 1. It is astonishing to find Ebionite hatred still burning against St. Paul in the second 
 century, and covertly slandering him because he had no <irt<rro\di o-vo-T<mitai from James. All who 
 came without such letters were to be regarded as false prophets, false apostles, &c. (Cf. 2 Cor. xl. 
 13 ; Gal. ii. 12.) (Ps. Clem. Recogn. iv. 34 ; Horn. xi. 85.) 
 
 8 Read capJiais, u, A, B, C, D, E, G. For the metaphor compare Prov. iii. 3 ; vii. 8 : Ezek* 
 XL 19 ; Ex. xviii. 18. 
 
 Compare the identification of the seed sown and the hearts that receive it in Mark iv. 18. 
 iii. 13. 
 
 iii. fl, oroKTiV ; Rom. Iv. 15; vll. (5, 7, 10, 11 ; Gal. til. 10; John yl. 63. faxnroui. Rom. vt 
 4, 11 ; viii. 2, 10 ; Gal. v. S.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS, 411 
 
 God gave the sufficiency. And what a glorious ministry! If the ministry of the 
 Law tending in itself to death, written in earthly letters, graven on granite slabs, 
 yet displayed itself in such glory that the children of Israel could not gaze on 
 the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which was rapidly fading 
 away, 1 how much more glorious was the Ministry of Life, of Righteoxisness, of the 
 Spirit, which by comparison outdazzles that other glory into mere darkness, 2 and is 
 not transitory (8<& 86ris) but permanent (tt> S6^r>). It was the sense of being 
 entrusted with that ministry which gave him confidence. Moses used to put a veil 
 over his face that the children of Israel might not see the evanescence of the transient ; 
 and the veil which he wore on his bright countenance when he spoke to them reminds 
 him of the veil which they yet wore on their hardened understandings when his 
 Law was read to them, which should only begin to be removed the moment they 
 turned from Moses to Christ, 3 from the letter to the spirit, from slavery to freedom. 
 But he and all the ministers of Christ gazed with no veil upon their faces upon His 
 glory reflected in the mirror of His Gospel ; and in their turn seeing that image as 
 in a mirror, 4 caught that ever-brightening glory as from the Lord, the Spirit. 
 How could one entrusted with such a ministry grow faint-hearted ? How could 
 he as Paul's enemies charged him with doing descend into " the crypts of 
 shame ? " Utterly false s were such insinuations. He walked not in craftiness ; 
 he did not adulterate the pure Word of God ; but his commendatory letter, the 
 only one he needed, was to manifest the truth to all consciences in God's sight. 
 There was no veil over the truths he preached ; if veil there was, it was only in the 
 darkened understandings of the perishing, so darkened into unbelief by the god of 
 the present world, 6 that the brightness of the gospel of the glory of Christ could 
 not illuminate them. He it is Christ Jesus the Lord, the image of God He it is, 
 and not ourselves, whom Paul and all true Apostles preached. He had been ac- 
 cused of self-seeking and self-assertion. Such sins were impossible to one who 
 estimated as he did the glory of His message. All that he could preach of himself 
 was that Christ was Lord, and that he was their slave for Christ's sake. For God 
 had shone in the hearts of His ministers only in order that the bright knowledge 
 which they had caught from gazing, with no intervening veil, on the glory of 
 Christ, might glow for the illumination of the world. 7 
 
 A glorious ministry ; but what weak ministers ! Like the torches hid in Gideon's 
 pitchers, their treasure of light was in earthen vessels, 8 that the glory of their victory 
 over the world and the world's idolatries might be God's, not theirs. This was why 
 they were at once weak and strong weak in themselves, strong in God "in every- 
 thing being troubled, yet not crushed ; perplexed, but not in despair ; persecuted, 
 but not forsaken ; flung down, but not destroyed ; always carrying about in our 
 body the putting to death of the Lord Jesus Christ, in order that also the life of Jesus 
 may be manifested in our body. For we, living as we are, are ever being handed 
 over to death for Jesus' sake, in order that the life of Jesus also may be manifested 
 in our moiial flesh. So that death is working in us seeing that for Christ's sake 
 and for your sakes we die daily but life in you. The trials are mainly ours ; the 
 blessings yours. Yet we know that this daily death of ours shall be followed by a 
 resurrection. He who raised Christ shall also raise us from the daily death of our 
 
 1 ill. 7. The word " till " in the E.V. of Ex. miv. 83 seems to be a mistake for " when." He 
 put on the veil, not to dim the splendour while he spoke, but (so St. Paul here implies) to veil the 
 evanescence when he had ended his words KarapyoG/xcu (1 Cor. i. 23 ; ii. 6 ; vi. 13 ; xiiL 8, 11 ; 
 xv. 24^-4wenty-two times in this group of Epistles). 
 
 * iii. 10, 11, ou JeSofaarai TO Se5oa<Tf<.Vov ' TOUTW r<f ju*pt. 
 
 * iii. 16, eirMrrpe^rrj ... irptaipiTO4. 
 
 4 iii. 18, (toToirrpi^ojitevoi. Chrysostom, tec., make it mean " reflecting," but there seems to be 
 no instance of that sense. 
 
 5 iv. 2. Cf. 1 Cor. iv. 5. Hence the prominence of the word <^avepow In this Epistle (11. 14 ; 
 lit. 8 ; iv. 10 ; v. 10, 11 ; vii. 12 ; xi. 6). 
 
 s Cf. John ziv. 30 ; Eph. ii. 2. " GrandU sed horribilis descriptio Satanae " (Bengel). 
 1 iii. 4 iv. 6. 
 
 8 He was a oxo/os Xoynj (Acts Ix. 15), but the VKWOS wai Itself cm-paxtrcv. " Lo VM d' clezioas" 
 (Dante, Inf. ii 28).
 
 412 THE LIFE AITD WOBE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 afflicted lives' and from the deatk in which they end, and shall present us, with you, 
 to God's glory, by the increase of grace and more abundant increase of thanksgiving. 
 For this reason we do not play the coward, but even if our outward man is being 
 destroyed, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For the lightness of 
 our immediate affliction is working out for us, in increasing excess, an eternal weight 
 of glory, since our eyes are fixed not on the visible, but on the invisible ; for the 
 things visible are transient, but the things invisible are eternal. 2 The tents of cur 
 earthly bodies shall be done away, but thon we shall have an eternal building. "We 
 groan, we are burdened in this tent of i3osh, s wo long to put on over it, aa a robe, 
 our house from heaven if, as I assume, we shall not indeed be found bodiless 4 that 
 the mortal mav be swallowed up by life. 8 And God, who wrought us for this end, 
 Jias given us the earnest of His Spirit that it shall be so. Henco, since we walk by 
 faith, death itself has for us lost all terrors ; it will be but an admission into the 
 nearer presence of our Lord. To please Him is our sole ambition, because we shall 
 each 8tand before His tribtinal to receive the things dono by the body ; to be paid 
 in kind for our good and evil, not by arbitrary infliction, but by natural result." 
 This is our awful belief, and we strive to make it yours. 7 To God our sincerity ia 
 manifest already, and we hope that it will bo to your consciences, since we tell you 
 all this not by way of commending ourselves, but that you may have something of 
 which to boast about us against thoso whose boasts are but of superficial things. They 
 call us mad, 8 well, if so, it is for God ; or if we be sober-minded, it is for you. 9 Our 
 one constraining motive is Christ's love. Since He died for all, all in His death died 
 to sin, and therefore the reason of His death was that we may not live to ourselves, 
 but to Him who died and rose again for us. From henceforth, then, we recognise 
 no relation to Him which is not purely spiritual. Your Jerusalem emissaries boast 
 that they knew the living Christ ; and in consequence maintain their superiority to 
 us. If we ever recognised any such claim if we ever relied on having seen the 
 living Christ we renounce all such views from this moment. 10 'He who is in Christ 
 is a new creation ; the old things are passed away ; lo ! all things have become new.' 
 It is the spiritual Christ, the glorified Christ whom God made to be sin for ua in 
 
 "God exhibits deati in the living, life In the dying" (AL'ordl 
 
 * Cf. Plat. Fhaedo, 79. 
 
 8 Wisd. ix. 15, " the earthly tabernacle (yeiSes tr/c^os) weigheth down the mind." 
 
 * T. 3. So I understand this difficult clause. It seems to imply some condition which is no< 
 thst of disembodied spirits, between the death of the mortal and the reception of the resurrection 
 body (cf. Hdt. v. 92 ; Thuo. iii. 58). 
 
 * Again, notice the strange confusion of metaphors. It is only the very greatest writers who can 
 ventnro to write thus ; only those whose thoughts are like a flame, that cracks the enclosing laic? of 
 language that it may emit more heat and light. 
 
 ' It is not easy to see the exact correlation between the Judicial process of result according to 
 good and evil conduct even as regards saints and that free absolute justification by faith in Christ, 
 that complete forgiveness cf sins, and tearing up of the bond which ia against us, on which St. Paul 
 dwells in v. 19, 21 ; Rom. iii. 25 ; Col ii. 14. But faith Is as little troubled by unsojved antinomies 
 in the kingdom of grace as in that of nature (see infra, Excursus XXL, p. 732). 
 
 1 r. 11. So Chrysostom, &a, but it is one of tho many verses in this Epistle about which no 
 absolute certainty is attainable. Itmaymean "knowing that tho fear of God (timorem Domini, Vuljj.) 
 is the principle of my own life, I try to persuade you of this truth ; that it is so God knows already. 
 
 * Cf. Acts xxvi. 24. 
 
 " My revelations, ecstacies, glossolaly, are phases of intercourse of niy soul with God; my 
 practical sense and tact are for you." 
 
 10 2 Cor. v. 16, OTTO TOU vvv. In Gal 1. 15, 16, St. Paul hag said that "it pleased God to reveal His 
 Son in him," and in his view "the oi.iire, absolute importance of Christianity resided in the person 
 of Christ. God had disclosfl to him aa the S<-n of God that Jesus whom he had opposed as a false 
 Meaiiah. But the resurrection had elevated his historic Christ far above a Jewish Messiah (1 Cor. 
 rv. 8). The death of Christ had severed Hl connexion with mere national elements, and He was 
 then manifested in the universal and spiritual sphere in which all absolute importance of Judaism 
 was obliterated. St Paul here says that since he began to live for Christ, who died and rose, Jesus 
 ia no longer for him A Messiah after the flesh. That conception of Him is now purged of all sensuous, 
 Judaic, personal limitations, and Christ becomes not only one who lived and died in Judtea, but who 
 lives and reigns in tha heart of every Christian on tho absolute principle of the spiritual life." (Baur, 
 Paul. ii. 12(5.) When Paul had once shaken himself free, first from his unconverted Pharisaism, then 
 from the Judxo-ChrUtian stage of his earlier convictions, he grasped the truth that the risen and as- 
 cended Lord of all dwarfed and shamed the notion of all reero local, and family, and national restric- 
 tion*.
 
 8ECOSD EPISTLB TO THE COSINTHIANS. 413 
 
 whom God reconciled the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto 
 them whom we preach ; and our ministry is the Ministry of Reconciliation which 
 God entrusted to us, and in virtue of which we, as ambassadors on Christ's behalf, 
 entreat you to be reconciled to God. ' Him who knew not sin He made sin on our 
 behalf, that we may become the righteousness of God in Him.' * AB His fellow, 
 workers we entreat you, then, not to render null the acceptance of His grace in this 
 the day of salvation, and that this our ministry may not be blamed, we give no 
 legitimate cause of oifence in anything, but in everything commend ourselves* as 
 minibters of God " in much endurance, in tribulations, in necessities, in pressure of 
 circumstance, in blows, in prisons, in tumults, in toils, in spells of sleeplessness, in 
 fastings, in purenees, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in kindness, in the Holy 
 Spirit, in love unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God, by the arms of 
 righteousness on the right and left, by glory and dishonour, by ill report and good 
 report ; as deceivers and yet true, as being ignored and yet recognised, as dying and 
 behold we live, as being chastened yet not being slain, as being grieved and yet re- 
 joicing, as paupers yet enriching many, as having nothing yet as having all things 
 in full possession."* 
 
 He may well appeal to this outburst of impassioned eloquence as a proof that his 
 mouth is open and his heart enlarged towards them, and as the ground of entreaty 
 that, instead of their narrow jealousies and suspicions, they would, as sons, love him 
 with the same large-heartednoss, and so repay him in kind, and separate themselves 
 from their incongruous yoke-fellowship with unbelief 4 the unnatural participations, 
 symphonies, agreements of righteousness and light with lawlessness and darkness, 
 of Christ with worthlessness,* of God's temple with idols, which forfeited the glorious 
 promises of God. 6 Let them cleanse themselves from these corruptions from within 
 and from without. And then, to clench all that he has said, and for the present to 
 conclude the subject, he cries, 'Receive us! we wronged nobody, ruined nobody, de- 
 frauded nobody such charges against us are simply false. I do not allude to them 
 to condemn you. I have said already that you are in my heart to die together and 
 live together. I epeak thus boldly because of the consolation and superabundant 
 joy in the midst of all the tribulations which came on me in Macedonia with over- 
 whelming intensity without, battles ; within, fears. But God, who consoleth tho 
 humble,? consoled us by the coming of Titus, and tho good news about your reception 
 of my letter, and the yearning for me, and the lamentation, and the zeal which it 
 awoke on my behalf. At one time I regretted that I had written it, but, though it 
 pained you, I regret it no longer, because the pain was a holy and a healing pain, 
 which awoke earnestness in you self-defence and indignation against wrong, and a 
 fear and yearning towards me, and zeal for God, and punishment of the offender. 
 It was not to take either one side or the other in the quarrel that I wrote to you, but 
 that your allegiance and love to me might be manifested to yourselves 8 before God. 
 I did not care for those people their offence and quarrel. I cared only for you. 
 And you stood the test. You justified all that I had boasted to Titus about you, 
 and the respect and submission with which you received hira have inspired me with 
 
 * The meaning of this verse will be brought out infra, p. 472, stq. 
 
 ' The reader will observe how much the mention of the mxrraTucal cvurroXat has dominated 
 throughout this m^eatic self-defence. The statement of the nature and method of Hit ministiy is 
 the only commendatory letter which to them, at least, Paul will deign to use. Yet in makiag a self- 
 defence so utterly distasteful to him, observe how noble sad eternal are the thought* on which be 
 dwells, and the principles upon which ha insists. 
 
 * iv. 7-vi. 10. 
 
 * An allusion to the " diverge kinds," and ox and ass ploughing together (Lev. six. 19 ; Dent. 
 xxii. 10). I am unable to ace so strongly as othcra the digressive and parenthetic character of vL 
 H-vii. 1. 
 
 5 vi. 15, /SeAi'ap. Belial is not originally a proper natne (Prov. vi 12, " a naughty person " La 
 Adam belial) ; and this is why there was no worship of BeliaL 
 
 These are given (vi. 18) in " a mosaic of citations " from 2 Sam. vii. 14, 8 ; la. xliil. 6 (Plumptre) ; 
 perhaps, however, St. Paul had in his mind also Jer. rxxi. 3 33 ; Ezek. xxxvi 23. 
 
 i Cf. x. 1. He touphingly accepta the term applied to him. 
 
 ( yij. 12. The reading seems to be rr t v (nravSijp VULUV njc vn-cp ^uiv rcbj v/iij. (C, E. J. K.)
 
 411 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 deep joy on his account, and him with a deep affection for you. I rejoice, then, 
 that in everything I am in good heart about you.' ' 
 
 He proceeds to give them a proof of it. The churches of Macedonia he tells them, 
 poor as they are, 2 afflicted as they are, yet -with a spontaneous liberality, absolute 
 self-devotion, and affectionate enthusiasm for his wishes, giving themselves first to 
 God beyond his hopes, had not only subscribed largely to the collection for the saints, 
 but had entreated him to take part in its management. Encouraged by this, he had 
 asked Titus to finish the arrangement of this matter with the rest of his good work 
 among them. As they abounded in so many gifts and graces, let them abound in 
 this. He did not want to order them, he only told them what others had done, and 
 asked (not on his own behalf) a proof of their love, even as Christ had set them the 
 example of enriching others by His own poverty. They had begun the collection 
 first, but Macedonia had finished it. They need not give more than they could 
 afford, for God looked not to the gift, but to the spirit of the giver. Nor did he 
 wish to pauperise them in order to set others at ease, but only to establish between 
 Jewish and Gentile churches a reciprocity of aid in time of need. Titus had gladly 
 accepted the commission, and with him he sent the brother, whose praise in the 
 Gospel is known in all the churches, and who has been specially elected by the 
 churches to this office ; sinco so great was Paul's determination to give not the 
 slightest handle to mean insinuations, that he would have nothing to do with the 
 money himself. 3 With Titus and this brother he sent a third, whose earnestness had 
 been often tested in many circumstances, and who was now specially stimulated by 
 his confidence in the Corinthians. If they wanted to know anything about those 
 three visitors, Titus was his partner and fellow- worker towards them ; the other two 
 brethren were delegates of the churches, 4 the glory of Christ. Let the Corinthians 
 give a proof of their love, and a justification to all churches of his boasting about 
 them. As to the general desirability of the collection he surely need say nothing. 
 He had been boasting of their zeal, and had told the Macedonian churches that the 
 Achaians had been ready a year ago. In this there was some reason to fear that he 
 had been in error, having mistaken their ready professions for actual accomplish- 
 ment. He had therefore sent on these brethren, lest, if Macedonians came with him 
 on his arrival, and found them unprepared, he to say nothing of them should be 
 ashamed of a boast which would turn out to be false. He exhorts them, therefore, 
 to willing liberality, trusting that God would reward them. Let them give benefi- 
 cently, not grudgingly. " But (notice) this Ho who soweth sparingly, sparingly 
 also shall reap, and he who soweth with blessings, with blessings." 6 "And God ia 
 able to make all grace abound towards you, that in everything, always, having all 
 sufficiency, ye may abound to every good work." And this collection was not only 
 for the aid of the saints, but also for the glory of God by the thanksgiving to Him, 
 and pra3'er for them which it called forth. The recipients would glorify God for it 
 as a sign of genuine religion, and would yearn towards them in love, because of the 
 grace of God abounding in them. " Thanks," he says, identifying himself with the 
 feelings of the gvateful recipients " thanks to God for His unspeakable gift." 6 
 
 At this point the whole tone of the Epistle changes changes so com- 
 pletely that, in this section of it (x. i. xiii. 10), many have not only seen an 
 entirely separate letter, but have even with much plausibility identified it 
 
 ' vi. 11 vii. 16. 
 
 * Dean Stanley refers to Arnold, Rom. Commonwealth, ii. SS2. 
 
 viiL 20 (cf. Prov. ill. 8, LXX.), aiponj?, lit. " ripeness." These hapax legomena occur freely In 
 Paul's unquestioned Epistles. lie readily took up new words. lie may, for instance, have picked 
 \tp the word iiri\opr^!av (first used in ix. 10, and then in Gal. iii. 5 ; Col. ii. 19 ; Eph. iv. 16) at 
 Athens. It is unknown to the LXX. of the Old Testament, and only found in Ecelua. xxv. 22. 
 
 * Lit. "apostles," but here in its untechnical sense of "authorised delegates." Who these tw< 
 brethren were is quite uncertain ; perhaps Luke and Trophimus. 
 
 * ix. 6, en-' evAoyiais, i.e., in a large, gracious, liberal spirit (Prov. xt. 24 ; Txil. M. 
 
 * viii. 1 is. 15.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE COBINTHU.NS. 415 
 
 with that stern missive alluded to in vii. 8 12, which caused the Corinthians 
 so much pain, and stirred them up to such vigorous exertion, which is usually 
 identified with the first extant Epistle. 1 It is difficult to accept any such 
 hypothesis in the teeth of the evidence of all manuscripts ; and when we 
 remember the perpetual interchange of news between different Churches, it 
 is a much simpler and more natural supposition that, as the first part of the 
 letter had been wrjtten while he was in anxiety about them, and the second 
 after his mind had been relieved by the arrival of Titus, so this third part of 
 the letter was written after the arrival of some other messenger, who bore 
 the disastrous tidings that some teacher had come from Jerusalem whose 
 opposition to St. Paul had been more marked and more unscrupulous than any 
 with which he had yet been obliged to deal However that uiay be, certain it 
 is that these chapters are written in a very different mood from the former. 3 
 There is in them none of the tender effusiveness and earnest praise which we 
 have been hearing, but a tone of suppressed indignation, in which tenderness, 
 struggling with bitter irony, in some places renders the language laboured 
 and obscure, 3 like the words of one who with difficulty restrains himself from 
 saying all that his emotion might suggest. Tet it is deeply interesting to 
 observe that " the meekness and gentleness of Christ " reigns throughout all 
 this irony, and he utters no word of malediction like those of the Psalmists. 
 And there is also a tone of commanding authority, which the writer is driven 
 to assume as a last resource, since all forbearance has been so grievously mis- 
 understood. Some among them one person in particular 4 had been passing 
 their censures and criticisms on St. Paul very freely, saying that his 
 person was mean ; 6 that he was untutored in speech ; that ho was only 
 bold in letters, and at a distance ; that ho walked " according to thp 
 flesh ; " J that he was certainly a weakling, and probably a madman. 8 
 They had been urging their own near connexion with Christ as a sub- 
 ject of self -commendation ; 9 had been preaching another Jesus, and a 
 different Gospel, and imparting a different spirit ; 10 had been boasting im- 
 measurably of their superiority, though they were thrusting themselves into 
 
 1 If .such a supposition were at all probable, we should rather infer from xii. 18 that 
 this section was an Epistle written after the mission of Titus and the brother alluded to 
 in viii. 18. But the suggestion in the text seems to me to meet most of the difficulties. 
 
 s A change of tone of an analogous character from a more distant and respectful 
 to a more stern and authoritative style is observable in Rom. xiv., xv. (v. infra, p. 450). 
 So there is a wide difference between the apologetic and the aggressive part of Demos- 
 thenes, De Corond (Hug). Semler was the first to suggest that this Epistle was an 
 amalgamation of three, which is also the view of "Weisse. The Avrbs Si iyit HaCXos of x. 1 
 (cf . GaL v. 2 ; Eph. iii. 1 ; Philem. 19) at once marks the change. 
 
 8 Theodoret says of x. 12 18 that St. Paul wrote it obscurely (io-o^is) from a desire 
 not to expose the offenders too plainly. 
 
 * x. 2, rivas ; 7, rl T iriiroiBtv iaMTif ', 10, (jxprt, " says he ; " 11, 6 TOIOVTOS ; 12, nai ; 18, 
 a iavr'ov avvuniav ', xL 4, 6 cpxo/upot. 
 
 * x. 1, 10. 8 xi. 6. 
 
 7 x. 2, Kara cap**, i.e., with mere earthly motives ; that he was timid, complaisant, 
 inconsistent, self-seeking. 
 
 8 xi. 16, 17, 19. Compare the blunt " Thou art mad, Paul ! " of Festui. 
 
 * x. 7. 
 
 w xi. 4, iAAnv 'Iij<rovr . . trtpov nvevftm . . . cv'ayye'Xiov crpor,
 
 416 THE LIFK AND WOEK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 spheres of work in which they had not laboured ; l and by whispered sedcc- 
 tions had been beguiling the Corinthians from the simplicity of their original 
 faith. 1 In contrast to the self -supporting toils and forbearance of St. Paul, 
 these men and their coryphaeus had maintained their claim to Apostolic 
 authority by an insolence, rapacity, and violence, 3 which made Paul ironically 
 remark that his weakness in having any consideration for his converts, instead 
 of lording it over them, had been a disgrace to him. And, strange to say, 
 the ministry and doctrine of this person and his clique had awakened a distinct 
 echo in the hearts of the unstable Corinthians. They had taken thorn at their 
 own estimate ; had been dazzled by their outrageous pretensions ; benumbed 
 by the " torpedo-touch " of their avarice ; and confirmed in a bold disregard 
 for the wishes and regulations of their true Teacher.* 
 
 It is at these intruders that St. Paul hurls his indignant, ironical, unanswerable 
 apology. "Mean as he was of aspect," 4 he entreats them by the gentleness aud 
 mildness of Christ that when he came he might not be forced to show that if " lie 
 walked after the flesh," at any rate the weapons he wielded were not after the flesh, 
 but strong enough to humble insolence, and punish disobedience, and rase the strong- 
 holds of opposition, and take captive every thought into the obedience of Christ. 
 Did they judge by outward appearance ? They should find that he was as near to 
 Christ as any member of the party that used His name. They should find that his 
 personal action, founded on a power of which he well might boast, but which God 
 had given him for their edification, not for destruction, could be as weighty and 
 powerful, as calculated to terrif y them, as his letters. 6 He would not, indeed, venture 
 to enter with them into the mean arena of personal comparisons, 7 which proved the 
 unwisdom of his opponents ; nor would lie imitate them in stretching his boasts to 
 an illimitable extent. He would confine these boasts to the range of the measuring- 
 line which God had given him, and which was quite large enough without any over- 
 straining to reach to them, even as His Gospel had first reached them ; for, unlike 
 his opponents, he was not exercising these boasts in spheres of labour not his own, 
 but had hope that, as their faith enlarged, he would be still more highly esteemed, 
 and the limit of his work extended to yet wider and untried regions. Let the boaster 
 then boast in the Lord, since the test of a right to boast was not in self-commenda- 
 tion, but in the commendation of the Lord.s 
 
 He entreats them to bear with him, just a little, in this folly nay, he is sure they 
 do so.9 He feels for thcia a godly jealousy, desiring to present thorn as a chaste 
 virgin to Christ, but fearful lest they should be seduced from their simplicity as tho 
 eerpent beguiled Eve. It would have been easy for them (it appears) to tolerate this 
 new preacher 10 if he is preaching another Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel; 
 but he professes to preach the same, and such being the caso be had no more 
 
 i 1. 13. si. 8. si. 20, 21. x. 13 ; si. 3, 20 ; xii. 13,14, 
 
 Mauv of these expressions, as St. Chiysosloin saw, are quotations of the sneers of his oppo- 
 nents KOT eipiMtiav <t*i<ri TO. iicsCvtov 0eyyofispos. For traces of similar irony, see 1 Cor. iv. 811 ; 
 TL 3-8 ; ix. 1 1C ; xv. 6. 
 
 x. 1 11. This comparison of his letters and his personal conduct (ver. 10) is quoted from the 
 Jerusalem emissary (^TJO-IV, "he says ;" 7, TI$; 11, TOIOVTOS). 
 
 1 x, 12, YKpZv<u 17 ovyKpivai, an untranslatable paronomasia. 
 
 x. 12 18. The haunting word is, as in so many parts of the Epistle, "boast" and "commen- 
 dation "(Hi- 1 ; iv. 2; v. 12; x. 12, 16, 17, 18; xi 10, 12. 18, SO; xii. 1, 5, 6, 11), with especial refer- 
 ence to the commendatory letters. It was an easy thing, he hints, for these Judaisers to cuino 
 comfortably with "letters" from Jerusalem to Corinth, and there be supported by admiring 
 Adherents whom his toils had converted ; a very different thing to traverse the world as a friendless 
 missionary, and sow the seed of the Gospel in virgin eoiL 
 
 xi. 1, fiiKpov TI . . . iAAa KOI. This Epistle is characterised by haunting words, aud the 
 V.ey words of this chapter are avc'xopai (1, 4, 19, 20) and fypwv (1, 16, 17, 19, 21 ; xii. 6, 11). Dr. 
 1 luiiptre seea in this the echo of some taunt which Titus l)ad reported " His folly is becoming 
 Intolerable." ^- r-^ 
 
 ti. i, 6 px<&fifvo.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 417 
 
 authority than Paul, who claimed that he had in no respect fallen short of the most 
 super-apostolic Apostles.i A mere laic in eloquence he might be, but there was at 
 any rate no defect in his knowledge ; and the proof of this as regards them was 
 obvious in everything among all men,* unless, indeed, he had transgressed by humi- 
 liating himself for their exaltation by preaching to them gratuitously. Other 
 Churches he plundered, preaching to the Corinthian, and being paid his wages by 
 others. And though he was in positive want while among them, he did not benumb 
 them with his exactions, as though he were some gymnotus, but was helped by 
 Macedonians, and kept and would keep himsolf from laying any burden whatever 
 on them. That boast no one should obstruct, 3 not (God knows) because he did not 
 love them, but because he would cut off the handle from those who wanted a handle, 
 and that, in this topic of boasting, he and his opponents might be on equal grounds. 
 The last remark is a keen sarcasm, since, if they charged Paul with taking money, 
 they charged him with the very thing which he did not do, and which they did.* 
 "For such," ho adds with passionate severity, "are false Apostles, deceitful workers, 
 transforming themselves into Apostles of Christ { nor is this to be wondered at, for 
 Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.* It is no great thing then, 
 if alsp His ministers transform themselves as ministers of righteousness, whose end 
 shall be according to their works. Again I say, Let no one think mo a fool ; or, if 
 you do, receive me even as you would receive a fool, that I too, as well as they, may 
 boast a little." He claims nothing lofty or sacred or spiritual for this determined 
 boasting. It was a folly, but not one of his own choosing. Since many adopted 
 this worldly style of boasting, he would meet them with their own weapons ; and the 
 Corinthians, since they were so wise, would, he was sure, gladly tolerate mere harm- 
 less fools, seeing that they tolerated people much more objectionable people who 
 enslaved, devoured, 5 took them in people who assumed the most arrogant preten- 
 sions people who smote them in tho face.' " Of course all this ia to my discredit, 
 it shows how weak I was in not adopting a similar line of conduct. Yet, speaking 
 in this foolish way, I possess every qualification which inspires them with this 
 audacity. I, like them, am a Hebrew, an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham ; 8 I ani 
 not only, as they claim to be, a minister of Christ, but (I am speaking in downright 
 madness) something more." And then follows the most marvellous fragment ever 
 written of any biography ; a fragment beside which the most imperilled lives of the 
 most suffering saints shrink into insignificance, and which shows us how fractional 
 at the best is onr knowledge of the details of St. Paul's life "in toils moro 
 abundantly, in stripes above measure, in prisons more abundantly, in deaths oft ; of 
 tho Jews five times received I forty stripes save one ; thrice was I beaten with rods ; 
 once was I stoned ; thrice I suffered shipwreck ; a night and day have I spent in 
 the deep; 9 in journeyings often ; in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils 
 
 i xi. 5, ruv vtrepXiof 'AworToAaM/j literally " the extra-super Apostles." There is undoubtedly 
 a sense qf indignation in the use, twice over, of t&is strange colloquialism ; but it is aimed, not at the 
 Twelve, with whom St. Paul's relations were always courteous and respectful, but at tho extravagant 
 and purely human claims (mere superiority, Kara, <rapa) asserted for them by these emissaries. H* 
 compares himself with them in knowledge (xi. 6), in self-denial about support (xi. 6 21), ia privilege J 
 of birth (22), in Labours and perils (23 33), in ths feet that his weakness resulted from pre-enainei^i 
 revelations (xii. 1 10), and in the supernatural signs of Apostlcship (siL 11, 12). 
 
 a xi. 6. If ^avepuxravm (, B, F, G) be the right reading, it means "manifesting it (.., Know- 
 bjige) to you in everything among alL" 
 
 * Xi. 10. leg. <|>pay>}<7crai. 
 
 * How long this vile calumny continued may be seen ia tie identification of alia with Simon 
 Magus in the Clementines. 
 
 8 This incidentally alludes to a|Hagadah respecting Job. i. 6, or tho angel wha wrestled with 
 Jacob (Eisenmenger, Entd. Judenth. i. 845). 
 
 * It is very probable that the Claudian famine had made many needy Jewish Christians from 
 Jerusalem go the round of the Churches, demanding and receiving the Chaluka. 
 
 i Cf. 1 Kings mi. 24; Matt v. 39 ; Luke xxii. 64 ; Acts xxiii. 2. Even teachers could act thus. 
 1 Tim. iiL 8 ; Titus 1. 7. 
 
 * We can hardly Imagine that the Ebionite lie that St. Paul was a Gentile, who had got liimso/f 
 circumcised in okler to marry the High Priest's daughter, had as yet been, invented ; yet the Tarsian 
 birth and Roman franchise may have led to whispered insinuations. 
 
 * Iz. xv. 5(LXX.). Theopbylact makes it mean "in Bythos," a place near Ljstrs, after the stoning.
 
 418 THB LIFE AND WORK O! ST. PAUL. 
 
 from my own race, in perils from Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the 
 wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in toil and weariness, 
 in sleeplessness often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often ; besides the things 
 additional to all these, the care which daily besets me,i my anxiety for all the 
 Churches. Who is weak, and I share not his weakness ? who is made to stumble, 
 and I do not burn with indignation? If I must boast, I will boast of this, the 
 weakness to which I alluded. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
 is blessed for evermore, knoweth that I am not lying. In Damascus the ethnarch 
 of Aretas the king was guarding the city of the Damascenes, wishing to seize me ; 
 and through a window in a large basket, I was let down through the wall, and 
 escaped his hands." 8 
 
 Such had been his "preparation of feebleness," without which he could neither 
 have been what he was, nor have done what he did. Such is one glimpse of a life 
 never since equalled in self-devotion, as it was also " previously without precedent 
 in the history of the world." Here he breaks off that part of the subject. Did he 
 intend similarly to detail a series of other hair-breadth escapes ? or glancing retro- 
 spectively at his perils, does he end with the earliest and most ignominious ? Or 
 was it never his intention to enter into such a narrative, and did he merely mention 
 the instance of ignominious escape at Damascus, so revolting to the natural dignity 
 of an Oriental and a Rabbi, as a climax of the disgraces he had borne ? We cannot 
 tell. At that point, either because he was interrupted, or because his mood changed, 
 or because it occurred to him that he had already shown his ample superiority in the 
 " weakness " of voluntary humiliation to even the most " super-apostolic Apostles," 
 he here stops short, and so deprives us of a tale inestimably precious, which the 
 whole world might have read with breathless interest, and from which it might 
 have learnt invaluable lessons. However that may be, he suddenly exclaims, " Of 
 course it is not expedient for me to boast. 8 I will come to visions and revelations 
 of the Lord." I know a man in Christ fourteen years ago (whether in the body or 
 out of the body * I know not, God knows) snatched such an one as far as the third 
 heaven. 5 And I know such a man (whether in the body or apart from the body I 
 know not, God knows) that he was snatched into Paradise, and heard unspeakable 
 utterances which it is not lawful for man to speak. Of such an one I will boast 
 but of myself I will not boast except in these weaknesses ; for even should I wish 
 to boast I shall not be a fool ; for I will speak the truth. But I forbear lest any 
 one should estimate about me above what he sees me to be, or hoars at all from me. 
 And to prevent my over-exaltation by the excess of the revelation, there was given 
 me a stake in the flesh,* a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I may not be 
 over-exalted. About this I thrice besought the Lord that it (or he) may stand off 
 from me. And He has said to me, ' My grace sufficeth thee ; for my power is 
 perfected in weakness.' Most gladly then will I rather boast in my weaknesses that 
 the power of Christ may spread a tent over me7 That is why I boast in weaknesses, 
 insults, necessities, persecutions, distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, 
 then I am mighty. I have become a fool in boasting. You compelled me. For I 
 ought to be ' commended ' by you. For in no respect was I behind the ' out and 
 out ' Apostles, 8 even though I am nothing. Certainly the signs of an Apostle were 
 
 1 xi. 28, <Vi<rTtt(Tis (N, B, B, E, F, G). 
 
 1 xL 133. On the escape from Damascus, see tvpra, p. 128. 
 
 * 8ij is the most forcible and natural reading, and here th MSS. variation* $i fa D) and tft 
 (B, E, P, G) are probably due to itacism or misapprehension. The 6Jj implies, " You will see from 
 the humiliating escape to which I have just so solemnly testified that in my case boasting is not 
 expedient." If the following " for " (D) be correct, it is due to counter-currents of feeling ; but it 
 is omitted in A, B, G. 
 
 * xii. 8. leg. x w p, B, D, B. The physical condition was probably identical with that to which 
 Hindu psychologists give the name of Ttirga, a fourth state, bwides those of waking, dreaming, 
 and slumber. The Hindu yogis call it VvlilM sthiti, and dwell rapturously on it in their mystio 
 writings and songs. 
 
 1 The " third heaven " occurs here only. For paradise, see Luke xxiii. 43. 
 
 * On this " stake in tho flesh," v. infra, Excursus X. Ko\a.<f>iy, lit. " should lp in the fso?." 
 
 ' Xii. 9, 77icnc>7i>cu(<T) eir* ifit. 
 
 * xiL 111. The colloquialism closely reproduce! that of St. Paul.
 
 SECOND EPISTLE TO THB CORINTHIANS. 419 
 
 wrought among you in all patience, by signs, and portents, and poweri. The single 
 fact that I did not benumb you with exactions is your sole point of inferiority to 
 other Churches. Forgive me this injustice ! See, a third time I am ready to coma 
 to you, and I will not benumb you, for I seek not yours but you. Children 
 ought to treasure up for their parents, but so far from receiving from you, 
 I will very gladly spend and be utterly spent for your souls, even though 
 the more exceedingly I love you, the less I am loved. But stop ! though I did not 
 burden you, yet ' being a cunning person I caught you by guile.' Under the pre- 
 text of a collection I got money out of you by my confederates ! I ask you, is that 
 a fact ? Did Titus or the brother whom I have sent with him over-reach you in 
 any respect ? Did not they behave exactly as I have done ? You have long been 
 fancying that all this is by way of self-defence to you. 1 Do not think it ! You are 
 no judges of mine. My appeal is being made in the presence of God in Christ ; yet, 
 beloved, it has all been for your edification. It was not said to defend myself, but 
 to save us from a miserable meeting, lest we mutually find each other what we 
 should not wish ; lest I find you buzzing with quarrels, party spirit, outbreaks of 
 rage, self-seekings, slanders, whisperings, inflations, turbulences ; and lest, on my 
 return to you, my God humble me in my relation to you, and I shall mourn over 
 many of those who have sinned before and not repented for the uncleanness, forni- 
 cation, and wantonness which they practised. It is the third time that I am intending 
 to visit you ; 2 it will be like the confirming evidence of two or three witnesses. I 
 have forewarned, and I now warn these persons once more that, if I come, I will not 
 spare. Since you want a proof that Christ speaks in me, ye shall have it. He was 
 crucified in weakness; we share His death and His weakness, but we shall also share 
 His life and power. Prove yourselves, test yourselves. Is Christ in you, or are you 
 spurious Christians, unable to abide the test ? You will, I hope, be forced to recog- 
 nise that I am not spurious ; but my prayer is that you may do no evil, not that my 
 genuineness may be manifested ; that you may do what is noble, even if therewith 
 we be regarded as spurious. Against the truth, against genuine faithf ulness, I have 
 no power, but only for it. Be true to the Gospel, and I shall be powerless; and you 
 will be mighty, and I shall rejoice at the result. I ever pray for this, for your 
 perfection. That is why I write while still absent, in order that when present I 
 may have no need to exercise against you with abrupt severity s the power which the 
 Lord gave me, and gave me for building up, not for rasing to the ground." 4 
 
 He would not end with words in which such uncompromising sternness mingled 
 with his immense and self-sacrificing forbearance. He adds, therefore, in his own 
 hand " Finally, brethren, farewell ; be perfect, be comforted, be united, be at 
 peace'; then shall the God of love and peace be with you. Salute one another with 
 a holy kiss. All the saints salute you." And then follows the fullest of his Apos- 
 tolic benedictions, " thence adopted by the Church in all ages as the final blessing 
 of her services " " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and 
 the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with you all."* 
 
 i TroAoi (, A, B, F, G, Vulg.). 
 
 1 xii. 14. He has been atTCorinth once ; is now going a second time (ira\iv) ; and had once in- 
 tended to go. This is like a thing attested by two or three witnesses, and will certainly be fulfilled. 
 I agree with Banr in saying, " Let ua give up the fiction of a journty for which we can find no 
 reasonable grounds " (Paul. ii. 320). 
 
 * iiroTOfjuas only in Titus i. 13, not in LXX. The metaphor is either " by way of amputation" 
 or " precipitately," as in Wiad. v. 23 ; in-oro/ita (Rom. xi. 22). 
 
 * xii. 13 xiii. 10. 
 
 * xiii. 11 13. As these are the last extant words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, It is interest- 
 Ing to see what was the condition of the Church when St. Clement of Rome wrote to them thirty- 
 five years later. We find that they were still somewhat turbulent, somewhat disunited, somewhat 
 sceptical, and St. Clement has to recall to them the examples of St. Peter and St. Paul. On the 
 whole, however, we can see that the appeals and arguments of the Apostle in these two letters havs 
 not been in vain. About A.D 135 the Church was visited by Hegesippns (Euseb. H.E. iy. 22), who 
 spoke favourably of their obedience and liberality. Their Bishop Dionysius was exercising a wide- 
 spread influence. In speaking of the Resurrection, St. Clement alludes to the Phoenix (ad Roin. i. 
 4, 25), which in that age excited much interest (Tac. Ann. vi. 28 ; Plin. H. N, x, 2). Can any one 
 fail to see a " grace of superintendence " in the absence of such illustrations from the page of the 
 Apostles ?
 
 420 THE UM AND YTOBK OF ST. PATTL, 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 THE SECOND VISIT TO COEINTH, 
 
 AtiaKTueby, avsfiKajtor. 2 TUJ. ii. 24 
 
 ST. LUKE passes over with the exi-remest brevity the second sojourn of Si 
 Paul in Tilaeedonia. The reason for his silence may have been that the period 
 was not iiis iked by any special events sufficiently prominent to find room in 
 his pages. I' *raa no part of his plan to dwell on the sources of inward 
 sorrow which weighed so heavily upon the mind of St. Paul, or to detail the 
 afflictions which formed the very groundwork of his ordinary life. It was 
 the experience of St. Paul, more perhaps than that of any man who has erer 
 lived even if we select those who have made their lives a sacrifice to some 
 great cause of God that life was a tissue of minor trials, diversified by greater 
 and heavier ones. But St. Luke not to speak of the special purposes which 
 seem to have guided his sketch only gives us full accounts of the events 
 which he personally witnessed, 1 or of those which he regarded of capital 
 importance, and about which he could obtain information which he knew to 
 be trustworthy. It is one of the many indications of the scantiness of his 
 biography that he does not even once mention a partner and fellow-worker 
 of St. Paul so dear to him, so able, so energetic, and so deeply trusted as the 
 Greek Titus, of whose activity and enthusiasm the Apostle made so much 
 uee in furthering the Offertory, and in the yet more delicate task of dealirsg 
 with the Christian Corinthians at this most unsatisfactory crisis of their 
 troubled history. 
 
 St. Luke accordingly, passing over the distress of mind and the outward 
 persecution which St. Paul tells us he had at this time encountered, says 
 nothing about the many agitations of which we are able from the Epistles 
 to supply the outline. All that he tells us is that Paul passed through those 
 regions, and encouraged them with much exhortation. He does not even 
 mention tho interesting circumstance that having preached during his second 
 journey at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Bercea, tho capitals respectively of 
 Macedonia Prima, Secunda, and Tertia, he now utilised the intentional post- 
 ponement of his visit to Corinth by going through Macedonia Quarta as far 
 aa Hlyricum. Whether he only went to the borders of Illyricnra, or whether 
 ho entered it and reached as far as Dyrrachium, and even as Nicopolis, and 
 whether by Illyricum is meant tho Greek district or the Roman province 3 
 that went by that name, we cannot tell; but at any rats St. Paul mentions this 
 country as marking the circumference of the outermost circle of those mis- 
 sionary journeys of which Jerusalem was the centre. 
 
 That the Offertory greatly occupied his time and thoughts is clear from 
 
 1 So tho Muratorian Canon : " act* autS omiriu apostolorum sub uno libro ecribta sunt 
 lucaa optime theofile comprindit quia mb praesentia ejus singula g3rebantur < " 
 "Titus unto Dahnatia," 2 Tim. IT. 10.
 
 THE SECOND VISIT TO COKIrfTH. 421 
 
 his own repeated allusions and the prominence which he gives to this subject 
 in the Epistles to the Corinthians. It must have been one of his trials to 
 be perpetually pleading for pecuniary contributions, among little bodies of 
 converts of whom the majority were not only plunged in poverty, but who 
 had already made the most conspicuous sacrifices on behalf of their Christian 
 faith. It was clear to him that this fact would be unscrupulously used as a 
 handle against him. However careful and businesslike his arrangements 
 might be however strongly he might insist on having no personal share in 
 tho distribution, or even the treasurership of these funds persons would not 
 bo wanting to whisper the base insinuation that Paul found his own account 
 in them by means of accomplices, and that even the laborious diligence with 
 which he worked day and night at his trade, .and failed even thus to ward off 
 the pains of want, was only the cloak for a deep-laid scheme of avarice and 
 eelf -aggrandisement. It was still worse when these charges came from the 
 emissaries of the very Church for the sake of whose poor he was facing this 
 disagreeable work of begging. 1 But never was there any man in this world 
 however innocent, ho wever saintly who has escaped malice and slander; 
 iudeed, the virulence of this malice and the persistency of this slander are 
 often proportionate to the courage wherewith he confronts the baseness of 
 the world. St. Paul did not profess to be indifferent to these stings of hatred 
 and calumny; he made no secret of the agony which they caused him. He was, 
 on the contrary, acutely sensible of their gross injustice, and of the hindrance 
 which they caused to the great work of his life ; and the irony and passion 
 with which, on fitting occasions, he rebuts them is a measure of the suffering 
 which they caused. But, as a rule, he left them unnoticed, and forgave those 
 by whom they wore perpetrated: 
 
 " Assailed by slander and the tongue of strife 
 1 ! ia only answer was a blameless life ; 
 Ami he that forged and he that flung the dart, 
 Had each a brother's interest in his heart." 
 
 For he was not the man to neglect a duty because it was disagreeable, or 
 because his motives in undertaking it might be misinterpreted. And the 
 motives by which he was actuated ia this matter were peculiarly sacred. In 
 the first place, the leading Apostles at Jerusalem had bound Mm by a special 
 promise to take care of their poor, almost as a part of the hard- wrung compact 
 by which their Church had consented to waive, in tho case of Gentile converts, 
 the full acceptance of legal obligations. In the second place, the need really 
 existed, and was even urgent; and it was entirely in consonance with St. 
 Paul's own feelings to give them practical proof of that brotherly love which 
 he regarded as the loftiest of Christian virtues. Then, further, in his early 
 days, his ignorant zeal had inflicted on the Church of Jerusalem a deadly 
 injury, and he would fain show the sincerity and agony of his repentance by 
 
 To thia day the Chaluka and Kadima at Jerusalem are the source of endless heart- 
 burnings and jealousies, and cause no particle of gratitude, but are accepted by the Jews 
 as a testimonial to the high desert of living in the Holy City,
 
 4122 THE LiirE AUD wofcs or ST. 
 
 doing all he could, again and again, to repair it. Lastly, lie had a hope-* 
 sometimes strong and sometimes weak that so striking a proof of disin- 
 terested generosity on the part of the Gentile Churches which he had founded 
 would surely touch the hearts of the Pharisaic section of the mother Church, 
 and if it eonld not cement the differences between the Christians of Judsea 
 and Heathendom, would at least prevent the needless widening of the rift 
 which separated them. At moments of deeper discouragement, writing from 
 Corinth to Rome, 1 while he recognises the ideal fitness of an effort on the 
 part of Gentile Christians to show, by help in temporal matters, their sense 
 of obligation for the spiritual blessings which had radiated to them from 
 the Holy City, and while- he looks on the contribution as a harvest gathering 
 to prove to Jewish Christians the genuineness of the seed sown among the 
 heathen, he yet has obvious misgivings about the spirit in which even this 
 offering may be accepted, and most earnestly entreats the Romans not only 
 to agonise with him in their prayers to God that he may be delivered from 
 Jewish violence in Judsea, but also that the bounty of which he was the chief 
 minister might be graciously received. It may be that by that time experi- 
 ences of conflict with the Judaisers in Corinth may have somewhat damped 
 the fervour cf his hopes ; for before his arrival there, 2 he gives expression to 
 glowing anticipations that their charitable gifts would not only relieve un- 
 deserved distress, but would be a proof of sincere allegiance to the Gospel of 
 Christ, and would call forth deep thankfulness to God. 3 Alas ! those glowing 
 anticipations were doomed there is too much reason to fear to utter dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 Having finished his work in the whole of Macedonia, and finding no more 
 opportunity for usef ulness in those parts, 4 he at last sot out on Ids way to 
 Corinth. It was probably towards the close of the year 57, but whether Paul 
 travelled by sea or land, and from what point he started, we do not know. 
 After his journey into Macedonia Quarta, he perhaps returned to Thessalonica, 
 which was a convenient place of rendezvous for the various brethren who 
 now accompanied him. The number of his associates makes it most probable 
 that he chose the less expensive, though, at that late season of the year, 
 more dangerous mode of transit, and took ship from Thessalonica to Cenchreae, 
 The care of the money, and his own determination Co have nothing to do with 
 it, rendered it necessary for the treasurers appointed by the scattered com- 
 munities to accompany his movements. The society of these fellow-travellere 
 must have been a source of deep happiness to the over-tried and over-wearied 
 Apostle, and the sympathy of such devoted friends must have fallen like dew 
 upon his soul. There was the young and quiet Timothy, the beloved com- 
 panion of his life ; there was Tychicus, who had been won in the school of 
 Tyrannus, and remained faithful to him to the very last ; 6 there was Gaius of 
 Derbe, a living memorial of the good work done in his earliest missionary 
 
 1 Rom. xv. 2532. * 2 Cor. viii. 24 ; ix. 1215. 
 
 2 Cor. ix. 14, * Bom. XV. 23, JU^KCTI TOTTOV l\<av iv rots icAifAaO'i rovrotf 
 
 6 2 Tim. iv. 12,
 
 THE SECOND VISIT TO COfclNTH. 423 
 
 journey. Theasalonica had contributed no less than three to the little band 
 Jason, his fellow-countryman, if not his kinsman, whose house at St. Paul's 
 first visit had been assaulted by a raging mob, which, failing to find his guest, 
 had dragged him before tho Politarchs ; Aristarchus, who had shared with 
 him the perils of Ephesus, as ho subsequently shared his Toyage and shipwreck ; 
 aiid Secundus, of whom no particulars are known. Besides these, Beroea had 
 despatched Sopater, a Jewish convert, who is one of those who sends his 
 greetings to the Roman Christians. 1 In Corinth itself he was again looking 
 forward to a meeting with some of his dearest friends vith Titus, whose 
 courage and good sense rendered him so invaluable ; with Luke the beloved 
 physician, who was in all probability the delegate of Philippi; with Trophimus, 
 an Ephesian Greek, the fatal but innocent cause of St. Paul's arrest at Jeru- 
 salem, destined long afterwards to start with him on his voyage as a prisoner, 
 but prevented from sharing his last sufferings by an illness with which he 
 was seized at Miletus ; a and with the many Corinthian Christians Justus, 
 Sosthenes, Erastns, TertiuB, Quartus, Stephanas, Fortunatus, Achaicus, and 
 lastly Gaius of Corinth, with whom St. Paul intended to stay, and whose open 
 house and Christian hospitality were highly valued by the Church. 
 
 The gathering of so many Christian hearts could not fail to be a bright 
 point in the cloudy calendar of the Apostle's life. What happy evenings 
 they must have enjoyed, while the toil of his hands in no way impeded the 
 outpouring of his soul ! what gay and genial intercourse, such as is possible 
 in its highest degree only to pure and holy souls! what interchange of 
 thoughts and hopes on the deepest of all topics ! what hours of mutual con- 
 solation amid deepening troubles ; what delightful Agapse ; what blessed 
 partaking of the Holy Sacrament; what outpourings of fervent prayer! 
 For three months St. Paul stayed at Corinth, and during these three months 
 he wrote, in all probability, the Epistle to the Galatians, and certainly 
 the Epistle to the Romans two of the most profound and memorable of all 
 his writings. 3 And since it was but rarely that he was his own amanuensis 
 
 1 Rom. xvi. 21. The exact sense which St. Paul attributed to ov/ye^t ia uncertain. 
 
 2 2 Tim. iv. 20. 
 
 * The subtle indications that the Epistle to the Galatians was written nearly at the 
 same time as the Second Epistle to the Corinthians consist of casual reflections of the 
 same expression and pre-occupation with the same order of thought. The tone, feeling, 
 style, and mode of argument show the greatest similarity. Compare, for instance 
 
 2 CORINTHIANS. GALATIANS. 
 
 xi. 2 iv. 17. 
 
 xi. 20 v. 15. 
 
 xii. 20, 21 v. 20, 21. 
 
 ii. 7 vi. 1. 
 
 xiii. 5 vi. 4. 
 
 ix. 6 vi.8. 
 
 v. 17 vi. 15. 
 
 2 CORINTHIANS. GALATIANS. 
 
 i. 1 
 
 xi. 4... 
 v. 11 
 xii. 11 
 
 . 1. 
 
 6. 
 
 .10. 
 ii. 6. 
 
 v. 15 ... ... ii. 20. 
 
 viii. 6 ii. 3. 
 
 v. 21 lii. 13. 
 
 These are but specimens of coincidence in thought and expression, which might be almost 
 indefinitely multiplied. To dwell on the close resemblance between Galatians and 
 Romans is needless. It was noticed a thousand years ago. The Epistle to the Galatians 
 is the rough sketch, that to the Romans the finished picture. The former is an im- 
 passioned controversial personal statement cf the relation of Gentile Christians mainly 
 to one legal obligation circumcision ; the latter is a calm, systematic, general treatise
 
 424 SEK IIFB AND WORK OF Si. PAtJL. 
 
 since it is his custom to associate one or more and sometimes the whole body 
 01 Ms fellow-travellers with himself in the superscriptions of his letters, as well 
 as to send greetings from them may we not regard it as certain that those 
 letters were read aloud to the little knot of friends, and formed fruitful topics 
 of long and earnest discussion ? Did even St. Paul anticipate that those few 
 rolls of papyrus would be regarded to the latest ages of the world as a price- 
 less treasure? 
 
 But what was the state of things which the Apostle found when he 
 stepped out of the house of Gains into the house of Justus? It waa St. 
 Luke's object to show the fundamental unity which existed among Christians, 
 and not to dwell upon the temporary differences which unhappily divided 
 them. Ho does not, indeed, conceal the existence of discordant elements, but 
 his wish seems to have been to indicate the essential harmony which these 
 discords might disturb, but not destroy. He has not, therefore, told us a 
 single detail of St. Paul's encounter with the false Apostles, the deceitful 
 workers who had huckstered and adulterated the Word of God, or with that 
 one insolent and overbearing emissary, who with his stately presence, trained 
 utterance, and immense pretensions, backed with credentials from Jerusalem 
 and possibly with the prestige of a direct knowledge of Christ, had denied 
 St. Paul's Apostleship, and omitted no opportunity of blackening his 
 character. Did this man face St. Panl ? Did his followers abide by the 
 defiance which they had expressed towards him ? Was there a crisis in which 
 it was decisively tested on which side the true power lay ? Did he after all 
 come with a rod, or in the spirit of meekness ? waa the proof of his Apostle- 
 ship given by the exercise of discipline, and the utterance of excommunica- 
 tions which struck terror into flagrant apostates, or did the returning allegiance 
 of the erring flock, and the increase of holiness among them, render it un- 
 necessary to resort to stringent measures ? To all these questions we can 
 return no certain answer. We may imagine the hush of awful expectation 
 with which the little community gathered in the room of Justus would 
 receive the first entrance and the first utterances of one whose love they 
 had so terribly tried, and against whose person they had levelled such un- 
 worthy sarcasms. Personal questions would, however, weigh least with him. 
 They knew well that it was not for party opposition but for moral contumacy 
 that his thunders would be reserved. Since many of them were heinous 
 offenders, since many had not even repented after serious warnings, how must 
 they have shuddered with dread, how must their guilty consciences have 
 made cowards of them all, when at last, after more than three years, they 
 etood face to face with one who could hand them too over to Satan v/ithall the 
 fearful consequences which that sentence entailed! Over all these scenes 
 the veil of oblivion has fallen. The one pen that might have recorded them 
 has written nothing, nor do we hear a single rumour from any other source. 
 
 on the relations of the Gospel to the Law. An instructive comparison of Gal. iii. 6 
 29 with Bom, ir., &c., will be found in Lightfoot's Galatiwu, pp. 11 16.
 
 IMFORTANOEjOF THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIA.NS. 425 
 
 Bnt that for the time the Apostle triumphed that whether in consequence of 
 an actual exertion of power, or of a genuine repentance on the part of his 
 opponents, his authority was once more firmly established we may infer from 
 his hint that until the Corinthian difficulties were removed he could take no 
 sther task in hand, and that in the Epistles which he wrote during these 
 three months of his residence at the Achaian capital ho contemplates yet 
 wider missions and freely yields himself to new activities.! 
 
 Yet, amid our ignorance of facts, we do possess the means of reading 
 the inmost thoughts which were passing through the soul of St, Paul. The 
 two Epistles which he despatched during those three months were in many 
 'respects the most important that he ever wrote, and it inspires us with the 
 highest estimate of his intellectual power to know that, within a period so 
 short and so much occupied with other duties and agitations, he yet found 
 time to dictate the Letter to the Galatians, which marks an epoch in the 
 history of the Church, and the Letter to the Romans, which may well be 
 regarded as the most important of all contributions to the system of its 
 theology. 
 
 _ ^__^^ 
 
 'toiH 
 
 fj KOIJJOICO ot l^ih'ifi itfiitfi-uJI ^.ij^'iJO <* 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 '. i wlillj nil tutH it .11.' 
 
 IMPORTANCE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE OALATIAH3. 
 
 " In Ex. xxxiL 16, for charuth, l graven,' read chertrth, ' freedom,' for thou wflt 
 find no freeman but him who is engaged in the Thorah." R. HEIR (Perek. 2). 
 
 " He is a freeman whom THE TRUTH makes frf 
 And all are slaves beside." 
 
 s . . . ?rapaKi'<f u* ds )>6 l uo>> ri\tiov rdv Tqs t*.tu9fplas . . (JAKES i, 25). 
 
 WE have already seen that in his brief second visit to the Churches of 
 Galatia, on his road to Ephesus, St. Paul seems to have missed the bright 
 enthusiasm which welcomed his first preaching. His keen eye marked the 
 germs of coming danger, and the warnings which he uttered weakened the 
 warmth of his earlier relationship towards them. But he could hardly have 
 expected the painful tidings that converts once so dear and so loving had 
 relapsed from everything which was distinctive in his teaching into the 
 shallowest coremonialism of his Judaising opponents. Already, whoever 
 sanctioned them, these men had spoilt his best work, and troubled his happy 
 disciples at Autioch and at Corinth, and they had their eye also on Ephesus. 
 Thus to intrude themselves into other men's labours thus to let him bear the 
 brunt of all dangers and labours while they tried to monopolise the result to 
 watch indifferently and unsympathetieally while the sower bore forth bis good 
 
 Bom, i. 13; iv. 24, 32. 
 15
 
 426 THE LIFE AKD WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 seed, weeping, and then securely to thrust their blunt and greedy sickles into 
 the ripening grain to dog the footsteps of the bold, self-sacrificing missionary 
 with easy, well-to-do men-pleasers, who, with no personal risk, stole in his 
 absence into the folds which he had constructed, in order to worry with privy 
 paws his defenceless sheep to trouble with their petty formalisms and 
 artificial orthodoxies the crystal water of Christian simplicity and Christian 
 happiness to endanger thus the whole future of Christianity by trying to 
 turn it from the freedom of a universal Gospel into the bondage of a Judaic 
 law to construct a hedge which, except at the cost of a cutting in the flesh, 
 should exclude the noblest of the Gentiles while it admitted the vilest of the 
 Jews all this, to the clear vision of St. Paul, seemed bad enough. But thus 
 to thrust themselves among the little communities of his Galatian converts 
 to take advantage of their warm affections and weak intellects to play on the 
 vacillating frivolity of purpose which made them such easy victims, especially 
 to those who offered them an external cult far more easy than spiritual 
 religion, and bearing a fascinating resemblance to their old ceremonial 
 paganism this to St. Paul seemed intolerably base. 
 
 Vexed at this Galatian fickleness, and stung with righteous indignation at 
 those who had taken advantage of it, he seized his pen to express in the most 
 unmistakable language his opinion of the falsity and worthlessness of the 
 limits into which these Christian Pharisees wished to compress the principles 
 of Christianity the worn-out and burst condition of the old bottles in which 
 they strove to store the rich, fresh, fermenting wine. It was no time to 
 pause for nice inquiries into motives, or careful balancing of elements, or 
 vague compromise, or polished deference to real or assumed authority. It 
 was true that this class of men came from Jerusalem, and that they belonged 
 to the very Church of Jerusalem for whose poorer members he was making 
 such large exertions. It was true that, in one flagrant instance at any rate, 
 they had, or professed to have, the authority of James. Could it be that 
 James, in the bigotry of lifelong habit, had so wholly failed to add under- 
 standing and knowledge to his scrupulous holiness, that he was lending the 
 sanction of his name to a work which St. Paul saw to be utterly ruinous to 
 the wider hopes of Christianity ? If so, it could not be helped. James was 
 but a man a holy man indeed, and a man inspired with the knowledge of 
 great and ennobling truths but no more faultless or infallible than Peter or 
 than Paul himself. If Peter, more than once, had memorably wavered, James 
 also might waver ; and if so, James in this instance was indubitably in the 
 wrong. But St. Paul, at least, never says so ; nor does he use a word of dis- 
 respect to " the Lord's brother." The Church of Jerusalem had, > m a 
 previous occasion, expressly repudiated others who professed to speak in llieir 
 name; nor is there any proof that they had ever sanctioned this sort of 
 counter-mission of espionage, which was subversive of all progress, of all 
 liberty, and even of all morals. For, whoever may have been these Judaic 
 teachers, vanity, party spirit, sensuality, had followed in their wake. They 
 must be tested by their fruits, and those fruits were bitter and poisonous.
 
 IMPOBTAWCE OP THE EPISTLE TO THE OALATIANS. 427 
 
 Some of them, at least, were bad men, anxious to stand well with everybody, 
 and to substitute an outward observance for a true religion. Greed, self-im- 
 portance, externalism, were everything to them ; the Cross was nothing. If 
 they had not been bad men they would not have been BO grossly inconsistent 
 as to manipulate and evade the Law to which they professed allegiance. 
 If they had not been bad men they would not have made the free use they 
 did of the vilest of controversial weapons surreptitious sneers and personal 
 slanders. Yet by such base means as those they had persistently tried to 
 undermine the influence of their great opponent. They systematically dis- 
 paraged his authority. He was, they said, no Apostle whatever; he was 
 certainly not one of the Twelve ; he had never seen Jesus except in a vision, 
 and therefore lacked one essential of the Apostolate ; all that ho knew of 
 Christianity he had learnt at Jerusalem, and that he had wilfully perverted ; 
 his Gospel was not the real Gospel; such authority as he had was simply 
 derived from the heads of the Church at Jerusalem, to whom his doctrines 
 must be referred. Many of his present developments of teaching were all 
 but blasphemous. They were a daring apostasy from the oral and even from 
 the written Law; a revolt against the traditions of the fathers, and even 
 against Moses himself. "Was not his preaching a denial of all inspiration? 
 Could they not marshal against him an array of innumerable texts ? "Was 
 not well-nigh every line of the five books of Moses against him ? "Who was 
 this Paul, this renegade from the Rabbis, who, for motives best known to 
 himself, had become a nominal Christian from a savage persecutor ? Who 
 was he that he should set himself against the Great Lawgiver ? 1 If he 
 argued that the Law was abrogated, how could he prove it? Christ had 
 never said so. On the contrary, He had said that not a fraction of a letter of 
 the Law should pass till all was fulfilled. To that the Twelve could bear 
 witness. They kept the Law. They were living at peace with their Jewish 
 brethren who yet did aot recognise Jesus as the Messiah. Must not Paul's 
 opinions be antagonistic to theirs, if he was the only Christian who could 
 not show his face at Jerusalem without exciting the danger of a tumult ? 
 Besides, he was really not to be trusted. He was always shifting about, now 
 saying one thing and now another, with the obvious intention of pleasing men. 
 "What could be more inconsistent than his teaching and conduct with regard 
 to circumcision ? He had told the Galatians that they need aot be circum- 
 cised, and yet he himself had once preached circumcision aye, and more than 
 preached it, he had practised it ! "Would he answer these two significant 
 questions "Who circumcised Timothy ? "Who circumcised Titus ? 
 
 St. Paul saw that it was time to speak out, and he did speak out. The 
 matter at issue was one of vital importance. The very essence of the Gospel 
 
 1 The elements of the above paragraph are drawn partly from the "Galatians," partly 
 from the "Corinthians." For the Ebionite slanders against St. Paul, see Iren. Adv. 
 Haer. i. 28 ; Euseb. H. E. iii. 27 ; Epiphan. Haer. xxx. 25 ; Ps. Clem. Horn. ii. 1719. 
 " Totius mundi odio me oneravi," says Luther, " qui olim eram tutissimus. Ministerium 
 Ecclesiae omnibus periculis cxpositum eat, Diaboli insultationibus, mundi ingratitudini, 
 ectarum blasphemiis " (Colloq. i. 13).
 
 428 T2E LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 the very liberty which Christ had given the very redemption for which 
 
 He had died was at stake. The fate of the battle hung apparently upon his 
 single arm. He alone was the Apostle of the Gentiles. To him alone had it 
 been granted to see the full bearings of this question. A new faith must not 
 be choked at its birth by the past prejudices of its nominal adherents. Its 
 ^rave-clothes must not thus be made out of its swaddling-bands. The hour 
 had come when concession was impossible, and there must ba no facing both 
 ways in the character of his conciliatoriness. Accordingly he flung all reti- 
 cence and all compromise to the winds. Hot with righteous anger, he wrote 
 the Epistle to the Galatians. It was his gage of battle to the incompetence 
 of traditional authority his trumpet-note of defiance to all the Pharisees of 
 Christianity, and it gave no uncertain sound. 1 
 
 Happily, he could give distinctness to his argument by bringing it to bear 
 on one definite point. In recovering the lost outwork of Galatia he would 
 carry the war into the camp of Jerusalem. The new teachers asserted, as at 
 Antioch, the necessity of circumcision for Gentile Christians. If Paul could 
 storm that bastion of Judaising Christianity, he knew that the whole citadel 
 must fall. Circumcision was the very badge of Jewish nationality the very 
 nucleus of Jewish ceremonialism ; the earliest, the most peculiar, the most 
 ineffaceable of Jewish rites. Adam, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Balaam, 
 had all been born circumcised. 2 So completely was it the seal of the Cove- 
 nant, that it had been given not even to Moses, but to Abraham. Joseph had 
 seen that it was duly performed in Egypt. Moses had insisted upon it at all 
 risks in Midian. Joshua had renewed it in Canaan ; and so sacred was it 
 deemed to be that the stone knives with which it had been performed were 
 buried in his grave at Timnath Serah. Was there a king or prophet who had 
 not been circumcised P Had not Jesus Himself submitted to circumcision P 
 Was not Elias supposed to be always present, though unseen, to witness its 
 due performance ? Was not the mechanical effacement of it regarded as the 
 most despicable of Hellenising apostasies ? It was true that in the temporary 
 and local letter which the Apostles had sanctioned they had said that it was 
 not indispensable for Gentile converts; but a thing might not be indis- 
 pensable, and yet might be pre-eminently desirable. Let them judge for 
 themselves. Did they not hear the Law read ? Was not the Law inspired P 
 If so, how could they arbitrarily set it aside P * 
 
 1 "It was necessary that the particularisms of Judaism, which opposed to the heathen 
 world so repellent a demeanour and such offensive claims, should be uprooted, and the 
 baselessness of its prejudices and pretensions fully exposed to the world s eye. This was 
 the service which the Apostle achieved for mankind by his magnificent dialectic " (Baur, 
 JFirst Three Centuries, i. 73). 
 
 8 AbMth of Rabbi Nathan, ch. ii. 
 
 8 "But for circumcision, heaven and earth could not exist : for it is said, ' Save for 
 (the sign of) my covenant, I should not have made day and night the ordinances of 
 heaven and earth ' " (Nedarim, f . 32, coL 1, referring to Jerem. train. 25). The same 
 remark is made about the whole Law. Rabbi (Juda Hakkadosh) says how great is 
 circumcision, since it is equivalent to all the commandments of the Law, for it is said. 
 " Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you, concerning all 
 ofew all) these wwrds " (Ex. xxiv. S).Nedarim, f. 32, 1. Angela so detest an
 
 IMPORTANCE OP THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIAJJ8. 429 
 
 It was ever thus that Judaism worked, beginning with the Psalms and 
 pure Monotheism, and then proceeding to the knife of circumcision, and the 
 yoke of the Levitic Law, in which they entangled and crushed their slaves. 1 
 It was ever thus that they compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, and 
 when they had got him, made him ten times more the child of Gehenna than 
 themselves. There was iiotliing at which the Jew gloried so much as thus 
 leaving his mark on the very body of the despised and hated heathen hardly 
 less despised and hated, almost even more so, if he had hoped to equal them 
 and their privileges by consenting to become a Jew. It was thus that they 
 had got into their net the royal family of Adiabeue. Helena, the amiably 
 qtteoa who fed the paupers of Jerusalem with dried figs and grapes in the 
 famine of Claudius, and who now lies interred with some of her children in 
 the Tombs of the Kings, had taken upon her the vow of the Nazarite for 
 eeven years. Just before the completion of the vow at Jerusalem, she had 
 was it accidentally, or by some trickery P touched a corpse, and therefore 
 had to continue the vow for seven years more. Once more at the conclusion 
 of this term she had again incurred some trivial pollution, and had again to 
 renew it for yet seven years more. Ananias, a Jewish merchant, in pursuance 
 of his avocations, had got access to the seraglio of King Abennerig, and there 
 had made a proselyte of the queen, and, through her influence, of her two 
 sons, Izates and Monobazus. But he had had the good sense and large- 
 heartedness to tell them that the essence of the Law was love to God and love 
 to man. He was probably a Hagadist, who valued chiefly the great broad 
 truths of which the outward observances of Mosaisni were but the temporary 
 casket ; and he had the insight to know that for the sake of an outward rite, 
 which could not affect the heart, it was not worth while to disturb a people 
 and imperil a dynasty. His advice must not be confused with the cynical 
 and immoral indifference which made Henri IV. observe that " Paris was well 
 worth a mass." It was, on the contrary, an enlightenment which would not 
 confound the shadow with the substance. 8 It was the conviction that the 
 inscription on the Chel should be obliterated, and the Chel itself broken down. 3 
 But on the steps of the enlightened Ananias came a narrow bigot, the Rabbi 
 Eliczer of Galilee, and ho employed to the facile weakness of the young 
 princes the very argument which the Judaising teacher, whoever he was, 
 employed to the! Galatians : " My king, yon are sinning against the Law, and 
 therefore against God. It is not enough to read the La\v ; you must do the 
 Law. Read for yourself what it says about circumcision, and you will see 
 
 pncircumcised person that, when God spoke to Abraham before circumcision, He spoLo 
 in Aramaic, which, it appears, tlie angels do not understand (Yalkuih Chadask, f. 
 117, 3). 
 
 1 See Hausrath, p. 263. 
 
 2 Josephus had the good sense to take tho same line when " two great men " came 
 to him from Trachonitis ; bxit though for tho time he succeeded in persuading the Jeivs 
 not to force circumcision upon them^yet afterwards these fugitives ;v ere nearly massacred 
 by a fanatical mob, and could cnly secure their livea by a hasty flight. See tlio very 
 instructive passage in Vit. Jos. 23, 31. 
 
 Eph. ii. 14.
 
 430 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 how wrong yon are." l Prince Izatos was so much struck with this " uncom- 
 promising orthodoxy " that he secretly withdrew into another chamber, and| 
 there had the rite performed by his physician. Not long after he and his' 
 brother were reading the Pentateuch, and came to the passage about circum- 
 cision in Ex. xii. 48. Monobazus looked up at his brother, and said, " I amj 
 sorry for you, my brother," and Izates made the same remark to him. This, 
 led to a conversation, and the brothers confessed, first to each other, and then! 
 to Queen Helena, that they had both been secretly circumcised. The queen j 
 was naturally alarmed and anxious, and dangerous consequences ensued. But! 
 these were nothing to the Jewish fanatic. They would only be a fresh source; 
 of publicity, and therefore of glorifying in the flesh of his proselyte. Again., 
 we read in the Talmud that Rabbi 2 was a great friend of "the Emperor 
 Antoninus." On one occasion the Emperor asked him, " Wilt thou give me a 
 piece of Leviathan in the world to come P " since the flesh of Leviathan and! 
 of the bird Barjuchneh are to be the banquet of the blessed hereafter. " Yes," 
 answered Rabbi. " But why dost thou not allow me to partake of the| 
 Paschal Lamb ? " " How can I," answered Rabbi, " when it is written thatj 
 ' no uncircumcisod person shall eat thereof ' ? " Upon hearing this Antoaiuusi 
 submitted to the rite of circumcision, and embraced Judaism. The imagination 
 of Rabbis and Pharisees was flattered by the thought that even emperors! 
 were not too great to accept their Halachoth. What would be their f eelingsj 
 towards one who offered the utmost blessings of the Chosen People without a 
 single Judaic observance to the meanest slave ? 
 
 Self-interest was an additional and a powerful inducement with these, 
 retrogressive intruders. Although Christian, they, like the Twelve, like even, 
 Paul himself, were still Jews. At Jerusalem they continued regularly to| 
 attend the services at the Temple and the gatherings of their synagogue., 
 lo be excommunicated from the synagogue in little Jewish communities like] 
 those that were congregated in Ancyra and Pessinus was a very serious 
 matter indeed. It was infinitely more pleasant for them to be on good terms 
 with the Jews, by making proselytes of righteousness out of St. Paul's 
 converts. Thus circumcision was only the thin end of the wedge. 3 It 
 obviated the painful liability to persecution. It would naturally lead to the 
 adoption of all the observances, which the converts would constantly hear 
 read to them in the Jewish service. But, if not, it did not much matter. It 
 was not really necessary for them to keep the whole Law. A sort of decent 
 external conformity was enough. So long as they made "a fair show 
 
 1 Jos. Antt. xx. 2. 4. This interesting royal family had a house in Jerusalem (Joa. 
 B.J. v. 6, , 1; vi. 6, 3). 
 
 2 Rabbi Juda Hakkadosh is thus called KO.T itoxnv. The anecdote is from Jer. Megillah, 
 cap. i. For another wild story about their intercourse, see Ahhoda Zara, f. 10, 2. The, 
 Talmud being the most utterly unhistorical and unchronological of books, it is difficult to 
 say which Emperor is the one alluded to in this and a multitude of similar fables about 
 his supposed intercourse with Rabbi. It cannot be Antoninus Pius, who never left Rome ; 
 nor M. Aurelius, who was unfavourable both to Jews and Christians. Possibly the worth- 
 less Caracalla may be alluded to, since he once visited Palestine. Heliogabalus appears 
 to be alluded to in some passages of the Talmud as " the yotipger Antoninus," and he, too, 
 u said to have accepted circumcision. 
 
 Gal. y. 3, 6, l-14.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 431 
 
 in the flesh," they might in reality do pretty much as they liked. It 
 was against all this hypocrisy, this retrogression, this cowardice, this 
 mummery of the outward, this reliance on the mechanical, that Paul 
 used words which were half battles. There should be no further doubt 
 as to what he really meant and taught. He would leap ashore among his 
 enemies, and burn his ships behind him. He would draw his sword against 
 this false gospel, and fling away the scabbard. What Luther did when he 
 nailed his Theses to the door of the Cathedral of Wittenberg, that St. Paul 
 did when he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians. It was the manifesto 
 of emancipation. It marked an epoch in history. It was for the early days 
 of Christianity what would have been for Protestantism the Confession 
 of Augsburg and the Protest of Spires combined; but it was these "expressed 
 in dithyrambs, and written in jets of flame ; " and it was these largely 
 intermingled with an intense personality and impassioned polemics. It was a 
 De Corona, a Westminster Confession, and an Apologia in one. If we wish 
 to find its nearest parallel in vehemence, effectiveness, and depth of conviction, 
 we must look forward for sixteen centuries, and read Luther's famous treatise, 
 De Captivitate Sabylonica, in which he realised his saying " that there ought 
 to be set aside for this Popish battle, a tongue of which every word is a 
 thunderbolt." l To the Churches of Gahitia he never came again ; but the 
 words scrawled on those few sheets of papyrus, whether they failed or not of 
 their immediate effect, were to wake echoes which should "roll from soul to 
 soul, and live for ever and for ever." 
 
 . 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVL 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 
 
 " The Epistle to the Galatians is my Epistle ; I have betrothed myself to it : it 
 ifl my wife." LUTHER. 
 
 "Principalis adversus Judaismum Epistola." TERT. adv. Mare. v. 2. 
 
 " DiscrimenLegis et Evangelii est depictum in hoc dicto ' posteriora me a videMtis, 
 faciem means non videbitis.' 
 
 ( Dorsum \ 
 \ Ira f 
 
 ^jPeccatum ( Evangelium 
 ( Inflrmitas ) 
 
 Fades 
 Gratia 
 Donum 
 Perfectio." 
 
 LUTHER, Colhq. i., p. 20, ed. 1571. 
 
 " Judaism was the narrowest (i.e. the most special) of religions, Christianity 
 the most human and comprehensive. In a few years the latter was evolved out of 
 the former, taking all its intensity and durability without resort to any of its limi- 
 tations. ... In St. Paul's Epistles we see the general direction in which 
 thought and events must have advanced : otherwise the change would seem as 
 violent and inconceivable as a convulsion which should mingle the Jordan and the 
 Tiber." MARTINEAU, Stttdies of Chrittianity, p. 420. 
 
 IN the very first line of the Apostle's greeting a part of his object the vin- 
 
 1 Luther, Tisch-Reden, 249. But though Luther constantly defends his polemical 
 ferocity by the example of St. Paul, St. Paul never (not even in Gal. T. 12) shows the 
 violence and coarseness which deface the stylo of Luther.
 
 432 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 dication of his Apostolic authority becomes manifest. 1 In the Epistles toj 
 the Thessalonians he had adopted no title of authority; but since those j 
 Epistles had been written, the Judaists had developed a tendency to limit thei 
 term Apostle almost exclusively to the Twelve, and overshadow all others j 
 with their immense authority. The word had two technical senses. lu the! 
 lower sense it merely meant a messenger or worker in the cause of the Gospel, 
 and as an equivalent to the common Jewish title of Sheliach, was freely 
 bestowed on comparatively unknown Christians, like Andronicus and Junias.* 
 Now Paul claimed the title in the highest sense, not from vanity or self- 
 assertion, but because it was necessary for the good of his converts. He had 
 the primary qualification of an Apostle in that he had seen Christ, though 
 for reasons which he explained in the last Epistle he declined to press it. He 
 had the yet further qualification that his Apostolate and that of Barnabas 
 had been publicly recognised by the Church of Jerusalem. But this claim 
 also he wished to waive as unreal and even misleading ; for his Apostolato 
 was derived from no merely human authority. Writing to the Corinthians, 
 some of whom had impugned his rights, he had intentionally designated him- 
 self as " a called Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God." Writing to 
 these weak and apostatising Galatians it was necessary to be still more explicit, 
 and consequently he addresses them with his fullest greeting, in which ha 
 speaks both of his own authority and of the work of Christ. By impugning 
 the first they were setting temporary relations above spiritual insight ; by 
 errors respecting the hitter they were nullifying the doctrine of the Cross. 
 
 " Paul, an Apostle, not from men, nor by the instrumentality of any man, but 
 by Jesus Christ and God our Father, who raised Him from the dead, and all ths 
 brethren with me, 3 to the Churches of Galatia. Grace to you and Peace from God 
 the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins that He may 
 
 1 The general outline of the Epistle is as follows : It falls into three divisiots 1. 
 Personal (an element which recurs throughout) ; 2. Dogmatic ; 3. Practical. In the first 
 part (i., ii.) he vindicates his personal independence (a) tveya&ively, by showing that b. 
 vas an Apostle before any intercourse with the Twelve (i. 17, 18) ; and () positively, 
 since he had secured from the Apostles the triumphant recognition of his own special 
 principles on three occasions, viz., (i.) in an association on perfectly e<jual terms with 
 Peter (18, 19); (ii.) when they were compelled by facts to recognise his equal mission 
 (ii. 9, 10) ; and (iii.) when he convinced Peter at Antioch that he was thoroughly in the 
 wrong (it 11 21). 2, Passing naturally to the dogmatic defence of justification by faith, 
 he proves it (a) by the Christian consciousness (iii. 1 5), and (p) from the Old Testament 
 (iii. 6 18). This leads him to the question as to the true position of the Law, which he 
 shows to be entirely secondary, (*) objectively, by the very nature of Christianity (iii. 19 
 29) ; and (ft) subjectively, by the free spiritual life of Christians (iv. 1 11). After affec- 
 tionate warnings to them about those who had led them away (iv. 11 30), ho passes to 
 3. The practical exhortation to Christian freedom (v. 1 12), and warnings, both genera! 
 (1318) and special (v. 16 vi. 10), against its misuse. Then follows the closing summary 
 and blessing (vL 1118). 
 
 J Rom. xvi. 7 } of. Phil. ii. 25 ; 2 Cor. yiii. 23. Similarly the title Imperator -was used 
 by Cicero and other Romans down to Junius Blaesus, long after its special sense had been 
 isolated to connote the absolute head of the state. 
 
 3 At this time he was accompanied by a larger number of brethren than at any other. 
 This is one of the minute circumstances which support the all-but-certain inference that 
 the Epistle was written at this particular period, during St. Paul's three months' stay at 
 Corinth, towards the close of A.D. 57, 
 
 ' ft3{.TW}n
 
 T3E EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 433 
 
 deliver us from this present evil state of the world, according to the will of our Gbd 
 and Father, to whom is His due glory 1 for ever and ever. Amen." 8 
 
 This greeting is remarkable, not only for the emphatic assertion of his in- 
 dependent Apostleship, and for the skill with which he combines with, this 
 subject of his Epistle the great theologic truth of our free deliverance s by 
 the death of Christ, but also for the stern brevity of the terms with which he 
 greets those to whom he is writing. A seuso of wrong breathes through Uv 
 fulness of his personal designation, and the scantiness of the address to kis 
 converts. He had addressed the Thessalonians as " the Church of the 
 Thessalonians iu God our Eather and the Lord Jesus Christ," He 
 had written "to the Churdi of God which is in Corinth, to the 
 sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints." About this very time 
 he wrote to the Romans 'as "beloved of God, called to be saints." 
 To the Fhilippians, Ephosians, Colossians, he adds the words "saints in 
 Christ Jesus,' 1 and " saints and faithful brethren ; " but to these Galatians 
 alone, in his impetuous desire to deal at once with their errors, he uses only 
 the brief, plain address, " To the Churches of Galatia." 
 
 And then without one word of that thanksgiving for their holiness, or 
 their gifts, or the grace of God bestowed on them, which is found iu every 
 one of his other general Epistles, he bursts at once into the subject of which 
 his mind is so indignantly full. 
 
 -.-' 
 
 " I am amazed that you are so quickly shifting from him who called you in the 
 grace of Christ into a different Gospel, which is not merely another,* only there are 
 some who are troubling you, and wanting to reverse the Gospel of Christ. But 
 even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach contrary to what we 
 preached to you, let him be accursed.* As we have said before, so now again I ear 
 deliberately, If any one is preaching to you anything contrary to what ye received, 
 LET HIM BE ACCURSED. 6 Well, am I NOW trying to be plausible to men, or to conci- 
 liate God Himself f Had I still been trying to ba a man-pleaser, I should not havs 
 been what I am a slave of Christ." 7 
 
 Such was the startling abruptness, such the passionate plainness with which 
 he showed them that the time for conciliation was past, Their Jewish teachers 
 said that Paul was shifty and complaisant, and that he did not preach the real 
 Gospel. He tells them that it is they who are perverters of the Gospel, and 
 that if they, or any one of thorn, or any one else, eten an artgel, preaches 
 . .. 
 
 l 4 Mi*, sub. &,,. Matt. vi. 13 ; 1 Pet. iv. 11. * 1. 1-5. < 
 
 * i. 4, C^-'XJJTOI. "Deliver strikes the key-note of the Epistle" (Lightfoot). ev^rrwros, 
 'present, Horn. vui. SS. 
 
 4 If pTaTt'0e<r0 is really a mental pun (as Jerome thought) on Galatoe and V>3, we 
 might almost render it galatising. For Tpc>', "different,' and <L\XO, "another," see 
 2 Cor. xi. 4. Hence Wpo came to mean " bad ; " flarepoi' is the opposite to " good." 
 
 Probably Paul had been accused of emancipating tl 
 out of mere complaisance. 
 
 ' L 110, in, "aftey ajl I have endured ;" v, 11 ; vt 17; 1 Cor. XT. SO -32,
 
 434 THE LIFE AKD WOKK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 contrary to what he has preached, let the ban the cherem fall on him. He 
 has said this before, and to show them that it is not a mere angry phrase, he 
 repeats it more emphatically now, and appeals to it as a triumphant proof that 
 whatever they conld charge him with having done and said before, now, at any 
 rate, his language should be unmistakably plain. 
 
 " Now I declare to you, brethren, as to the Gospel preached by me that it is not 
 a mere human Gospel. For neither did I myself receive it from man, nor was I 
 taught it, but by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you heard my manner of life 
 formerly in Judaism, that I extravagantly i persecuted the Church of God, and 
 ravaged it, and was making advance in Judaism above many my equals in age in my 
 own race, being to an unusual degree a zealot for the traditions of my fathers. But 
 when He who set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me by His grace 
 thought good to reveal His Son in me that I should preach Him among the Gentiles, 
 immediately I did not confer with mere human teachers, nor did I go away to 
 Jerusalem to those who were Apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and 
 again returned to Damascus. 
 
 " Next, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Kephas, and I stayed 
 at his house fifteen days ; but not a single other Apostle did I see, except James, the 
 Lord's brother. 2 Now in what I am writing to you, see, before God, I am not lying. 3 
 
 " Next I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia ; and was quite unknown, by 
 person to the Churches of Juda?a which were in Christ, only they were constantly 
 being told that our former persecutor is now a preacher of the faith which once he 
 ravaged. And they glorified God in me. 4 
 
 " Next, after fourteen years, I again went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking 
 with me Titus also. 5 And I went up by revelation, and referred to them the Gospel 
 which I preach among he Gentiles, 6 privately however to those of repute, lest per- 
 chance I might be running, or even ran, to no purpose.' But not even Titus, who 
 was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised but because of the 
 false brethren secretly introduced, who slank in to spy out our liberty which wo have 
 in Christ Jesus that they might utterly enslave us [to whom not even (?)] for an 
 hour we yielded by way of the subjection they wanted, in order that the truth of the 
 Gospel may permanently remain with you. 8 From, those, however, who are reputed 
 to be something whatever they once were, makes no matter to me, God cares for no 
 man's person 9 for to me those in repute contributed nothing, but, on the contrary, 
 seeing that I have been entrusted with the Gospel of the uncircumcision, as Peter of 
 the circumcision for He who worked for Peter for the Apostolate of the circum- 
 cision, worked also for me towards the Gentiles and recognising the grace granted 
 
 1 i. 13, Kaff v7rep|3oAj)i', A outrance. 
 
 3 Who in one sense was, and in another was not, an Apostle, not being one of the 
 Twelve. 
 
 3 V. supra, pp. 131 134. As I have already examined many of the details of 
 this Epistle for biographical purposes, I content myself with referring to the passages. 
 The strong appeal in i. 20 shows that Paul's truthfulness had been questioned. 
 (Cf. 1 Thess. v. 27.) 
 
 * i. 11 24. 
 
 5 V. supra, pp. 232 237. Paul's purpose here is not the tedious pedantry of 
 chronological exactitude. 
 
 6 ii. 2, ivtOtiaiv, not to submit to their decision, but with the strong belief that he 
 could win their concurrence. (Cf. Acts xxv. 14.) 
 
 7 Phil. ii. 16. I have already explained the probable meaning of this " that I might 
 feel quite BUI a of the truth and practicability of my views." Even Luther admits, 
 " Sathan saepe mihi dixit, quid si falsum esset dogma tuurn?" (Colloq. ii. 12.) 
 
 ,7* 8 V. supra, p.2S4. 
 
 9 ii. 6, eb avOprfirov. The position is emphatic. This seems to glance at the absurdity 
 of founding spiritual authority on mere family or external claims. (See Martineau* 
 Studies in Christianity, p. 428.)
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALA.TIANS 43& 
 
 to me, James, and Kephas, and John, who are in repute as pillars, gave right hands 
 of fellowship to me and Barnabas, that we to the Gentiles, and they to the circum- 
 cision only that we should bear in mind the poor, which very thing I was of my 
 own accord even eager to do. 1 
 
 " But when Kephas came to Antioch I withstood him to the face, because he was 
 a condemned man. 2 For before the arrival of certain from James 8 he used to eat 
 with the Gentiles ; but on their arrival 4 he began to withdraw and separate himself, 
 being afraid of these Jewish converts. And the rest of the Jews joined in this 
 hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was swept away by their hypocrisy. 5 But 
 when I perceived that they were not walking in the straight truth of the 
 Gospel, I said to Kephas, before them all, If you, a born Jew, are living 
 Gentile-wise and not Judaically, how can you try to compel the Gentiles to Judaiso ? 
 We, Jews by birth and not ' sinners ' of the Gentiles,' but well aware that no man 
 is justified as a result of the works of the Law, but only by means of faith in Jesus 
 Christ even we believed on Jesus Christ that we may be justified as a result of faith 
 in Christ, and not of the works of Law ; for from works of Law ' no flesh shall bo 
 justified.' 7 But (you will object) if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we turn 
 out to be even ourselves ' sinners ' (men no better than the Gentiles), is then Christ 
 a minister of sin ? 8 Away with the thought ! For if I rebuild the very things I 
 destroyed, t fan I prove myself to be not only a ' sinner ' but a transgressor." The 
 very rebuilding (he means) would prove that the previous destruction was guilty ; 
 " but it was not so," he continues to argue, " for it was by Liw that I died to 
 Law ;" in other words, it' was the Law itself which led me to sec its own nullity, 
 and thereby caused my death to it that I might live to God. 9 " I have b^en crucified 
 with Christ ;" my old sins are nailed to His cross, no less than my old Jewish 
 
 1 ii. 1 10, It was, as Tertullian says, a distributio officii, not a separatio evangelti 
 (De Pmescr. Haer. 28). He had already shown his care for the poor (Acts xi. 30). 
 
 3 ii. 11, (careyc. Manifestly and flagrantly in the wrong. Of. Rom. xiv. 23. To 
 make KOTO irpderwnw mean " by way of mask, " and treat the scene as one got up (KO.TO. crxrjiia.) 
 between the Apostles as Origen and Chrysostom do or to assume that Kephas does 
 not mean Peter as Clemens of Alexandria does is a deplorable specimen of the power 
 of dogmatic prejudice to blind men to obvious fact. St. Peter's weakness bore other 
 bitter fruit. It was one ultimate cause of Ebionite attacks on St. Paul, and of Gnostic 
 attacks on Judaism, and of Porphyry's slanders of the Apostles, and of Jerome's quarrel 
 with Augustine. (See Lightfoot, pp. 123 126.) 
 
 3 Cf. Acts xv. 24. 
 
 4 ii. 12, foe (H, B, D, F, G), if St. Paul really wrote it, could only mean " when 
 James came ; " and so Origen understood it (c. Cels. ii. 1). 
 
 4 We can scarcely even imagine the deadly offence caused by this boldness, an offence 
 felt a century afterwards (Ireii. Haer. i. 26 ; Euseb. H. E. iii. 27 ; Epiphan. Haer. xxx. 
 16 ; Baur, Ch. Hist. 89, 98). Even when the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies were written 
 the Jewish Christians had not forgiven the word Ka.rfyviaa-iJ.evas. Ei lan^vui^^ivov ue Xe'v ets 
 eeoO oiro<caA.ityaiTos uoi T'OV Xpurrbv icanjyopets (Clem. Horn. xvii. 19). And yet, however 
 bitter against unscrupulous Judaism, St. Paul is always courteous and respectful when 
 he speaks of the Twelve. The Praedicatio Petri (in Cyprian, De Rebapt.) says that Petei 
 and Paul remained unreconciled till death. 
 
 6 Cf. Bom. ix. 30, iev-n ra an Suaxovra &IKO.IOOTJIHIV \ Luke vi. 32, 33 : Matt. v. 47 ; ix. 
 10, 11. 
 
 7 Ps. cxliii. 2. St. Paul's addition <py<ns i/o/xov is an obvious inference. The accentua- 
 tion of meaning on ritual or moral observance must depend on the context. Here tht 
 latter is mainly in question (Neander, Planting, i. 211). 
 
 s It is impossible to say how much of this argument was actually addressed to Peter. 
 itr, yeVoiro, rMp ', of. Gen. xliv. 7, 17. 
 
 9 The Latin fathers and Luther understand it "by the law (of Christ) I am dead to 
 the law (of Moses)." The best commentary is Eom. vii 1 11. Expressions like this 
 led to the charge of antinomianism, which St. Paul sets aside in 1 Cor. ix. 21. Celsus 
 taunts the Apostles with the use of such language while yet they could denounce each 
 other (ap. Orig. v. 64). But they did not profess tor have attained their own ideal 
 (Phil. iii. 13).
 
 436 THE LIFE AND WOSK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 obligations ; vet this death is life not mine, however, but the life of Christ in me \ 
 and so far as I now live in the flesh, I live in faith on the Son of God who loved me, 
 and gave Himself up for me. I am not. therefore, Betting at nought the grace of 
 God by proclaiming my freedom from the Levitical Law ; you are doing that, not I ; 
 " for had righteousness been at all possible by Law, then it seems Christ's death wag 
 superfluous." 1 
 
 He hag now sufficiently vindicated his independent Apostleship, and since 
 this nullification of the death of Christ was tho practical issue of the Gal at ia a 
 retrogression into Jewish ritualism, he passes naturally to the doctrinal truth 
 on which he had also touched in his greeting, and he does eo with a second 
 burst of surprise and indignation : . 
 
 " Dull Galatians ! 2 who bewitched you with his evij eye, you before whcss eyes 
 Jesus Christ crucified was conspicuously painted ? 3 This is the only thing I vrarit 
 to learn of you; received ye the Spirit as a result of works of Law, or of faithful 
 hearing ? Are ye so utterly dull ? After beginning the sacred rite spiritually, will 
 ye complete it carnally ? Did ye go through so many experiences ia vain ?* ii it be- 
 indeed iu vain. He then that abundantly supplieth to you the Spirit, and worketh 
 powers in you, does he do so as a result of works of Law or of faithful hearing ? Of 
 faith surely just as ' Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righte- 
 ousness.' Eecogniae then that they who start from faith, they are sons of Abraham. 
 And the Scripture foreseeing 5 that God justifies the Gentiles as a result of faith,' 
 preached to Abraham as an anticipation of the Gospel, ' In thee shall all the Gentiles 
 be blessed.' So they who start from faith are blessed with the faithful Abraham. 
 For as many as start from works of law are under a curse. For it stands written, 
 ' Cursed is every one who does not abide by all the things written in tho book of the 
 Law to do them.' But that by Law no man is justified with God is clear because 
 ' The just shall live by faith.' But the Law is not of faith, but (of works, for 
 its formula is) he that doth these things shall live by them. Christ ransomed us 
 from the curse of the Law, becoming on our behalf a curse, since it is written. 
 ' Cursed is every one who hangeth on a tree ' 7 that the blessing of Abraham may 
 by Christ Jesus accrue to the Gentiles, that we may receive the promise of the Spirit 
 by means of faith."' 
 
 Then came some of the famous arguments by which he establishes these 
 weighty doctrines arguments incomparably adapted to convince thcsa to 
 
 1 ii. 1121. For an examination of this paragraph, v. supra-, pp. 250, 251. 
 
 2 iii. 1, avdjjToii as in Luke xxiv. 25. So far from being dull in things not spiritual, 
 Themistius calls them 6| *ol ayxiVot xal cVfia&aTopot ruv ayai 'KAXrji/wv (Plat. 23). 
 
 3 If irpaypdtjxa has here tho same sense as in Rom. xv. 4, Eph. iii. 3, Jude 4, it :nuai 
 mean "prophesied of ; " but this gives a_ far weaker turn to the clause. 
 
 4 iii. 4, eTro&re seems here to have its more general sense, as in Mark v. 28 ; if iha 
 common sense " suffered " be retained, it must cllude to troubles caused by Judaisers. 
 
 * A Hebraic personification. "What saw the Scripture?" is a Rabbinic formula 
 Schottg. ad loc.). The passages on which the argument is founded are Gen. xv. 6 ; 
 (xii. 3 5 Deut. xxvii. 26 ; xxi. 23 ; Lev. xviii. 5 ; Hab. ii. 4. The reasoning will be t jttc. 
 understood from 2 Cor. v. 1521 ; Rom. vi. 323. 
 
 9 IK wiVrctoT, "from faith " as a cause ; or SiA rrjs irurreut, per filler^ "by means of 
 faith aa an instrument ; " never Sia. wlimv, propter Jidem, " on account of faith " as a 
 merit. 
 
 7 The original reference is to the exposure of the body on a stake after death (Deut. 
 xxi. 23; Josh. x. 26). St. Paul omits the words "of God" after "cursed," which 
 would have required long explanation, for the notion that it meant " a curse, or insuli 
 %gainst God " is a later uoss. Hence the Talmud speaks of Christ as "the hung " ( % v
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS 437 
 
 whom he wrote, because they were deduced from their own principles, aud 
 grounded on their own methods, however startling was the originality of the 
 conclusions to which they lead. Merely to translate them without brief 
 explanatory comment would add very little to the reader's advantage. I will 
 endeavour, thereforo, to throw them into a form which shall supply what is 
 necessary to render them intelligible. 
 
 " Brethren," hs says, " I will give you an every-day illustration. 1 No one 
 annuls, or vitiates by additions, even a inero human covenant -when it han been once 
 ratified. Now tha Promises weiie uttered to Abraham ' and to his seed.' The word 
 employed is neither plural iu form nor in significance. A plural word might have 
 been used hud many been referred to; the reason for the use of a collective term is 
 pre-eminently radicated, and that one person is Christ. 2 What I mean is this : 
 God made and ratified a covenant with Abraham ; and the Law which came four 
 hundred and thirty yeara afterwards* cannot possibly nullify the covenant or abro- 
 gate tho promise. Now God has bestowed the gift on Abraham by promise, and 
 therefore clearly it was not bestowed as a result ot obedience to a law. 4 
 
 " \Vhy, then, was the Law P you ask ; of what use was it P " Very briefly St. 
 Paul gives them the answer, which in the Epistle to tho Romans he elaborates with 
 so much more f ulness. 
 
 Practically, the answer may be summed up by saying that tho Law was damnatory, 
 temporary, mediate, educational. 6 It was added to create in the soul the sense of sin, 
 und so lead to tho Saviour, who in due time should come to render it no more 
 necessary; 6 and it was given by the ministry of angola? and a human mediator. 
 It was not, therefore, a promise, but a contract ; and a promise direct from God 
 is far superior to a contract made by the agency of a human mediator between God 
 and man. 8 The Law, therefore, waa but " supplementary, parenthetical, provisional, 
 
 1 iii. 15. Kara aiS^-tv, i.e., i( a.v6fujriinav irapafciyf*aT*>y (Chrys,). 
 
 2 V. supra, pp. 30, SL 
 
 8 In Qen. xv. 13, Acts vii. 6, &o., the period in Egypt seems to count from Abraham's 
 visit. * iii. 1518. 
 
 5 iii. 15, eTriSiaras-o-eTai | 19, irpoireT^Sij ; Rom. V. 20, iraptcrr>9ev. The LftW Was (1) TWV 
 Tapaa<roy \6.pw, restricted and conditioned ; (2) SXPIS cv, K.T.\., temporary and provisional; 
 (3) fiiaraycls, ic.r.A.., mediately (but not immediately) given by God ; (4) V X etp! /meo-., me- 
 tiiitely (not immediately) received from God (Bp. EUicott, ad loc.). The Law is a harsh, 
 imperious incident in a necessary divine training. 
 
 6 iii. 19. irapajSoureov ^a-fiv means "to bring transgression to a head." See Eom. v. 20; 
 1 Cor. xv. 58. The fact is here stated in all its harshness, but in Eom. vii. 7, 13, the 
 Apostle shows by a masterly psychological analysis in what way this was true-^-namely, 
 because (i.) law actually tends to provoke disobedience, and (ii.) it gives the sting to the 
 disobedience by making us fully conscious of its heinousness. The Law thus brought the 
 disease of sbi to a head, that it might then bo cured. Wo might not be able to follow 
 these pregnant allusions of tue Ep_istle if we did not possess the Epistle to ths Romans aa 
 a commentary upon it. The Galatians could only have understood it by the reminiscences 
 of Paul's oral teaching. 
 
 7 Jos. Antt. iv. 5, S ; Acts vii. 53 ; Deut. xxxiii. 2. These angels at Sinai are 
 often alluded to in the Talmud. K. Joshua Ben Lovi rendered Psalm Ixviii. 12, " Th3 
 Angels ('SN'ja) of hosts kept moving " the Children of Israel nearer to Sinai when they 
 retired from it (Shalbath, f . 88, 2). 
 
 8 iii. 19, 20. A " mediator " in Jewish language meant one who stands in the middle 
 position between two parties. 
 
 " The voice of God 
 
 To mortal ear is dreadful. They beseech 
 That Moses might repeat to them Hla will 
 And terror cease." (Milton, P. L. xii. 235.) 
 
 Moses receives tha Law direct from God (lv xpt)i an< ^ hands it to man (Ex. xx. 19). He 
 therefore was not one cf the contracting parties ; but God is cne, i, .-'., lie is no mediator,
 
 438 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAtTL. 
 
 manuductory." How startling would such arguments be to those who had, from 
 their earliest childhood, been taught to regard the Law as the one divine, inspired, 
 perfect, and eternal thing on earth ; the one thing which alone it was worth the 
 labour of long lives to study, and the labour of long generations to interpret and to 
 defend ! And how splendid the originality which could thus burst the bonds of 
 immemorial prejudice, and the courage which could thus face the wrath of outraged 
 conviction ! It was the enlightenment and inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God ; 
 yes, but the Spirit works by the human instruments that are fitted to receive His 
 indwelling power ; and, in the admirable saying of the Chinese philosopher, "The 
 light of heaven cannot shine into an inverted bowl." To many a thoughtful and 
 candid Jew it must have come like a flash of new insight into the history of hia 
 nation, and of mankind, that he had elevated the Law to too exclusive a position ; 
 that the promise to Abraham was an event of far deeper significance than the legis- 
 lation of Sinai ; that the Promise, not the Law, was the primary and original element 
 of Judaism; and that therefore to fall back from Christianity of Judaism was 
 to fall back from the spirit to the letter an unnatural reversion of what God had 
 ordained. 
 
 But he proceeds, " Is there any opposition between the Law and the Promise f 
 Away with the thought ! In God's ceconomy of salvation both are united, and the 
 Law is a relative purpose of God which is taken up into His absolute purpose as a 
 means. 1 For had a Law been given such as could give life, righteousness would in 
 reality have been a result of law ; but the Scripture shut up all things under sin, 
 that the promise which springs from faith in Jesus Christ may be given to all who 
 believe. For before the faith came we were under watch and ward of Law, till the 
 faith which was to be revealed. So the Law became our tutor unto Christ, the stern 
 slave guiding us from boyish immaturity to perfect Christian manhood, 2 in order 
 that we may be justified as a result of faith. But when the faith came we are no 
 longer under a tutor. For by the faith ye are all sons of God in Jesus Christ. 
 For as many of you as were baptised into Christ, put on Christ. There is no room 
 for Jew or Greek, no room for slave or free, no room for male or female ; for ye are 
 all one man in Christ Jesus ; 3 and if ye are of Christ then it seems ye are Abraham's 
 seed, heirs according to promise. 4 
 
 " Now, what I mean is, that so long as the heir is an infant he differs in no 
 
 but one of the parties to the covenant (Sia&jio)). It Is only under a different aspect that 
 Christ is a mediator (1 Tim. ii. 5). The passage has no reference to the eternal unity of 
 God, which is not at all in question, but to the fact that He stands by Himself as one 
 of the contracting parties. The "Law," then, has the same subordinate position as the 
 "Mediator" Moses. The Promise stands above it as a " covenant," in which God stands 
 alone-j-"is one " and in which no mediator is concerned. Such seems to be the clear 
 and simple meaning of this endlessly-disputed passage. (See Baur, Paul, ii. 198.) 
 Obviously, (1) the Promise had a wider and nobler scope than the Law ; (2) the Law was 
 provisional, the Promise permanent ; (3) the Law was given directly by angels, the 
 Promise directly by God ; but, while he leaves these three points of contrast to be 
 inferred, he adds the fourth and most important, that (4) the Promise was given, without 
 any mediating human agency, from God to man. On the sources of the (perfectly 
 needless) "three hundred explanations " of a passage by no means unintelligible, see 
 Keuss, Les Epitres, i. 109. 
 
 1 iii. 19, 20. Holsten, Inhalt des Briefs an die GaJater, p. 30. 
 
 2 iii. 24, iroiSaywyb? s xptoror. The waiSaycoyb? was often the most valueless of the 
 slaves. Perikles appointed the aged Zopyrus as the rac.Jayco-yb of Alkibiades. This fact 
 can, however, hardly have entered into St. Paul's meaning. The world, until Christ 
 came, was in its pupilage, and the Law was given to hold it under discipline, till a new 
 period of spiritual freedom dawned. The more inward relation between Law and sin, 
 and its power to bring sin more to our conscience, and so bring about the possibility of 
 its removal, are, as we shall see, worked out in the Epistle to the Romans. 
 
 3 Contrast this with the Jewish morning prayer, in which in three benediction! * 
 man blesses God who has not made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. 
 
 m. 2129,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 439 
 
 respect from a slave, though he is lord of all, but is under tutors and stewards till 
 the term fized by his father. So we, too, when we were infants, were enslaved 
 under elements of material teaching ; but when the fulness of time came God sent 
 forth His Son born of a woman, that we may receive the adoption of sons ; 1 born 
 under Law, that He may ransom those under Law. But because ye are sons, God 
 sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, our Father ! So thou 
 art no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, an heir also by God's means. Well, 
 in past time not knowing God ye were slaves to those who by nature are not gods, 
 but now after recognising God nay, rather being recognised by God how can yo 
 turn back again to the weak and beggarly rudiments, 2 to which again from the 
 beginning ye want to be slaves ? Ye are anxiously keeping days and months and 
 seasons and years. I fear for you that I have perhaps totted for you in vain." * 
 
 In this clause the boldness of thought and utterance is even more striking. 
 He not only urges the superiority of the Christian covenant, but speaks of the 
 Jewish as mere legal infancy and actual serfdom ; nay, more, he speaks of the 
 ceremonial observances of the Levitical Law as "weak and beggarly rudi- 
 ments ; " and, worse than all, he incidentally compares them to the ritualisms 
 of heathendom, implying that there is no essential difference between observing 
 the full moon in the synagogue and observing it in the Temple of Men; 
 between living in leafy booths in autumn, or striking up the wail for Altis in 
 spring ; nay, even between circumcision and the yet ghastlier mutilations of 
 the priests of Cybele.* Eighteen hundred years have passed since this brief 
 letter was written, and it has BO permeated all the veins of Christian thought 
 that in these days we accept its principles as a matter of course ; yet it needs 
 no very violent effort of the imagination to conceive how savage would be the 
 wrath which would be kindled in the minds of the Jews aye, and even of the 
 Jewish Christians by words which not only spoke with scorn of the little 
 distinctive observances which were to them as the very breath of their 
 nostrils, but wounded to the quick their natural pride, by placing their 
 cherished formalities, and even the antique and highly- valued badge of their 
 nationality, on a level with the pagan customs which they had ever regarded 
 with hatred and contempt. Yet it was with no desire to waken infuriated 
 prejudice that St. Paul thus wrote. The ritualisms of heathen worship, so 
 far as they enshrined or kept alive any spark of genuine devotion, were not 
 objectionable had a useful function ; in this respect they stood on a levoJ 
 with those of Judaism. The infinite superiority of the Judaic ritual arose 
 from its being the shadow of good things to come. It had fulfilled its task, 
 
 1 Iv. 4, 5. Notice the chiasmus of the original which would not suit the English 
 idiom. Notice, too, the importance of the passage as showing that men did not begin to 
 be eons of God, when they were declared sons of God, just as the Roman act of emanci- 
 pation did not cause sons to be sons, but merely put them in possession of their rights 
 (Maurice, Unity, p. 504). 
 
 J iv. 3, <rroix e ' a To Kotrpov ; 9, acrOcvii xal irrw^a oroide"*, physical elements of religion, 
 symbols, ceremonies (cf. Col. ii. 8), &c., which invest the natural with religious signi- 
 ficance. Both in Judaism and heathenism religion was so much bound up with the 
 material and the sensuous as to place men in bondage. In neither was God recognised 
 as a Spirit (Baur, New Test. Theol., p. 171). Or the notion may be that ritualism is only 
 the elementary teaching, the A B of religion. 
 
 iv. 111. Cf. Col. ii. 16. * Hausrath, p. 2G8.
 
 40 THE LIPS AND YfORS O* ST. FATTI* 
 
 and ought now to be suffered to drop away. It is not for the sake of the 
 calyx, but for the sake of the corolla, that we cultivate the flower, and the 
 calyx may drop away when the flower is fully blown. To cling to the shadow 
 when it had been superseded by the substance was to reverse the order 
 of God. 
 
 Then comes a strong and tender appeal. 
 
 " Become as I, because I too became as you, brethren, I beseech you, 1 It is not 
 I whom you wronged at all, by your aberrations. Nay, to me you were always 
 kind. You know that the former time it was in consequence of a sickness that I 
 preached to you : and though my personal condition might welj have been a trial to 
 you, ye despised me not, nor loathed me, 2 but as an angel of God ye received me, 
 SB Christ Jesus. What, then, has become of your self -felicitation ? for I bear you 
 witness that, if possible, ye dug out your very eyes and gave them me. So, have 
 I become your enemy by speaking the truth to you ? 8 
 
 M Mere alien teachers are paying court to you assiduously, but not honourably ; 
 nay, they want to wall you up from every one else, that you may pay court "to 
 them. 4 Now, to have court paid to you is honourable in an honourable cause 
 always, and not only when I am with you, 5 my little children whom again I travail 
 with, until Christ be formed in you. But I could have wished to be with you now, 
 and to change my voice to you, 6 for I am quite at a loss about you."? 
 
 Then, returning as it were to the attack, he addresses to them the curious 
 allegory of the two wives of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, and their sons 
 Ishmael and Isaac. 8 
 
 These are types of the two covenants Hagar represents Sinai, corresponds to, or 
 is under the same head with bondage, with the Law, with the Old Covenant, and 
 therefore with the earthly Jerusalem, which is in bondage under the Law ; but 
 Sarah corresponds to freedom, and the promise, and therefore to the New Covenant, 
 and to the New Jerusalem which is tie free mother of us all. There must ba 
 antagonism between the two, as there was between the brother-sons of the slave and 
 the free-woman ; but this ended in the son of the slave-woman being cast out. So 
 it is now ; the unbelieving Jews, the natural descendants of the real Sarah, are tha 
 spiritual descendants of Hagar, the ejected bondwoman of the Sinaitic wilderness, 
 and they persecute the Gentiles, who are the prophesied descendants of tbe spiritual 
 Sarah. The spiritxial descendants of Sarah shall inherit the blessing of which those 
 Jews who are descended physically from her should have no share. Isaac, the 
 supernatural child of promise, represents the spiritual seed of Abraham, that is 
 Christ, and all who, whether Jew or Gentile, are in Him. " Therefore, brethren, 
 we," he adds identifying himself far more entirely with Gentiles than with Jews, 
 " are not children of a slave- woman, but of the free. In the freedom wherewith 
 Christ freed us, stand then, and bo not again enyoked with the yoke of slavery." 
 
 1 i.e., free from the bondage of Judaism. 
 
 2 iv. 14, t&jrrvVare lit., spat out," Krenkel (v. infra. Excursus X.J explains this 
 of the " spitting " to avert epilepsy. " Despuimus comitiales morbos " (Pun. xxviiL 4, 7 ; 
 Plant. Capt. iii. 4, 18, 21). 
 
 3 iv. 1216. On this passage, . infra, Excursus X. 
 
 4 iv. 17, Iva. ftXovre (ind.), but probably meant for a subjunctive ; tlie apparent sole- 
 cism is probably due to the difficulty of remembering the inflexions of the contract verb ; 
 cf. 1 Cor. iv. 6. 
 
 4 He seems to mean, " I do not blame zealous attachment, provided it be (as mine to 
 you waa) from noble motives, and provided it be not terminated (as yours to me w&s) by 
 a temporary separation." 
 
 ' t.c., to speak to you In gentler tones. 
 
 7 iv. 1720. 8 On this allegory see fupra, p. 83.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 441 
 
 Again, how strange and how enraging to the Jews would be such an allegory ! 
 it was Philonian, Eabbinic; but it was more admirable than any allegory in Philo, 
 because it did not simply merge the historical in the metaphorical ; and more full of 
 ability and insight than any in the Rabbis. 1 This was, indeed, " to steal a feather 
 from the spicy nest of the Phoenix " in order to wing the shaft which should pierce 
 her breast. The Jews, the descendants of Sarahj by the irresistible logic of their 
 own most cherished method, here find themselves identified with the descendants of 
 tho despised and hated Hagar, just as before they had heard the proof that not they 
 but the converted Gentiles were truly Abraham's seed ! 3 
 
 And tho Galatiana must be under no mistake ; they cannot serve two masters ; 
 they cannot combine the Law and the Gospel. Nor must they fancy that they could 
 escape persecution by getting circumcised and stop at that point. " See," he aaye, 
 " I, Paul who, as they tell you, onco preached circumcision I, Paul, tell you that, 
 ix you hanker after reliance on circumcision, Christ shall profit you nothing. Nay, 
 I protest again to every person who gets himself circumcised, that he is a debtor to 
 keep the whole Law. Ye are nullified from Christ, ye who seek justification in 
 Law, ye are banished from His grace; for we spiritually, as a consequence of 
 faith, earnestly await tho hope of righteousness. For in Christ neither circumcision 
 availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith working by means of love." * "In 
 these," as Bengel says, " stands all Christianity." 
 
 " Ye were running bravely. Who broke up your path to prevent your obeying 
 truth P This persuasion is not from Him who calleth you. It is an alien intrusion 
 it comes only from one or two yet beware of it. A little leaven loaveneth tho 
 whole lump. I feel confident with respect to you * in the Lord that you will adopt 
 ray views ; and he who troubles you shall bear the burden of his judgment, be he 
 who he may. And as for me, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still 
 an object of persecution ? The stumbling-block of the cross has been done away 
 with, it appears ! They are not persecuted, just because they preach circumcision ; 
 why then should I be, if as they say I preach it too ? Would that these turners of 
 you upside down would go a little further than circumcision, and make themselves 
 like the priests of Cybele ! B 
 
 " I cannot help this strong language ; for ye were called for freedom, brethren; 
 cnly, not freedom for a handle to the flesh, but by love be slaves to one another. 8 
 For the whole Law is absolutely fulfilled 7 in one word in the ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself.' But if ye are biting and devouring one another, take heed 
 that ye be not consumed by one another. 
 
 1 It was no 
 
 ticular case 
 
 no mere pretty application of a story, it was the detection In one par- 
 of a divine law, vrhich might be traced through every fact ci the divine 
 history (Maurice, Unity, 50S). How different from Philo's allegory, in which CLarrau 
 is the senses ; Abraham, the soul ; Sarah, divine wisdom ; Isaac, human wisdom j 
 l&hmael, sophistry; &o. 
 
 2 iv. 2131. * V. 16. * V. 10, ty, ntmSa. els vpas. 
 
 * v. 7 12, ajraxo^ovrat ; cf. curoKCKopp<w, Deut. xsiii. 1. I Lave givea the only 
 admissible meaning. Keuss calls it "line phrase affreuse, qui revolts notre sentiment. 
 This is to judge a writer by the standard of two millenniums later. Accustomed to 
 Paul's manner and temperament it would have been road as a" touch of rough humour, 
 yet with a deep meaning in it viz., that circumcision to Gentiles was mere concision 
 (Phil. iii. 2, 3), and if as such it had any virtue in it, there was something to be said for 
 tlie priests at Pessinus. 
 
 1 Peter ii. 1C. 
 
 7 v. 14, irEjrA)jp<oT<u, has been fulfilled ; Matt. xxii. 40 ; Rom. ziii. 8 (Lev. 3rix. 18). 
 
 8 v. 13 15. To a great extent the Apostle's warning was fulfilled. Julian, En. 52, 
 speaks of their internecine dissensions. Galatia became not only the stronghold of 
 Ivlontanism, but the headquarters of Ophites, Manichees, Passalorynchites, Ascodrogites, 
 Artotyrites, Borborites, and other 
 
 " Gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire ; " 
 
 and St. Jerome speaks of Ancyra as Schimatibus dilac&mta, doymaturn 
 oonstuprata (Lightfoot, Gal., p. 31).
 
 442 THE LIFE AND WORK OB 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 " I mean then, walk spiritually, and there is no fear of your fulfilling the loots 
 of the flesh. The flesh and the spirit are mutually opposing principles, and their 
 opposition prevents your fulfilling your highest will. But if ye are led by the spirit 
 ye are not under Law. Now the deeds of the flesh are manifest ; such are fornica- 
 tion, nncleanness, wantonness, idolatry, witchcrafts, 1 enmities, discord, rivalry, 
 wraths, cabals, party-factions, envies, murders,* drunkenness, revellings, 8 and 
 things like these ; as to which I warn you now, aa I warned you before, that all who- 
 do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit 4 ia 
 love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, beneficence, faith, gentleness, self-control. 
 Against such things as these there ia no law. But they that are of Christ Jesua. 
 crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we are living spiritually, spiritu- 
 ally also let us walk. Let us not become vainglorious, provoking one another, 
 envying one another." * 
 
 At this point there is a break. It may be that some circumstance at 
 Corinth had powerfully affected him. Another lapse into immorality may 
 have taken place in that unstable church, or something may have strongly 
 reminded St. Paul of the overwhelming effect which had been produced by the 
 sentence on the particular offender whom he had decided to hand over to 
 datan. However this may be, he says with peculiar solemnity : 
 
 " Brethren, even though a man be surprised in a transgression, ye the spiritual 
 *store such an one in a spirit of meekness, considering thyself lest even thou 
 shouldst be tempted. Bear ye the burdens of one another's cares, 8 and so shall ye 
 fulfil the law of Christ. But if any man believes himself to be something when he 
 is nothing, he is deceiving himself. But let each man test his own work, and then 
 he shall have his ground of boasting with reference to himself, and not to his neigh- 
 bour. For each one shall bear his own appointed load. 7 
 
 " Let then him who is taught the word communicate with the teacher in all good 
 things. 8 Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 also he shall reap. For he that soweth to his flesh, from his flesh shall reap cor- 
 ruption ; but ho that soweth to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap life eternal. 
 [That is the general principle ; apply it to the special instance of the contribution 
 for which I have asked you.] Let us not lose heart in doing right, for at the due 
 time we shall reap if we faint not. Well, then, as we have opportunity, let us 
 do good to all men, but especially to those who are of the family of the faith.* 
 
 " Look ye with what large letters I write to you with my own hand. 10 As many 
 aa want to make fair show in the flesh, want to compel you to get yourselves cir- 
 cumcised, only that they may not be persecuted for the crosa of Christ. For not 
 even the circumcision party themselves keep the law, yet they want to get you 
 circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it from me to boast 
 except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world haa been crucified 
 to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision ia anything nor uncircum- 
 cision, but a new creation. 11 And as many as shall walk by this rule, peace on them 
 
 I Sins with others against God. * Sins against our neighbour. 
 8 Personal sins (Bengel). 
 
 4 Deeds of the flesh, because they spring from ourselves ; fruit of the spirit, because 
 they need the help of God's grace (Chrys.j. 
 
 * v. 1626. 6 vi. 2, /3ap>j, weaknesses, sufferings, even sins. 
 
 7 vi. 1 5. vi. 5, foprlov of responsibility and moral consequence. 
 
 8 1 Cor. ix. ; Rom. xii. 13 ; 1 Thess. v. 12. vi. 610. 
 
 10 Theodore of Mopsuetia, believing that only the conclusion of the letter was auto- 
 graph, makes the size of the letters a sort of sign that the Apostle does not blush for 
 anything he has said. But the style of the letter seems to show that it was not dictated 
 to an amanuensis. 
 
 II It will be seen that in those two clauses he haa resumed both the polemical (13,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIA3TS. 443 
 
 and mercy, and on the Israel of God." And then, as though by a sudden after- 
 thought, we have the " Henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in triumph on 
 my body the brands of Jesus." 1 
 
 " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen." * 
 
 Such was the Epistle to the Galatians ; nor can we without some knowledge 
 of what Judaism then wa3, and what it was daily becoming, form any adequate 
 conception of tho daring courage, the splendid originality let us rather say 
 the inspired and inspiring faith which enabled the Apostle thus to throw off 
 the yoke of immemorial traditions, and to defy the hatred of those among 
 whom he had been trained as a Hebrew and a Pharisee. "We must remember 
 that at this veiy time the schools of Rabbinism were fencing the Law with a 
 jealous exclusiveness which yearly increased in its intensity ; and that while 
 St. Paul was freely flinging open all, and more than all, of the most cherished 
 hopes and exalted privileges of Judaism, without one of its burdens, the 
 Rabbis and Rabbans were on the high road to the conclusion that any Gentile 
 who dared to get beyond the seven Noachian precepts any Gentile, for 
 instance, who had the audacity to keep the Sabbath as a day of rest without 
 becoming a proselyte of righteousness, and so accepting the entire yoke of 
 Levitism, "neither adding to it nor diminishing from it," deserved to be 
 beaten and punished, and to be informed that he thereby legally incurred tha 
 penalty of death. 8 "What was the effect of the Epistle on the Churches of 
 Galatia we cannot tell ; but for the Church of Christ the work was done. By 
 this letter Gentiles were freed for ever from the peril of having their Chris, 
 tianity subjected to impossible and carnal conditions. In the Epistle to 
 the Romans circumcision does not occur as a practical question. Judaism 
 continued, indeed, for some time to exercise over Christianity a powerful in- 
 fluence, but in the Epistle of Barnabas circumcision is treated with contempt, 
 and even attributed to the deception of an evil angel; 4 in the Epistle of 
 Ignatius, St. Paul's distinction of the true and false circumcision is absolutely 
 accepted ; 5 and even in the Clementine Homilies, Judaistic as they are, not a 
 word is said of the necessity of circumcision, but he who desires to be 
 on-Hellenised must bo so by baptism and the new birth. 6 
 
 13) and the dogmatic theses (14, 1C) of the letter ; and that the personal (17) as well as 
 the doctrinal truth (18) on which he has been dwelling recur in the last two verses. 
 Thus, from first to last, the Epistle is characterised by remarkable unity. 
 
 1 Hence, as one marked with the brands of his master, in his next Epistle (Eom. i. 1) 
 he for the first time calls himself "a slave of Jesus Christ." Stigmata were usually a 
 punishment, so that in classic Greek, stiffmatias is "a rascal." Whether St. Paul's 
 metaphor turns on his having been a deserter from Christ's service before his conversion, 
 or on his being a Hierodoulos (Hdt. ii. 113), is doubtful. There seem, too, to be traces 
 of the branding of recruits (Ronsch. Das N. T. Tertullian's, p. 700). The use of 
 "stigmata" for the "five wounds" has had an effect analogous to the notion of 
 " unknown " tongues. 
 
 2 vi. 11 18. The one unusual last word, "brethren," beautifully tempers the 
 general severity of tone. 
 
 3 See Sanhedrin, f. 58, c. 2 ; and Maimonides. Yad Hach&akah (Hilchoth Melachim, 
 10, Hal. 9). 
 
 4 Ep. Ps. Barnab. Ix. 5 Ep. ad Philad. 6, i TJJ? vtpironrjs t|vSoiov5atf. 
 
 fr'jj'fii (Ps. Clem. Horn. iii. 9).
 
 444 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 The Epistle to the Galatians was qniclily followed by that to the Romans, 
 which was at once singularly like and singularly unlike iia immediate pre- 
 decessor. No violent external opposition, no deep inward sorrow was at that 
 particular moment absorbing the Apostle's soul. It "was a little pause in his 
 troubled life. The period of his winter stay at Corinth was drawing to a 
 close. Ho was already contemplating a yet wider circle for his nest missionary 
 tour. The tide of his thoughts was turning wholly towards the West. Ke 
 wished to see Rome, and, without making any prolonged visit, to confirm the 
 Gospel in the capital of the world. He did not contemplate a long stay 
 araong the Roman Christians, because it was his invariable principle not to 
 build on other men's foundations. But he wished to bo helped by them 
 with facilities which a great capital alone can offer on his journey to Spain, 
 where aa yet the Gospel had been unpreached. His heart was yearning 
 towards the shores whose vessels he saw in the ports of Lechseuni and 
 Cenehreae, and whose swarthy sailors he may have often met in the crowded 
 streets. 
 
 But before he could come to them he determined to carry out his long- 
 planned visit to Jerusalem. Whether the members of that church loved or 
 whether they hated him whether they would give to his converts the right 
 hand of fellowship or hold them at arin's-length ho at least would repay evil 
 with good; he would effectually aid their mass of struggling pauperism; he 
 would accompany the delegates who carried to them a proof of Gentile love 
 and generosity, and would himself hand over to the Apostles the sums 
 which must by this time have reached a considerable amount which had 
 been collected solely by his incessant endeavours. How earnestly and even 
 solemnly had he brought this duty before the Galatians, both orally and by 
 letter! how carefully had he recommended the Corinthians to prevent all 
 uncertainty in the contributions by presenting them in the form of a weekly 
 cliering ! how had he stimulated the Macedonians by the forwardness of the 
 Achaians. and the Achaiaus by the liberality of the Macedonians ! And after 
 all this trouble, forethought, and persistence, and all the gross insinuations 
 which he had braved to bring it to a successful issue, it was but natural that 
 one so warm-hearted should wish to reap some small earthly reward for his 
 exertions by witnessing the pleasure which the subscription afforded to the 
 mother church, and the relief which it furnished to its humbler members. 
 But he did not conceal from himself that this visit to Jerusalem would be 
 accompanied by great dangers. He was thrusting his head into the lion's den 
 of Judaism, and from all his past experience it was bat too clear that in such 
 a place, and amid the deepened fanaticism of one of the yearly feasts, perils 
 among his own countrymen and perils among false brethren would besot 
 every step of his path. Whether he would escape those perils was known to 
 God alone. Paul was a man who cherished no illusions. He had studied too 
 deeply the books of Scripture and the book of experience to be ignorant of the 
 manner in which God deals with His saints. He knew how Elijah, how 
 Isaiah, how Jeremiah, how Ezekiel, liow Daniel, how John the Baptist, how
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 44 
 
 the Lord Jesus Himself, had lived and died. He knew that devotion to 
 God's work involved no protection from earthly miseries and trials, and he 
 quoted without a murmur the sad words of t bo Psalmist, " For Thy sake are 
 wo killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep appointed to be slain." 1 
 But whether it was God's will that he should escape or not, at any rate ifc 
 would be well to write to the Roman Christians, and answer all objections, 
 aad remove all doubts respecting the real nature of his teaching, by a 
 systematic statement of his beliefs as to the true relations between Jews and 
 Gentiles, between the Law and the Gospel, as viewed in the light of the great 
 Christian revelation that we are justified through faith in Christ. This, if 
 anything, might save him from those Judaic counter-efforts on the part of 
 nominal Christians, which had undone half his work, and threatened to render 
 of no effect the cross of Christ. He therefore availed himself of the earliest 
 opportunity to write and to despatch tho greatest of all his Epistles one of 
 the greatest and deepest and most memorably influential of all compositions 
 ever written by human pen the Epistla to the Romans. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS, AND THE THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 
 nj y&p Hffrui. jSporta I/KCUOJ evuvrt Kvpiov ', JOB xxv. 4 (LXX.). 
 
 " But to the cross He nails thy enemies, 
 The Law that is against thee, and the sins 
 Of all mankind ; with Him these are crucified, 
 Never to hurt them more who rightly trust 
 In this His satisfaction." 
 
 MILTON, Par. lost, xii. 415. 
 
 Haf/Acf 3 nl~jsa rris aA-/j0e:as xi)pv|, ri Kavx^/xa T^y fKi&stiaia.s, 3 tv sitptU'Ois 
 &vdp<oTfos. Ps. CHBYS. Oral. Encom. 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 BEFOBE we enter on the examination of the Epistle to tho Romans, it wSl 
 ha necessary to understand, as far as we can, the special objects which tL.o> 
 Apostle had in view, and the conditions cf the ehurch to which it was 
 addressed. 
 
 Tho first conqueror who had introduced the Jews in any numbers into 
 Romo was tho great Pompoms, who treated tho nation with extreme indignity/* 
 In the capital of the world they showed that strong self-reliance by which 
 they have ever been distinguished. From tho peculiarities of their religious 
 
 i Rom. viii. 36. 
 
 3 Jos. Antt. xiv. 4, 15; B. J.I. 7; Floras, iii, 5; Tac. H. v. 9; Cic. pro Flaa. 
 xxvii., &c,
 
 446 THE LITE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 conviction, they were useless and troublesome as ordinary slaves, but they 
 displayed in every direction the adaptability to external conditions which, 
 together with their amazing patience, has secured them an ever-strengthen- 
 ing position throughout the world. They soon, therefore, won their emanci- 
 pation, and began to multiply and flourish. The close relations of friendship 
 which existed between Augustus and Herod the Great improved their con- 
 dition ; and at the dawn of the Christian era, they were so completely 
 recognised as an integral section of the population, with rights and a religion 
 of their own, that the politic Emperor assigned to them that quarter beyond 
 the Tiber which they have occupied for ages since. 1 From these dun purlieus, 
 where they sold sulphur matches, and old clothes, and broken glass, and went 
 to beg and tell fortunes on the Cestian or Fabrician bridge, 2 8,000 of them 
 swarmed forth to escort fifty deputies who came from Jerusalem with a 
 petition to Augustus. 3 It was doubtless the danger caused by their growing 
 numbers which led to that fierce attempt of Sejanus to get rid of them which 
 Tacitus records, not only without one touch of pity, but even with con- 
 centrated scorn.* The subsequent, but less atrocious decree of Claudius, 6 
 brought about St. Paul's friendship with Aquila and Priscilla, and is probably 
 identical with the measure alluded to by Suetonius in the famous passage 
 about the "Impulsor Ckrestus." 8 If so, it is almost certain that Christians 
 must have been confounded with Jews in the common misfortune caused by 
 their Messianic differences. 7 But, as Tacitus confesses in speaking of the 
 attempt to expel astrologers from Italy, these measures were usually as futile 
 as they were severe. 8 We find that those Jews who had left Rome under im- 
 mediate pressure began soon to return. 9 Their subterranean prosolytism, 10 as 
 far back as the days of Nero, acquired proportions so formidable that Seneca, 11 
 while he characterised the Jews as a nation steeped in wickedness (gens 
 sceleratissima), testifies to their immense diffusion. It is therefore certain 
 that when St. Paul first arrived in Home (A.D. 61), and even at the time 
 when he wrote this letter (A.D. 58), the Jews, in spite of the uurepealed 
 
 1 I have described this quarter of Rome In Seekers after Gfod, p. 168. 
 
 2 Mart. Ep. i. 42, 109 ; vi. 93 ; x. 3, 5 ; xii. 57 ; Juv. xiv. 134, 186, 201 ; Stat. Silv. L, 
 vi. 72. They continued here for many centuries, but were also to be found in other parta 
 of Rome. On their mendicancy see Juv. iii. 14, 29G ; vi. 542. On their faithful-ness to the 
 Law, see Hor. Sat. i., ix. 69; Suet. Aug. 76; Juv. xiv. 96 ; Pers. v. 134; &c. 
 
 8 Jos. Antt. xvii. 1. 
 
 4 Tac. Ann. ii. 85 ; Sueton. Tib. 36 ; Jos. Antt. xviii. 3, 5. s Acts xviii. 2. 
 
 6 V. supra, p. 279 ; infra, p. 720. Since Christus would be meaningless to classic ears, 
 the word was surfrappe (see my Families of Speech, p. 119). Chrestianus is common in 
 inscriptions ; Renan, St. Paul, 101. 
 
 7 And perhaps by the commencing troubles In Judaea, early In A.D. 52. 
 
 8 Tac. Ann. xii. 52, "atrox et irritum." It is not impossible that these may be one 
 and the same decree, for the Mathematici, and impostors closely akin to them, were fre- 
 quently Jews. 
 
 9 Dion Cass. (Ix. 6), who is probably alluding to this decree, says that the Jews were 
 not expelled, but only forbidden to meet in public assemblies. Aquila, however, as a 
 leading Christian, would be naturally one of those who was compelled to leave. 
 
 i Hor. Sat. L ix. 70; Pers. Sat. v. 180 ; Ovid, A. A. i. 76 ; Juv. vi. 542 ; Suet. Aug. 76 } 
 RIerivale, vi. 257, teq., &c. 
 
 11 Ap. Aug. De Civ. Dei, vi. 11 ; v. infra, Excursus XIV,
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGT OF ST. PAUL. 447 
 
 decree of Claudius, which had been passed only six years before, formed a 
 large community, sufficiently powerful to bo an object of alarm and jealousy 
 to the Imperial Government. 
 
 Of this Jewish community wo can form no conjecture how many were 
 Christians ; nor have we a single datum to guide us in forming an estimate 
 of the numbers of the Christian Church in Rome, except the vague assertion 
 of Tacitus, that a " vast multitude " of its innocent members were butchered 
 by Nero in the persecution by which he strove to hide hia guilty share in th? 
 conflagration of July 19, A.D. 64. 1 Even tho salutations which crowd the 
 last chapter of tho Epistle to the Romans do not help us. Twenty-six people 
 are greeted by name, besides " the Church in the house " of Aquila and 
 Priscilla, some of the "households" of Aristobulus and Narcissus, 2 tho 
 " brethren," with Asyncritus and others, and tho " saints " with Olympas and 
 others. 3 All that we could gather from these notices, if we could bo sure that 
 (he sixteenth chapter was really addressed to Home, is that tho Roman Chris- 
 tians possessed as yet no common place of meeting, but were separated into 
 at least three communities grouped around different centres, assembling in 
 different places of worship, and with no perceptible trace of ecclesiastical 
 organisation. But there is nothing whatever to show whether those com- 
 munities were large or small, and we shall see that the sixteenth chapter, 
 though unquestionably Pauline, was probably addressed to the Ephesiau and 
 not to the Roman Church. 
 
 Assuming, however, that the Christians were numerous, as Tacitus ex- 
 pressly informs us, two questions remain, of which both are involved in deep 
 obsurity. The one is, " When and how was Christianity introduced into 
 Home P " The other is, " Was the Roman Church predominantly Jewish or 
 predominantly Gentile P" 
 
 1. Tradition answers the first question by telling us that St. Peter was tho 
 founder of Latin Christianity, and this answer is almost demonstrably false. 
 It is first found in a work, at once malignant and spurious, written late in 
 the second century, to support a particular party. That work is the forged 
 Clementines, 4 in which we are told that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. 
 Tradition, gathering fresh particulars as it proceeds, gradually began to assert, 
 
 i Tac. Ann. xv. 40, 41 ; Suet. Nero, 38. 
 
 5 The mention of these two names has been regarded as an argument that the 
 sixteenth chapter really belongs to the Roman letter, since Aristobulus, the son of 
 Herod, and other Herodian princes of that time, had been educated in Rome, whose slaves 
 and freedmen these might be. Again, although Narcissus, the celebrated freedman of 
 Claudius, had been put to death in A.D. 54 (Tac. Arm. xiii. 1), four years before the 
 date of this letter, they of the household of Narcissus " may have been some of his 
 slaves. On the other hand, neither of these names was uncommon, and it is less 
 intrinsically improbable that there should have been a Narcissus and an Aristobulus at 
 Ephesus, than that there should have been so many Asiatic intimates and Jewish 
 kinsmen of St. Paul at Rome. Muratori (No. 1328) and Orelli (No. 720) give an inscrip- 
 tion found at Ferrara from a tablet erected by Tib. Claud. Narcissus, to the manes of 
 Iris wife, Dicceosune (Righteousness). See an interesting note on thi* in Phiniptre, Bill, 
 Stud., p. 428. 
 
 8 Rom. xvi. 5 14 15 Rccognit. I 6
 
 448 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTJ 
 
 with more or less confidence, that he came to Borne in the second year of 
 Claudius (AJ). 42) ; that he met and confounded Simon Magus ; that he con- 
 tinued Bishop of Borne for twenty -five years ; that he vras ultimately martyred 
 by being crucified, head downwards, at his own humble desire ; and that this took 
 pkce on June 29th, the same day as the execution of St. Paul. In attestation 
 of their martyrdom, Gains refers to their " trophies " noar the city. 1 The 
 lateness of these details, the errors with which they are mingled, and the 
 obvious party reasons for their invention, forbid our attaching to them any 
 liistoric value. It is not at all probable that St. Peter arrived at the city till 
 the year of his death. This at least is certain that, in the New Testament, 
 the sole asserted trace of his presence in Rome is to be found in the highly 
 disputable allusion, " They of Babylon salute you." 9 He may have died in 
 Rome ; he may even have preached in Rome ; he may even have been accepted 
 by the Jewish section of Roman Christians as their nominal " Bishop ; " but 
 tLat he was not, and could not have been, in any true sense the original 
 founder of the Roman Church is freely admitted even by Roman Catholics 
 themselves. 
 
 At what time the chance seeds of Christianity had been wafted to the 
 shores of Italy s we are utterly unable to say. That this took place in oar 
 Lord's lifetime is improbable, nor is it worth while to do more iLau allude 
 to the fiction which ascribes to the Emperor Tiberius a favourable opinion 
 respecting the divinity of Christ. 4 All that wo can safely assert is the like- 
 lihood that the good tidings may first have been conveyed by some of those 
 Jews and proselytes from Borne who heard the speech of St. Peter at Pente- 
 cost ; or by others who, like St. Paul himself, received their first impressions 
 from the close reasoning and fiery eloquence of St. Stephen as they sat among 
 chance visitors in the synagogue of the Libertini. 6 
 
 2. If this conjecture be correct, we see that, from the first, the Church 
 cf Borne must have contained both Jewish and Gentile elements. Tho 
 mere probabilities of the case will not enable us to decide which of the 
 two elements preponderated, and if we turn to the Epistle we aro met by 
 
 1 Euseb. H. E. ii. 14, 25 (quoting Dionysius of Corinth) ; Id, Dem. Ev. iii. 3 ; Origen 
 fop. ue&. iii. 1) ; Justin Martyr, Apolvg. ii. 26 ; Tert. De Praescr. Haw. 36 ; c. Matt. 
 iv. 5 ; Gaius ap. Euseb. ii. 25. Justin, and perhaps others, were misled by the inscrip- 
 tion to the Sabine deity Semo Sancus, which they read Simoni Sancto. Peter is also 
 associated with Paul in the founding of Christianity at Rome by Clemens, Ep. ad Cor. 
 5 ; by the Kijpirpu* tttrpcv ', by Lactant. Instt. Div. iv. 21 ; by. Iren. Hacr, iii. 3 ; by 
 Epiphan. Haer. i. 27 ; Ores. vii. 7 ; Constt. Apost. vii. 46 ; &o. &c. 
 
 5 TM, A ~i.~ ..--.- 11....L C<J. T>~i.._ _..,.. .i. T 1 _1 J. 1 TV 
 
 An 
 
 impr 
 
 It' "Babylon" in 1 Pet. v. 13, means Babylon and not Rome a question -which cannot 
 be positively decided then St. Peter was in Babylon ten years later than this. (See 
 Baur, Paul, ii. 291 seqq.) Spanheim, in his celebrated Dissertatic (1679), dwells much on 
 Gal. ii. 9 as a strong argument against the likelihood of Peter's visiting Rome. Ellendorf 
 (a Roman Catholic writer) admits that it cannot be proved; but even Neander and 
 Gieseier admit it to be probable. 
 
 s Act* JU..TL I ., 4 Tert. Apolcg. 5, 21 (Just. Mart. Aptlog. i. S5, 48), 
 
 * Acts ii. 10, .Act* vi. 9,
 
 EPISTLE TO THE BOMAN3, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 449 
 
 indications so dubious that critics have arrived at the most opposite con- 
 clusions. 1 Baur cannot even imagine how it is possible for any one to 
 avoid the conclusion that the Apostle has Jewish Christians in view 
 throughout. Olshausen, on the other hand, pronounces with equal confi- 
 dence on the prominence of Gentiles. Each can refer to distinct appeals 
 to both classes. If, at the very outset of the Epistle, St. Paul seems to 
 address the whole Church as Gentiles, and in xi. 13 says, "I speak unto 
 you Gentiles," and in xv. 15, 16, writes in the exclusive character of 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, 2 and in x. 1 speaks of the Jews in the third per- 
 son ; 3 yet, on the other hand, in iv. 1 he speaks of " Abraham our father/' 
 and eajs that he is writing to those who " know the Law," and have once 
 been under its servitude. If, again, the multitude of quotations from the 
 Jewish scriptures* might be supposed to have most weight with Jews 
 (though we find the same phenomenon in the Epistle to the Galatians^, 
 yet, on the other hand, in the apologetic section (ix. xi.) the argument is 
 rather about the Jews than addressed to them, 3 and the moral precepts of the 
 practical chapters seem to have in view the liberal Gentiles far more than 
 the Ebionisiug Jews. The views of the latter are not directly combated, 
 while the former are bidden to waive their personal liberty rather than 
 cause any personal offence. 
 
 Of these apparent contradictions the solution most commonly accepted is 
 that suggested by Professor Jowett, 5 that even the Gentile converts had been 
 mainly drawn from the ranks of proselytes, who at Home were particularly 
 numerous, 7 so that " the Roman Church appeared to be at once Jewish and 
 Gentile Jewish in feeling, Gentile in origin ; Jewish, for the Apostle every- 
 where argues with them as Jews ; Gentile, for he expressly addresses them as 
 Gentiles." This, no doubt, was the condition of other Churches, and may 
 have been that of the Church at Borne. But as this hypothesis by no meana 
 solves all the difficulties, it seems to me a preferable supposition that St. Paul 
 
 1 Neander, Meyer, De Wotte, Ofchausen, Tholuck, Reuss, &c., are confident that it 
 was mainly intended for Gentiles ; Baur, Schwegler, Thierseh, Davidson, "Wordsworth, 
 &<>., for Jews. 
 
 2 L 13. "Among you, as among other Gentilea" (of. 6, 6). 
 
 3 x. 1, " My heart's desire and prayer for them " (vwJp O.VTMV s, A, B, D, E, F, Q 
 not virlp tov 'I<fparf\). 
 
 4 The phrase K &3^ )i'/paitrai occurs no less than nineteen times in this single Epistle, 
 as it does on almost every page of the Talmud. 
 
 5 ix. 1 ; x. 1 ; xi., passim. 6 Jowett, Romans, vol. ii. 23. 
 
 1 Tao. H. v. 5 ; Cio. pro Flacco, 28, &o. We read of Jewish slaves in the noblest 
 houses. There was an Acme in the household of-Livia; a Samaritan named Thallus 
 was a freedman of Tiberius ; Aliturus was a favourite mime of Nero, &c. The Judaic 
 faithfulness of these Jews is proved by the inscriptions on their graves ; Garueei, 
 Oimitero, 4 ; Grata, iv. 123, 60o" ; and by the allusions of classic -writers. Suet. Aug. 
 57, 76, &c. Ifc ia remarkable that among Jewish proselytes are found such names as 
 Fulvia, Flavia, Valeria, &c.. while the Christians were mainly Trypheenas and Tryphosa?, 
 slave names ("Luxurious, " wanton ") which no human being would voluntarily bear. 
 It appears from inscriptions given by Grater and Orelli that there were many Jewish 
 synagogues in Rome, e.g., Synagoga Campi, Augutti, Agrippae, Suburrat, Oleae. The 
 titles cjjiAeiToAo* and 4>iAo\ao? on their tombs significant^ indicate their orthodoxy and 
 patriotism. (See too Hor, Sat, II. iii. 288.)
 
 450 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 is not so much addressing a special body as purposely arguing out a funda- 
 mental problem, and treating it in an ideal and dramatic manner. To the 
 Koman Christians as a body he was avowedly a stranger, but he knew that 
 Jews and Gentiles, each with their special difficulties and prejudices, existed 
 side by side in every Church which he had visited, and he wished once for all 
 to lay down, not only for the Roman Christians, but for all who might read 
 his letter, the principles which were to guide their mutual relations. He is 
 stating the truths which could alone secure the perfect unity of that Church 
 of the future in which the distinctions between Jew and Greek were to be no 
 more. It was natural that before he visited a strange Church, and one so 
 important as the Church of Rome, he should desire plainly to state to them 
 the Gospel which he meant to preach. But surely it is hardly probable that 
 he would wish the benefits of this consummate effort to be confined to a single 
 Church. The hypothesis that several copies of the letter were made, and that. 
 with appropriate conclusions, it was sent in whole or in part to other Churches 
 beside that of Rome, is not only intrinsically reasonable, but also accounts for 
 some of the peculiar phenomena presented by the manuscripts, and especially 
 by the structure of the concluding chapters. 1 
 
 1 (i.) The mission of Phoebe to Ephesoa is more probable than a mission to Rome, 
 which was nearly three times more distant ; nor could Paul well have addressed a 
 strange Church in language of such urgent request on the subject of her visit (Rom. xvi. 
 1, 2). (ii.) It is strange that St. Paul should salute twenty-six people at a Church 
 which he had never visited, and address them in terms of peculiar intimacy and 
 affection, when he only salutes one or two, or none at all, in Churches which he had 
 founded, (iii.) Aquila and Priscilla were at Ephesus when St. Paul wrote 1 Cor. xvi. 
 19, and again at Ephesus when he wrote 2 Tim. iv. 19. It is strange to find them settled 
 at Rome with a Church in their house between these two dates. (" Quoi ! toute I'Eglise 
 d'Ephe'se s'ctait done donnS rendezvous in Rome?" Renan, St. Paul, Ixviii.) (iv.) How 
 is it that there are no salutations to Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, Claudia (2 Tim. iv. 21)7 
 (v.) How comes it that "Epsenetus, the first-fruits of Asia," is at Rome? and that so 
 many others are there who have in other places, of which, from the nature of the case, 
 Ephesus is the one which most prominently suggests itself toiled so much, and suffered 
 so much for Paul, and even shared his frequent prisons (xvi. 7, 9, 12, 13)? (vi.) If so 
 many were at Rome who deserve to be specially signalised as "beloved, "and "approved," 
 and "elect," and "kinsmen." and "toilers," how is it that they all deserted him at the 
 hour of need (2 Tim. iv. 16) ? Was the Church at Rome BO mere a sand-cloud that all 
 these had been scattered from Rome ? or had they all been put to death in the perse- 
 cution of A. D. 64? How is it that not one of these exemplary twenty-six are among 
 the three Jewish friends who are alone faithful to him, even before the Neronian 
 persecutions began, and only a few years after this letter was despatched (Col. iv. 10, 11)? 
 (vii.) Again, how comes it that the severe yet fraternal reproachfulness of xvi. 17 20 is 
 BO unlike the apologetic and distant politeness of xv. 15 20? (viii.) How came Timothy 
 and St. Paul's other friends, whose salutations to Thessalonica or to Ephesus would be 
 natural, to send them so freely to distant and un visited Rome? (ix.) Even if these 
 considerations were unimportant, how is it that they are so well supported by the appa- 
 rently different terminations of the Epistle at xv. 33, and xvi. 20 and 24, as well as 
 xvi. 27 ? Why is the conchiding doxology missing in F, G, and some MSS. mentioned by 
 Jerome ? Why is it placed after xiv. 23 in L, in most cursives, in Greek Ivectionaries, ir- 
 Chrysostom, Theodoret, &c. ? Why is it found twice in Codex A (xiv. 24 and xvi. 25) ? 
 Why did Mansion, with no apparent dogmatic reason, omit the two last chapters 
 altogether ? Why, lastly, does so important a manuscript as G, founded as it is on a 
 very ancient manuscript, omit the words iv 'Pupy in i. 7, 15 ? No fair critic will, I think, 
 assert that these difficulties are collectively unimportant ; and they find a perfectly 
 simple and adequate solution if, without accepting the entire details of Renan's theory, 
 we suppose with him (St. Pavl, Ixiii. Ixxv.) that the main body of the Epistle WHS tent
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 451 
 
 3. We come, then, to the question, What is the main object of the Epistle 
 to the Romans ? And here we must not be surprised if we meet with different 
 answers. The highest works of genius, in all writings, whether sacred or 
 secular, are essentially many-sided. Who will pretend to give in a few words 
 the central conception of the " Prometheus Vinctus" or of " Hamlet " ? Who will 
 profess to unite all suffrages in describing the main purpose of Ecclesiastes or 
 of Job ? Yet, although the purpose of the Epistle has been differently inter- 
 preted, from our ignorance of its origin, and of the exact condition of the 
 Church to which it was written, it is impossible so to state it as not to express 
 one or other of its essential meanings. 
 
 The first question which meets us affects the general character of the 
 Epistle. Is it didactic or polemical P Is it general or special P The divergent 
 views of commentators may here be easily reconciled. It is only indirectly 
 and secondarily polemical ; the treatment is general even if the immediate 
 motive was special. Its tone has nothing of the passionate intensity which the 
 Apostle always betrays when engaged in controversy with direct antagonists. 
 It has been supposed by some that he desired to vindicate to the Roman Church 
 his Apostolic authority. Undoubtedly such a vindication is implicitly involved 
 in the masterly arguments of the Epistle ; yet how different is his style from 
 the vehemence with which he speaks in the Epistles to the Corinthians! 
 Bishop Wordsworth says that it is " an apology for the Gospel against 
 Judaism ;" but where is the burning invective and indignant eloquence of the 
 Epistle to the Galatians P We have no trace here of the ultra-liberalism of 
 Corinth, or the dreamy asceticisms of Colossae, or the servile Pharisaisms of 
 Galatia. Clearly he is not here dealing with any special dissensions, heresies, 
 or attacks on his authority. 1 The very value of the Epistle, as a systematic 
 exposition of " the Gospel of Protestantism 1 ," depends on the calmness and 
 
 not only to Rome, but also to Ephesus, Thessalonica, and possibly some other Church, 
 vrith differing conclusions, which are all preserved in the present form of the Epistle. 
 On the other side may be set the remark of Strabo (xiv. 5), that many Tarsians were at 
 Home, and that Borne swarmed with Asiatics (Friedlander, Sittengesch. Horns, i. 59) ; the 
 certainty that even in the days of Scipio, and much more in each succeeding generation, 
 the majority of the inhabitants of Rome the faex populi were but " stepsons of Italy " 
 (Sen. ad Helv., Com. 6, "Non possum ferre Quirites Graecam urban," Juv. Sat. iii. 61, 
 73, seq., "St. 1 tacete quibus nee pater nee mater est ") and predominantly Greek (see 
 Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 20) ; and that the names of Amplias, Urbanus, Stachys, 
 Apelles, Nereus, Hermes, Hernias, are all found, as Dr. Lightfoot has shown (ib. 172 
 175), in the inscriptions of the Columbaria among the slaves in the households of various 
 Cassarian families ; and not only these, but the rarer names Tryphsena, Tryphosa, 
 Patrobas, and even Philologus and Julia in connexion, which is at least a curious 
 coincidence. But when we remember the many hundreds of slaves in each great Roman 
 household ; and the extreme commonness of the names by which they were mostly 
 called ; and the fact that Garucci found that Latin nanws were twice as numerous as the 
 Greek in the old Jewish cemetery at Rome, we must still consider it more likely that 
 chap, xvi., in whole or in part, was addressed to Ephesus as a personal termination to 
 the copy of the Roman Epistle, which could hardly fail to be sent to so important a 
 Church. (See Schulz, Stud. u. Krit. 1829 ; Ewald, Sendschr. 428 ; Reuss, Les JEpttres, ii. 
 19.) Of all theories, that of Baur, that the chapter was forged to show how intimate 
 were the relations of Paul with the Roman Church, seems to me the most wanton and 
 arbitrary. 
 
 1 Reusa, Let pttrvi t \L 1L
 
 452 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 lucidity with which the Apostle appeals to an ideal public to follow him in the 
 discussion of abstract truths. We seem already to be indefinitely removed from 
 the narrow fanaticism of those who insisted on the impossibility of salvation 
 apart from circumcision. The Hellenistic Judaism of a great city, however 
 ignorant and however stereotyped, was incapable of so gross an absurdity, and 
 in the wider and deeper questions which were naturally arising between the 
 Jew and the Gentile Christian, there was as yet nothing sufficiently definite to 
 exasperate the Apostle with a sense of ruinous antagonism. The day indeed 
 was not far distant when, in the very city to which he was writing, some would 
 preach Christ even of contention, hoping to add affliction to his bonds. 1 But, 
 this lay as yet in the unknown future. He wrote during one of those littio 
 interspaces of repose and hope which occur in even the most persecuted lives. 
 The troubles at Corinth had been temporarily appeased, and his authority 
 established. He was looking forward with the deepest interest to fresh 
 missions, and although he could not deliberately preach at Some, because ho 
 had made it a rule not to build on another man's foundation, he hoped to hava 
 his heart cheered by a kindly welcome in the imperial city before he started to 
 plant the Cross on the virgin soil of Spain. And the Church of Rome stood 
 high in general estimation. It was composed of Jews and Gentiles, of whom, 
 not long afterwards, the former seem to have ranged themselves in uncompro- 
 mising hostility to the Gospel ; but he could as little foresee this as he could be 
 aware that, in the second century, the Ebionism of this section of the Church 
 would lead to a malignant attack on his character. At this time there do not 
 seem to have been any open divisions or bitter animosities. 2 Differences of 
 opinion there were between " the weak," who attached importance to distinctions 
 of meats and drinks, and " the strong," who somewhat scornfully discarded 
 them ; but it seems as though, on the whole, the Jews were forbearing and the 
 Gentiles moderate. Perhaps the two parties owed their immunity from dis- 
 sensions to the passage of the Gentiles into the Church through the portals of 
 the synagogue ; or perhaps still more to the plasticity of ecclesiastical organisa- 
 tion which enabled the foreign and Greece-Roman converts to worship 
 undisturbed in their own little congregations which met under the roof of an 
 Aquila or an Olympas. If the Jewish and Gentile communities were separated 
 by a marked division, collisions between the two sections would have been less 
 likely to occur. 
 
 Be this as it may, it is evident that it was in a peaceful mood that the 
 Apostle dictated to Tertius the great truths which he had never before so 
 thoroughly contemplated as a logical whole. 3 The broad didactic character 
 
 1 Phil. L 16. These were evidently Judaieers (iii. 2 ; Col. iv. 11). 
 
 2 The only trace of these is in xvi. 17 20 ; rat &i\otrTa<ria.s, TO. o-Ka-^SaAa. But this 
 furnishes one of the arguments against that chapter as part of the Epistle to tbg 
 Romans. 
 
 8 fc-co the much more tender tone towards the Jews, and also towards the Law, in 
 Rom. iv. 16, xi. 26, &c., compared with Gal. iv. 3, 2 Cor. L 5 i. 6, &c. In tho " not only 
 but also " of iv. 16 is reflected the whole conciliatory character of the Epistle to the 
 Romans (Pfieiderer, ii. 45).
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMAN3, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 453 
 
 of the Epistle, its freedom from those outbursts of emotion which we find in 
 others of his writings, is perfectly consistent with its having originated ia 
 historic circumstances; in other words, with its having been called forth, 
 as was every one of the other Epistles, by passing events. St. Paul was on 
 his way to Jerusalem, and his misgivings as to the results of the visit were 
 tempered by the hope that the alms which he had collected would smooth the 
 way for his favourable reception. Borne was the next place of importance 
 which he intended to visit. How would ho be received by the Christians cf 
 the great city? "Would they have heard rumours from the Pharisees of 
 Jerusalem that he was a godless and dangerous apostate, who defied all 
 authority and abandoned all truth ? It was at any rate probable that, even if 
 he had not been represented to them in the most unfavourable light, he would 
 have been spoken of as one who was prepared to abandon not only the peculiari- 
 ties, but even the exclusive hopes and promises of Judaism. To a great extent 
 this was true ; and, if true, how serious, nay, how startling, were the conse- 
 quences which such a belief entailed ! They wore views so contrary to centu- 
 ries of past conviction, that they at least deserved the most careful statement, 
 the most impregnable defence, the most ample justification, from the ancient 
 scriptures. Such a defence, after deep meditation on the truths which God's 
 Spirit had revealed to his inmost soul, he was prepared to offer in language 
 the most conciliatory, the most tender in language which betrayed how little 
 the unalterable fixity of his conviction had quenched the fire of his patriotism, 
 or deadened the quickness of his sensibility. 1 He expresses an inextinguish- 
 able love for his countrymen, and a deep sense of their glorious privileges, at 
 the very moment that he is explaining why those countrymen have been tempo- 
 rarily rejected, and showing that those privileges have been inexorably an- 
 nulled. 2 He declares his readiness to be even " anathema from Christ " for 
 the sake of Israel, in the very verses in which he is showing, to the horrified 
 indignation of his Jewish readers, that not the physical, but the spiritual seed 
 of Abraham, are alone the true Israel of God. 3 
 
 1 "We see," g^ys Dr. Davidson,-" a constant conflict between his convictions and feel- 
 ings ; the former too deep to be changed, the latter too strong to be repressed, too ardent 
 to be quenched by opposition of the persons he loved" (Introdn, i. 127). 
 
 2 We can judge what the Jewish estimate of these privileges was by such passages of 
 the Talmud as Yebhamoth, f. 47, 2 ; supra, p. 227. 
 
 3 There can be no more striking contrast to the whole argument of the Epistle to the 
 Romans than the following very remarkable passage in the Abhdda, Zara (f . 3, col. 1 3), 
 which will serve to show to what infinite heights above the ordinary Rabbinism of his 
 nation St. Paul had soared. I appeal to any candid and learned Jew which is noblest, 
 truest, divinest, manliest the tone and the reasoning of the Epistle to the Romans, or 
 the bigotry and frivolity of the following passage : 
 
 " In the days of the Messiah, the Holy One, blessed be He, holding the roll of the 
 Law in His bosom, will call upon those who have studied it to come forward and receive 
 their reward. Instantly the idolatrous nations will appear in a body (Isa. xliii. 9), but 
 will be told to present themselves separately with their Scribes at the-j head, that they 
 may understand the answers severally addressed to them. The Romans, as the most 
 renowned of all, will enter first. ' What has been your occupation ? ' will be demanded 
 of them. They will point to their baths and forums, and the gold and silver with which 
 they enriched the world, adding, ' All this we have done that Israel may have leisure for
 
 454 THE LIPS AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 If the current feelings of the Jews towards the Gentiles were much em. 
 bittered if they habitually regarded them in the spirit of hostile arrogance 
 it is very possible that the section respecting the relative position of the Jews 
 and Gentiles (ix. xi.) may be, as Baur argues, the kernel of the whole 
 Epistle, in the sense that these were the first thoughts which had suggested 
 themselves to the mind of the Apostle. Tet it is not correct to say that " the 
 whole dogmatic treatment of the Epistle can be considered as nothing but the 
 most radical and thorough-going refutation of Judaism and Jewish Chris- 
 tianity." l In his reaction against the purely dogmatic view which regards 
 the Epistle as " a compendium of Pauline dogma in the form of an apostolic 
 letter," 2 Baur was led into a view too purely historical ; and in his unwilling- 
 ness to regard the central section as a mere carottary from the doctrines 
 
 the study of the Law.' ' Fools ! ' will be the stern answer : ' have you not done all this for 
 your own pleasure, the market-places, and the baths alike, to pamper your own self- 
 indulgeuce ? and as for the gold and silver, it is Mine (Hagg. ii. 8). Who among you can 
 declare this Law ? ' (Isa. xliii. 9). 
 
 " The Romans retire crestfallen, and then the Persians enter. They too will urge that 
 they built bridges, took cities, waged wars to give Israel leisure to study the Law ; but 
 receiving the same rebuke as the Romans, they too will retire in dejection. 
 
 "Similarly all other nations, in the order of their rank, will come in to hear their 
 doom ; the wonder is that they will not be deterred by the failure of the others, but will 
 BtLll cling to their vain pleas. But then the Persians will argue that they built the 
 Temple, whereas the Romans destroyed it ; and the other nations will think that since 
 they, unlike the Romans and Persians, never oppressed the Jews, they may expect more 
 lenience. 
 
 "The nations will then argue, 'When has the Law been offered to us, and we refused 
 it ? ' In answer it is inferred from Dent, xxxiii. 2 and Hab. iii. 3 that the Law had been 
 offered to each in turn, but that they would not have it. Then they will ask, ' Why didst 
 Thou not place us also underneath the mount (Ex. xix. 17) as Thou didst Israel, bidding ua 
 accept the Law, or be crushed by the mountain ? ' To whom Jehovah will reply, ' Let ua 
 hear the first things (Isa. xliii. 9). Have you kept the Noachic precepts?' They answer, 
 ' Have the Jews kept the Law though they received it?' God answers, 'Yes ; I Myself 
 bear them witness that they have.' ' But is not Israel thy firstborn, and is it fair to 
 admit the testimony of a Father?' 'The heaven and earth shall bear them witness.' 
 4 But are not they interested witnesses ? ' * ' Well, then, you yourselves shall testify ; ' and 
 accordingly Nimrod has to testify for Abraham, Laban for Jacob, Potiphar's wife for 
 Joseph, Nebuchadnezzar for the three children, Darius for Daniel, Job's friends for Job. 
 Then the nations entreat, 'Give us now the Law, and we will keep it.' 'Fools ! do ye 
 want to enjoy the Sabbath without having prepared for it ? However, I will give you one 
 easy precept keep the Feast of Tabernacles (Zech. xiv. 16). Then they will all hurry off 
 to make booths on the roofs of their houses. But the Holy One, blessed be He, will make 
 the sun blaze with midsummer heat, and they will desert the booths with the scornful 
 exclamation, ' Let us break His bands asunder, and fling away Hia cords from us ' (Ps. ii. 
 3). Then the Lord, sitting in the heavens, shall laugh at them. The only occasion on 
 which He laughs at His creatures," though He doea so with His creatures, notably with 
 Leviathan, every day. 
 
 1 Baur, Paul. i. 349 ; Olshausen, Romans, Introd. 5. Philippi calls it " a con- 
 nected doctrinal statement of the specifically Pauline Gospel." 
 
 3 In any case this statement would be far too broad. If the Epistle to the Romans 
 be a complete statement of what may be called the Apostle's " Soteriology," it contains 
 little or none of the Eschatology which distinguishes these Epistles to the Thessalonians, 
 or the Christology of the Epistle to the Colossians, or the Ecclesiology of the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians. It is hardly worth while to notice the opinions that it is a mere defence 
 of his Apostolate (Mangold), or a description and vindication of the Pauline system of 
 missionary labours (Schott.). See Lange's Romans, p. 38, E. T. 
 
 Because they only exist for the sake of the Law (A'edaHm, f. 82, col. 1).
 
 EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 455 
 
 enunciated in the first eight chapters, he goes too far in calling them the heart 
 and pith of the whole, to which everything else is only an addition. These 
 chapters may have been first in the order of thought, without being first 
 in the order of importance ; they may have formed the original motive of the 
 Epistle, and yet may have been completely thrown into subordination by the 
 grandeur of the conceptions to which they led. 
 
 May we not well suppose that the Epistle originated as follows P The 
 Apostle, intending to start for Jerusalem, and afterwards to open a new 
 mission in the West, thought that he would utilise an interval of calm 
 by writing to the Roman Church, in which, though not founded by himself, he 
 could not but feel the deepest interest. He knows that, whatever might be 
 the number of the Gentile Christians, the nucleus of the Church had been 
 composed of Jews and proselytes, who would find it very hard to accept the 
 lesson that God was no respecter of persons. Yet this was the truth which 
 he was commissioned to teach ; and if the Jews could not receive it without a 
 shock if even the most thoughtful among them could not but find it hard to 
 admit that their promised Messiah the Messiah for whom they had yearned 
 through afflicted centuries was after all to be even more the Messiah of the 
 Gentiles than of the Jews then it was pre-eminently necessary for him to set 
 this truth so clearly, and yet so sympathetically, before them, as to soften the 
 inevitable blow to their deepest prejudices. It was all the more necessary 
 because, in writing to the more liberal Judaisers, he had not to deal with the 
 ignorant malignity of those who had seduced his simple Galatians. In 
 writing to the Churches of Galatia, and smiting down with one shattering 
 blow their serpent-head of Pharisaism, he had freed his soul from the storm 
 of passion by which it had been shaken. He could now write with perfect 
 composure on the larger questions of the position of the Christian in reference 
 to the Law, and of the relations of Judaism to Heathenism, and of both 
 to Christianity. That the Gentiles were in no respect inferior to the Jews in 
 spiritual privileges nay, more, that the Gentiles were actually superseding 
 the Jews by pressing with more eagerness into the Church of Christ 1 was a 
 fact which no Jewish Christian could overlook. Was God, then, rejecting 
 Israel ? The central section of the Epistle (ix. xi.) deals with this grave 
 scruple : and the Apostle there strives to show that (1) spiritual sonship does 
 not depend on natural descent, since the only justification possible to man- 
 namely, justification by faith was equally open to Jews and Gentiles (ix.); 
 that (2), so far as the Jews are losing their precedence in the divine favour, 
 this is due to their own rejection of a free offer which it was perfectly open 
 to them to have embraced (x.); and that (3) this apparent rejection is softened 
 by the double consideration that () it is partial, not absolute, since there was 
 " a remnant of the true Israelites according to the election of grace " ; and () 
 it is temporary, not final, since, when the full blessing of the Gentiles has 
 
 1 Just as in the days of Christ the publicans and harlots were admitted before the 
 Pharisees into the kingdom of God (Matt.ni. 31, 32).
 
 456 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 been secured, there still remains the glorious hope that all Israel would at last 
 be saved. 1 
 
 But was it not inevitable that from this point his thoughts should work 
 backwards, and that the truths to which now, for the first time, he gave full 
 and formal expression should assume an importance which left but subordinate 
 interest to the minor problem P From the relative his thoughts had been led 
 en to the absolute. From the question as to the extinction of the exclusive 
 privileges of the Jews, he had ascended to the question of God's appointed plan 
 for the salvation of mankind its nature, its world- wide f reedom, its necessity. 
 That plan the Apostle sums up in the one formula, JUSTIFICATION 
 BY FAITH, and in order to establish and explain it he had to prove the 
 universality of human sin; the inability alike of Jew and Gentile to 
 attain salvation by any law of works ; the consequent " subordinate, relative, 
 negative" significance of the Law; the utter and final evanescence 
 of all difference between circumcision and uncircumcision in the light of 
 a dispensation now first revealed. And thus the real basis of this, as of every 
 other Epistle, is " Christ as the common foundation on which Jew and Gentile 
 could stand, the bond of human society, the root of human righteousness." 2 It 
 may be quite true that throughout all these high reasonings, and the many 
 questions to which they give rise, there runs an undertone of controversy, and 
 that the Apostle never lost sight of the fact that he was endeavouring to prove 
 for the Roman Christians, and through them to the entire Church, the new 
 and startling doctrine that, since the annihilation of sin was rendered possible 
 by faith, and faith alone, all claims founded on Jewish particularism were 
 reduced to nothingness. This is the main point; but even the practical 
 questions which receive a brief decision at the close of the Epistle, 
 are handled in strict accordance with the great principles which he 
 has thus established of the Universality of Sin, and the Universality of 
 Grace. 8 
 
 Such seems to me to be the origin and the idea of the Epistle to the 
 Romans, of which Luther says that " it is the masterpiece of the New Testa- 
 ment, and the purest gospel, which can never be too much read or studied, 
 and the more it is handled, the more precious it becomes ; " on which Melanc- 
 thon founded the doctrinal system of the Reformed Church ; which Coleridge 
 called " the most profound work in existence ; " in which Tholuck, who wrote 
 the first really important and original commentary upon it in recent tiinesi 
 saw " a Christian philosophy of universal history." Its general outline may 
 be given as follows: After a full and solemn greeting, he passes, in tho 
 simplest and most natural manner, to state his fundamental thesis of justi- 
 
 '' , -L-GP. "*>- .,-.,<.. :*'"!. j,- iel *i. ', .; 
 
 1 See Baur, Paul. ii. 828. Maurice, Unity, p. 477. 
 
 * If we were to choose one phrase as expressing most of the idea of the Epistle, it 
 would be, "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive " (1 Cor. xv. 22). 
 " Its precepts naturally arise from its doctrinal assertions, that (1) all are guilty before 
 God ; that (2) all need a Saviour ; that (3) Christ died for all ; that (4) we are all one 
 body in Him !l (Bp. Wordsworth's Spittles, p. 200),
 
 TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF 8T PAUL. 457 
 
 fication by faith, 1 which he illustrates and supports by quoting the Septua- 
 gint version of Hab. ii. 4. The necessity for this mode of salvation rests in the 
 universality of sin a fact taught, indeed, by human experience, but too apt 
 to be overlooked, and therefore needing to be argumentatively enforced. 
 Thus Jews and Gentiles are reduced to the same level, and the exceptional 
 privileges of the Jew do but add to his condemnation (i. 16 iii. 20). Conse- 
 quently by the works of the Law whether the natural or the Mosaic Law 
 no flesh can be justified, and justification can only be obtained by the faith 
 of man accepting the redemption of Christ, so that all alike are dependent on 
 the free will of God (iii. 21 30). 2 Aware of the extreme novelty of these 
 conclusions, he illustrates them by Scripture (iii. 31 iv. 25), and then dwells 
 on the blessed consequences of this justification (v. 1 11). These conse- 
 quences are foreshadowed in the whole moral and religious history of man- 
 kind as summed up in the two periods represented by Adam and by Christ 
 (v. 12 21). Having thus completed the statement of his great doctrine, he 
 meets the objections which may be urged against it. So far from diminish- 
 ing the heinousness, or tending to the multiplication of sin, he shows that it 
 involves the radical annihilation of sin (vi.). If any were startled at the 
 close juxtaposition of the Law and sin, he points out that while the Law iii 
 itself is holy, just, and good, on the other hand what he has said of it, 
 relatively to mankind, is demonstrated by its psychological effects, and that 
 in point of fact the Law is, for the changed nature of the believer, super- 
 seded by a new principle of life by the Spirit of God quickening the heart 
 of man (vii. 1 viii. 11). This naturally leads him to a serious appeal to his 
 readers to live worthily of this changed nature, and to a magnificent outburst 
 of thanksgiving, which rises at last into a climax of impassioned eloquence 
 (viii. 1239). 
 
 At this point he finds himself face to face with the question from which 
 his thoughts probably started the relations of Judaism to Heathenism, 
 and of Christianity to both. In an episode of immense importance, especially 
 to the age in which he wrote, he shows that God's promises to Israel, when 
 rightly understood, both had been, and should be, fulfilled, and that so far 
 as they seemed for the moment to have been made void the failure was 
 due to the obstinate hardness of the chosen people (ix. ri.). The remainder 
 of the Epistle is more practical and popular. He urges the duties of holi- 
 ness, humility, unity, the faithful use of opportunities, hope, and above all 
 love, on which he dwells earnestly and at length (xii). Then, perhaps with 
 special reference to the theocratic prejudices of Jewish Christians, he enforces 
 the duty of obedience to civil authority, and reverts once more to love as the 
 chief of Christian graces ; enforcing these practical exhortations by the thought 
 that the night of sin and ignorance was now far spent, and the day waa 
 
 1 o Si 2iK<uof irt'oreti? [/xou] ri<rTai. The /aov is omitted by St. Paul, and, indeed, by 
 many MSS. of the LXX. (see supra on Gal. iii. 11). 
 
 2 This passage contains the very quintessence of Pauline theology. See it admirably 
 explained and developed by Reuss, ThM. Chret. ii. 18107. 
 
 II
 
 458 
 
 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 near (xiii.). He then points out the necessity for mutual forbearance and 
 mutual charity between the strong and the weak that is, between those who 
 considered themselves bound by legal prescriptions, and those who realised 
 that from such elements they were emancipated by the glorious liberty of 
 the children of God; mingling with these exhortations some reference to 
 the views which he had already expressed about the mutual relation of 
 Jews and Christians (xiv. xv. 13). The remainder of the Epistle is chiefly 
 personal. He first oilers an earnest and graceful apology for having thus 
 ventured to address a strange Church an apology based on his apostolic 
 mission (xv. 14 21) and then sketches the outline of his future plans, 
 specially entreating their prayers for the good success of his approaching 
 visit to Jerusalem. In the last chapter, which I have given reasons 
 for believing to have been addressed, at any rate in part, not to Romans, 
 but to Ephesians, he recommends Phoebe to the kindly care of the Church 
 (1, 2); sends affectionate salutations to six-and-twenty of the brethren 
 (3 16); gives a severe warning against those who fostered divisions, 
 which concludes with a promise and a benediction (17 20); repeats the 
 benediction after a few salutations from, the friends who were with him 
 (21 24) ; and ends with an elaborate and comprehensive doxology, in which 
 Borne have seen "a liturgical antiphouy in conformity with the funda- 
 mental thought of the Epistle." 1 
 
 n. 
 
 GENERAL THESIS OF THE EPISTLE. 
 
 *fl fov ISic&rov rb QavfM & rov a-ypcy^arov fj ffofyia.. Ps. Chrys. Orat. Encom. 
 (Opp. viii. 10). 
 
 "Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God 
 Himself. Let it be counted folly, or frenzy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our 
 wisdom and our comfort ; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man 
 hath sinned, and God hath suffered ; that God hath made Himself the Son of men, 
 and men are made the righteousness of God." Hooker, Serm. ii. 6. 
 
 "It breaketh the window that it may let in the light ; it breaketh. the shell that 
 we may eat the kernel ; it putteth. aside the curtain that we may enter into the 
 most Holy Place : it removeth the cover of the well that we may come by the 
 water." Pref. to Authorised Version. 
 
 WE must now look more closely at this great outline of one of the most 
 essential factors of Christian theology ; and I must ask my readers, Bible in 
 hand, to follow step by step its solemn truths as they gradually expand them- 
 selves before our view. 
 
 The Salutation, which occupies the first seven verses, is remarkable as 
 
 1 v. Lange, ad loc.
 
 PIS*LE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAtTL. 459 
 
 being the longest and most solemnly emphatic of those found in any of his 
 Epistles. Had he adopted the ordinary method of his day, he would have 
 simply headed his letter with the words, "Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to 
 the Roman Christians, greeting." 1 But he had discovered an original method of 
 giving to his first salutation a more significant and less conventional turn, and 
 of making it the vehicle for truths to which he desired from the first to arrest 
 attention. Thus, in one grand single sentence, of which the unity is not lost 
 in spite of digressions, amplifications, and parentheses, he tells the Roman 
 Christians of his solemn setting apart, 2 by grace, to the Apostolate ; of the 
 object and universality of that Apostolate ; of the truth that the Gospel is no 
 daring novelty, but the preordained fulfilment of a dispensation prophesied in 
 Scripture; 8 of Christ's descent from David, according to the flesh, and of his 
 establishment with power as the Son of God according to the spirit of holi- 
 ness* by the resurrection of the dead. 6 
 
 We ask, as we read the sentence, whether any one has ever compressed 
 more thoughts into fewer words, and whether any letter was ever written 
 which swept so vast an horizon in its few opening lines ? 8 
 
 He passes on to his customary thanksgiving " by Jesus Christ " for the 
 widely-rumoured faith of the Christians at Rome; 7 and solemnly assures 
 them how, in his unceasing prayers on their behalf, he supplicates God that 
 he may be enabled to visit them, because he yearns to see them, and impart to 
 them, for their stability, some spiritual gift. 8 Then, with infinite delicacy, 
 correcting an expression which, to strangers, might seem to savour of assumed 
 authority, ho explains that what he longs for is an interchange between them 
 of mutual encouragement ; 9 for he wishes them to know 10 that, though hin- 
 dered hitherto, he has often planned to come to them, that he might reap 
 among them, as among all other Gentiles, some of the fruit of his ministry. 
 The Gospel has been entrusted to him, and he regards it as something due 
 from him, a debt which he has to pay to all Gentiles alike, whether Greeks or 
 non-Greeks, whether civilised or uncivilised. He is therefore eager, so far as 
 
 1 This is the earliest letter which he addresses to "the saints." His former letters 
 were all addressed "to the Church" or "Churches" (1, 2 Thess., 1, 2 Cor., Gal.). It 
 is also the first in which he calls himself " a slave of Jesus Christ." 
 
 - a.<f>ti>puT/j.fvos- Cf, Acts xiii. 2, a^opiourc. 
 
 3 ypcufial ayuu, not " sacred writings," but like Upa ypo^xaTa, a proper name for the 
 Scriptures, and therefore anarthrous. 
 
 4 The form of expression is of course antithetical, but it seems to me that Dr. Forbes, 
 in his Analytical Commentary, pushes this antithesis to most extravagant lengths. 
 
 s 1 7. In ver. 4, avaoTa<r vcKpuv, is not "from" (ex), but "of" the dead, regarded 
 as accomplished in Christ. The notions of x<*pi and elpjjnj are united in Num. vi. 25, 26. 
 
 6 "Epistola tota sic methodica est, ut ipsum quoque exordium ad rationem artis 
 coinpositum sit " (Calvin). 
 
 7 The iv SA<j> TW Ko<Tfi< of course only means among the humble and scattered Christian 
 communities, and therefore furnishes no argument against the truth of Acts xxviii. 21, 22. 
 
 8 The expressions in these verses (eTruroei, 11 ; <rv/x7rapcucAr)fc)v<u, 12 ; irpocOeMV, e<cAv0rji/, 
 
 Kapn-bp, 13 ; 6<e<.Aenp, 14) are closely analogous to those in xv. (eveKonrc^ijc, 22 ; ewmodiav, 
 23 ; o$eiAerai, 27 ', crvvafairavawfiai, 32). 
 
 9 Of. xv. 24. Erasmus goes too far in calling this a " sancta adulatw." 
 
 10 ov ffc'Aw <? OM ivvotii/, xl. 25 ; 1 Thess. iv. 13 ; 1 Cor. x. 1, xii. 1 ; 2 Cor. i. 8,
 
 460 THE LIFE AND WORK Of St. PAltt. 
 
 it depends on him, to preach the Gospel even in the world's capital, even in 
 imperial Borne. 1 
 
 This leads him to the fundamental theme, which he intends to treat. 
 Many are ashamed of that Gospel ; he is not ; a "for it is the power of God 
 unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, 3 and also to the 
 Greek. For in it God's righteousness is being revealed from faith to faith, 
 even as it is written, ' But tlie just shall live by faith.' " 4 
 
 How easy are these words to read ! Yet they require the whole Epistle 
 for their adequate explanation, and many volumes have been written to eluci- 
 date their meaning. Rome is the very centre of human culture, the seat of 
 the widest, haughtiest despotism which the world has ever seen, and he is well 
 aware that to the world's culture the Cross is foolishness, and feebleness to 
 the world's power. Yet he is not ashamed of the Gospel of that Cross, for 
 to all who will believe it, whether the Jew to whom it was first offered or the 
 Greek to whom it is now proclaimed, it is the display of God's power in order 
 to secure their salvation. Even those few words " to the Jew first, and also 
 to the Greek " are the sign that a new aeon has dawned upon the world ; and 
 having thus indicated in two lines the source (God's power), the effect (salva- 
 tion), and the universality of the Gospel (to Jew and Gentile), he proceeds to 
 sum up its essence. " In it," he says, " God's righteousness is being revealed 
 from faith to faith." 
 
 We repeat the familiar words, but what meaning should we attach to 
 them ? It would take a lifetime to read all that has been written about them 
 in interminable pages of dreary exegesis, drearier metaphysics, and dreariest 
 controversy. Traducianist and Pelagian, Calvinist and Armiuian, Sublap- 
 sarian and Supralapsarian, Solifidian and Gospeller, Legalist and Antinomian, 
 Methodist and Baptist, have wrangled about them for centuries, and strewn 
 the field of polemical theology with the scattered and cumbering debris of 
 technicalities and anathemas. From St. Augustine to St. Thomas of Aquinum, 
 and from St. Thomas to Whitefield, men have 
 
 " Reasoned high 
 
 Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, 
 And found no end in wandering mazes lost ; " 
 
 and their controversies have mainly turned on these words. Does it not seem 
 presumptuous to endeavour to express in one simple sentence what they appear 
 to state P* Not if we distinguish between " ideas of the head" and " feelings 
 
 i i. 8-15. 
 
 8 What cause he might have had to be tempted to shame by the feelings of the 
 lordlier and more cultivated Gentiles may be seen in the remark of Tacitus (Ann. xv. 44), 
 who classes Christianity among the " cuncta atrocia aut pudenda " which flow together 
 into the vortex of .Roman life. 
 
 3 irpSrrov, precedence, genetic and historical (John iv. 22 ; Acts i. 8). 
 
 4 i. 16, 17. 
 
 * It will be observed that the true explanation of the meaning of the words Is one 
 thing, and one which may be regarded aa approximately certain ; the adequate explana-
 
 EPISTLE TO THK ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 461 
 
 of the heart." Not if we bear in mind that these controversies arise mainly 
 from " the afterthoughts of theology." We can only understand St. Paul's 
 views in the light of his own repeated elucidations, comments, and varied 
 modes of expression ; yet with this guidance we should sum up the results of 
 endless discussions, prolonged for a thousand years, by interpreting his words 
 to mean that In the Gospel is being made known 1 to the world that inherent 
 righteousness of God, which, by a judgment of acquittal pronounced once for 
 all in the expiatory death of Christ, He imputes to guilty man, and which 
 beginning for each individiial, with his trustful acceptance of this reconciliation 
 of himself to God in Christ, ends in that mystical union with Christ whereby 
 Christ becomes to each man a new nature, a quiclcening spirit. 
 
 It is impossible, I think, in fewer words to give the full interpretation of 
 this pregiiant thesis. The end and aim of the Gospel of God is the salvation 
 of man. Man is sinful, and cannot by any power of his own attain to holiness. 
 Yet without holiness no man can see the Lord. Therefore, without holiness no 
 man can be saved. How, then, is holiness to be attained P The Gospel is the 
 answer to that question, and this Epistle is the fullest and most consecutive ex- 
 position of this divine dispensation. The essence of the answer is summed up in 
 the one phrase " JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH." In this verse it is expressed as 
 " the righteousness and justice of God" which" is being revealed in the Gospel 
 from faith to faith." The word for " righteousness " is also rendered " justi- 
 fication." But neither of this word, nor of the word "faith," lias St. Paul ever 
 given a formal definition. It is only from his constantly- varied phrases, and 
 from the reasonings by which he supports, and the quotations by which he 
 illustrates them, that we can ascertain his meaning. Many writers have main- 
 tained that this meaning is vague and general, incapable of being reduced to 
 rigid and logical expression, impossible to tesselate into any formal scheme of 
 salvation. We must not overlook the one element of truth which underlies 
 these assertions. Undoubtedly there is a vast gulf between the large impas- 
 sioned utterances of mystic fervour and the cold analytic reasonings of 
 technical theology ; between emotional expressions and elaborate systems ; 
 between Orientalism and scholasticism ; between St. Paul and St. Thomas of 
 Aquinum. Speculative metaphysics, doctrines of sin, theories of imputation, 
 transcendental ontology these in the course of time were inevitable ; but 
 these are not the foundation, not the essence, not the really important element 
 of Christianity. This has been too much forgotten. Yet there is all the dif- 
 ference in the world between understanding what Paul meant to express, 
 and pretending to have fathomed to their utmost depths the Eternal Truths 
 which lie behind his doctrine ; and it is perfectly possible for us to compre- 
 hend God's scheme, so far as it affects our actions and our hopes, without 
 
 ;tion of the doctrine is quite another thing, and all attempt to do it lands us at once in 
 the region of insoluble mysteries. " We cannot measure the arm of God with the finger 
 of man. " 
 
 1 affoitaAvirrerai "progressive revelation," but tyavepaOii, it has been once for all 
 manifested ; or rather tr<4>a?c'pwr<u (iii. 21) has been manifested now atulfor ever.
 
 462 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 attempting to arrange in the pigeon-holes of our logical formulae the incom- 
 prehensible mysteries encircling that part of it which has alone been opened 
 for our learning: 
 
 1. We may, then, pronounce with reasonable certainty that in this 
 memorable thesis of the Epistle, " God's righteousness," which, in the first 
 instance, means a quality of God, is an expression which St. Paul uses to 
 express the imputation of this righteousness by free bestowal upon man, so 
 that man can regard it as a thing given to himself a righteousness which 
 proceeds from God and constitutes a new relation of man towards Him 
 justification of man, a declaration of man's innocence an acquittal from guilt 
 through Christ given by free grace the principle, ordained by God himself, 
 which determines the religious character of the race, and by which the 
 religious consciousness of the individual is conditioned. 1 
 
 2. And when St. Paul says that this " righteousness of God " springs 
 "from faith," he does not mean that faith is in any way the meritorious 
 cause of it, for he shows that man is justified by free grace, and that this 
 justification has its ground in the spontaneous favour of God, and its cause 
 in the redemptive work of Christ ; 2 but what he means is that faith is the 
 receptive instrument 3 of it the personal appropriation of the reconciling 
 love of God, which has once for all been carried into effect for the race by 
 the death of Christ. 
 
 3. Lastly, when he says that this righteousness of God is being revealed 
 in the Gospel " from faith to faith," he implies the truth, which finds frequent 
 illustration in his writings, that there are ascensive degrees and qualities of 
 Christian faith. 4 Leaving out of sight the dead faith (fides informis) of the 
 schoolmen, its lowest stage (i.) is the being theoretically persuaded of God's 
 favour to us in Christ on higher grounds than those of sensuous perception 
 and ordinary experience, namely, because we have confidence in God (assensus 
 fiducia}. In a higher stage (ii.) it has touched the inmost emotions of the 
 
 1 Pfleiderer, Paulinism, i. 178. "The acceptance wherewith God receives us into 
 His favour as if we were righteous it consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputa- 
 tion of the righteousness of Christ " (Calvin). " Faith taketh hold of Christ, and hath 
 Him enclosed, as the ring doth the precious stone. And whosoever shall be found having 
 this confidence in Christ apprehended in the heart, him will God accept for righteous " 
 (Luther). [See, too, the twelve ancient authorities quoted in the Homily on the 
 salvation of mankind.] " The righteousness wherewith we shall be clothed in the world 
 to come ia both perfect and inherent ; that whereby here we are justified is perfect, but 
 not inherent-ythat whereby we are sanctified, inherent, but not perfect " (Hooker, Serm. 
 ii. 3). " The righteousness which God gives and which he approves " (Hodges). " The very 
 righteousness of God Himself . . . imputed and imparted to men in Jesus Christ (Jer, 
 xxiii. 6 ; xxxiii. 16) ... who ... is made righteousness to us (1 Cor. L 30) . . .so 
 that we may be not only acquitted by God, but may become the righteous of God in Him 
 (2 Cor. v. 21) " (Bishop Wordsworth). 
 
 2 The Tridentine decree speaks of God's glory and eternal life as the final, of God as 
 the efficient, of Christ as the meritorious, of baptism as the instrumental, and of God's 
 righteousness as the formal cause of justification. 
 
 3 Spyavoj/ \rfim.Kov. We are justified per, not propter fidem (Acts x. 1, 2). 
 
 "From faith to faith," i.e., "which begins in faith and ends in faith, of which| 
 faith is the beginning, middle, and end " (Baur, who compares 6o>x.i) fwijs e f7jv, 2 Cor. i',. 
 16). In the first stage the Glavbe passes into Trent,
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST PATTL. 463 
 
 heart, and has become a trustful acceptance of the gift of favour by God, " a 
 self-surrender of the heart to the favourable will of God as it presents itself 
 to us in the word of reconciliation." But it has a higher stage (iii.) even than 
 this, in which it attains a mystical depth, and becomes a mystical incorpora- 
 tion with Christ (unio mystica) in a unity of love and life a practical 
 acquaintance with Christ, which completes itself by personal appropriation of 
 His life and death. In its final and richest development (iv.) it has risen 
 from the passive attitude of receptivity into a spontaneous active force " a 
 living impulse and power of good in every phase of personal life." 1 In this 
 last stage it becomes so closely allied to spirit, that what is said of the one 
 may be said of the other, and that which regarded from without is " faith," 
 regarded from within is "spirit." Faith, in this full range of its Pauline 
 meaning, is both a single act and a progressive principle. As a single act, it 
 is the self -surrender of the soul to God, the laving hold of Christ, the sole 
 means whereby we appropriate this reconciling love, in which point of view it 
 may be regarded as the root of the new relation of man to God in justification 
 and adoption. As a progressive principle it is the renewal of the personal life 
 in sanctification 2 a preservation of the " righteousness of God " objectively 
 
 1 For these ascensive uses of the word faith see (i.) Rom. iv. 18, Heb. xl. 1 ; (ii.) 
 Rom. x. 9, Pliil. iii. 7 ; (iii.) Phil. i. 21, Gal. ii. 20; (iv.) 1 Cor. vi. 17. (Baur, N. Test. 
 Theol. 176.) It should be observed that in his earlier Epistles St. Paul does not use the 
 word at all in the modern sense of "a body of doctrine," though this meaning of the 
 word begins to appear in the Pastoral Epistles. From the lowest stage of the word, in 
 which it merely means "belief" and "faithfulness," he rises at once to the deeper sensa 
 of " fast attachment to an unseen power of goodness," and then gradually mounts to 
 that meaning of the word in which it is peculiar to himself, namely, mystic union, abso- 
 lute incorporation, with Christ. 
 
 2 Rom. xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. x. 15. "Faith," says Luther (Preface to Romans), " is a divine 
 work in us, which changes us, and creates us anew in God." "Oh es ist ein lebendig, 
 goschaftig, thatig, machtig Ding um den Glauben, dass es unmachtig ist dass er nicht 
 ohne Unterlass, sollte Gutes wirken. Er fragt auch nicht ob gute "Werke zu thun sind, 
 sondern ehe man fragt hat er sie gethan, und ist immer im Thun. . . . Also dass 
 nnmoglich ist Werke vom Glauben zu scheiden : ja so unmoglich als brennen und leuchten 
 vom Feuer mag geschieden werden." Coming from hearing (ax<i TriVrew?, Gal. iii., 2), it 
 Is primarily a belief of the Gospel (n. rov evoyyeXio). As Christ is the essence of the 
 Gospel, it becomes -a. rov XprroC (Gal. ii. 16, iii. 26), the faith which has its principle in 
 Christ. It is further defined as " faith in His Blood " (Rom. iii. 24, 25), and thus is 
 narrowed stage by stage in proportion as it grows more intense and inward, passing from 
 theoretical assent to certainty of conviction (Baur, Paid. ii. 149). The antithesis of 
 faith and works is only one of abstract thought ; it is at once reconciled in the simple 
 moral truth of such passages as 1 Cor. iii. 13, ix. 17, Gal. vi. 7, &c. I cannot here enter 
 on the supposed contradiction between St. Paul and St. James. It will be sufficient to 
 remark that they were dealing with entirely different provinces of religious life, and were 
 using every one of the three words, "faith," "works," and "justification," in wholly 
 different senses. By "faith" St. James (who knew nothing of its Pauline meaning), 
 only meant outward profession of dead Jewish religiosity. By "works" Paul meant 
 Levitism and even moral actions regarded as external ; whereas James meant the 
 reality of a moral and religious life. Their meeting-point may be clearly seen in 
 2 Cor. v. 10 ; Rom. ii. ; 1 Cor. xiii. 1. And in the superficial contrast lies a real coinci- 
 dence. "The regal law of St. James (i. 25, ii. 8) is the law of liberty in the Epistle to 
 the Galatians. Both are confuting Jewish vanity and Pharisaism. Only the work of 
 St. James was to confute the Pharisee by showing what was the true service of God, and 
 that of St. Paul to show what !foundation had been laid for a spiritual and universal 
 economy after the Jewish ceremonial had crumbled" (Maurice, Unity, 511). See 
 Wordsworth, Epistles, p. 205 ; Hooker, Eccl. Pol. 1, xi. 6.
 
 464 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PATTL. 
 
 bestowed upon us, in the inward and ever-deepening righteousness of our own 
 life ; it is, in fact, a new and spiritual life, lived in the faith of the Son of God, 
 who loved us, and gave Himself for us. 1 And hence will be seen at once the 
 absurdity of any radical antithesis between Christian faith and Christian works, 
 since they can no more exist apart from each other than the tree which is 
 severed from the root, or, to use the illustration of Luther, than fire can exist 
 apart from light and heat. " Justification and sanctification," says Calvin, 
 " cohere, but they are not one and the same. It is faith alone which justifies, 
 and yet the faith which justifies is not alone ; just as it is the heat alone of the 
 sun which warms the earth, and yet in the sun it is not alone, because it is 
 always conjoined with light." 
 
 In accordance with his usual manner when he is enunciating a new truth, 
 St. Paul seeks to support it by the Old Testament Scriptures, and reads the 
 deeper meaning which he has now developed into the words, " The just shall 
 live by faith," which Habakkuk had used in the far simpler sense of " the just 
 shall be delivered by his fidelity." But St. Paul reads these simple words 
 by the light of his own spiritual illumination, which, like the fabled splendour 
 on the graven gems of the Urim, makes them flash into yet diviner oracles. 
 Into the words " faith " and " life " he infuses a significance which he had 
 learnt from revelation, and, as has been truly said, where Habakkuk ends, 
 Paul begins. And, in fact, his very phrase, " justification by faith," marks 
 the meeting-point of two dispensations. The conception of " justification " 
 has its roots in Judaism ; the conception of " faith " is peculiarly Christian. 
 The latter word so completely dominates over the former, that Sucaioo-vvri from 
 its first meaning of "righteousness," a quality of God, comes to mean sub- 
 jectively "justification" as a condition of man the adequate relation in 
 which man has to stand towards God. Man's appropriation of God's recon- 
 ciling love in Christ has issued in a change in man's personal life : justifica- 
 tion has become sanctification, which is the earnest of future glory. 
 
 m. 
 
 UNIVERSALITY OF SIN. 
 "Knit in vetitum, damni secura, libido." OLATTD. 
 
 HAVING thus endeavoured to render clear the one subject which underlies the 
 entire system of St. Paul's theology, we can proceed more rapidly in trying to 
 catch his line of thought through the remainder of the Epistle. 
 
 1 See the two very valuable sections on Faith and Justification In Pfleiderer's 
 Paulinisium, v. Other explanations of "from faith to faith " areI, " from the Old 
 to the New Testament " (Origen, Ohrys., &c.) ; 2, " Ex tide legis in fidem evangolii " 
 (TertJ ; 3, "from faith to the believer " (iii. 22 ; Olshausen, &c.) ; 4, " from weak to strong 
 faith' (cf. 2 Cor. iii. 18; Ps. Ixxxiv. 7; Luther, &c.) ; 5, "An intensive expression = 
 mera fides ; faith the prora etpuppis (Bengel, &c.) ; 6, From Divine faithfulness to human 
 faith (Ewald). Of. Heb. xii. 2, "the author &n& finisher of oar faith " (Lange, ad te. .
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PATTL. 465 
 
 L Now, since the Apostle had already dwelt on the universality of the 
 Gospel, it was necessary to show that it applied equally to Jews and Pagans ; 
 that the universality of free grace was necessitated by the universality of 
 wilful sin. Righteousness and sin, soteriology and hamartiology, are the 
 fundamental thoughts in St. Paul's theological system. The first is a theoretic 
 consequence of our conception of God's nature ; the second an historic fact 
 deducible fi'om experience and conscience. 
 
 As there is a righteousness of God which is being revealed in the Gospel, so, too, 
 there is a wrath of God against sin which is ever being revealed from heaven, by 
 tbe inevitable working of God's own appointed laws, against all godlessness and 
 unrighteousness of those who in their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 1 And 
 since the world is mainly Gentile, he speaks of the Gentiles first. Some might 
 imagine that their ignorance of God made them excusable. Not so. The facts 
 which render them inexcusable 2 are (i.) that God did in reality manifest Himself to 
 them, and tbe invisibilities of Has eternal power and Godhead were clearly visible 
 in His works ; 3 and (ii.) that though they knew God, yet by denying Him the due 
 glory and gratitude, they suffered themselves to plunge into the penal darkness of 
 ignorant speculation, and the penal folly of self-asserted wisdom, and tbe self-con- 
 victed boast of a degraded culture, until they sank to such depths of spiritual 
 imbecility as to end even in tbe idolatry of reptiles ; 4 and (iii.) because mental 
 infatuation, both as its natural result and as its fearful punishment, issued in moral 
 crime. Their sin was inexcusable, because it was the outcome and the retribution, 
 and the natural child, of sin. Because they guiltily abandoned God, God abandoned 
 them to their own guiltiness. 5 The conscious lie of idolatry became the conscious 
 infamy of uncleanness. Those " passions of dishonour " to which God abandoned 
 them rotted tbe heart of manhood with their retributive corruption, and affected 
 even women with their execrable stain. 6 Pagan society, in its hideous disintegration, 
 became one foul disease of unnatural depravity. The cancer of it ate into the heart ; 
 tbe miasma of it tainted tbe air. Even tbe moralists of Paganism were infected 
 with its vileness. 7 God scourged their moral ignorance by suffering it to become a 
 deeper ignorance. He punished their contempt by letting them make themselves 
 utterly contemptible. Tbe mere consequence of this abandonment of them was 
 a natural Nemesis, a justice in kind, beginning even in this life, whereby their 
 unwillingness to discern Him became an incapacity to discern 8 the most elementary 
 
 1 Ka.Ttx6vT<av (TTJV oAr/flaa!/), i. 18. In 19, rt yvoxrrby is "that wbich is known," not 
 " which may be known." 'AirtHcoAunreTcu, is being revealed. "The modes of the New 
 Testament converge towards the present moment " (Jowett). 
 
 2 In verse 20, obviously is TO twu, K. r. A., expresses rather a consequence tban a 
 purpose. 
 
 s oopoLTa Kafloparai, " Invisibilia videntur" an admirable oxymoron. "Deum non 
 vides, tamen Deum agnoscis ex ejus operibus " (Cic. Q. T. i. 29. Of. De Div. ii. 72). 
 The world was to the Gentiles a fleoyi-uo-ias iraifievTjjptox (Basil). On this point see Hum- 
 boldt, Cosmos, ii. 16. 
 
 4 As in Egypt. Egyptian worship was now spreading in Italy : 
 
 " Nos in terapla tuam Romana receplmus Isim 
 Semidcosque canes " (Luc. Phart. viii. 83). 
 
 * Verse 24, s-ape'Saxe, "non permissive, nee K0<mKw sed SucaoTucwt" i.e., not as a mere 
 result, but as a judgment in kind. 
 
 6 This is the period of which Seneca says that women counted their years by the 
 number of their divorced husbands (De Benef. iii. 15). 
 
 7 There are only top awful and only too exhaustive proofs of all this, and (if possible), 
 worse than all this, in Dollinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, 684. But Ostendi 
 debent scelwa dum puniuntur afoscondi Jtagitia." 
 
 8 i. 28, Ka0u>? owe <ioi'/xa<ray . . . irafiSatcw . . . ti? i^OKi^ov rovy, "As they 
 
 16
 
 466 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST; PAUL. 
 
 distinctions between nobleness and shame. Therefore, their hearts became sur- 
 charged with every element of vileness ; with impurity in its most abysmal degra- 
 dations, with hatred alike in its meanest and its most virulent developments, with 
 insolence culminating in the deliberate search for fresh forms of evil, 1 with cruelty 
 and falsity in their most repulsive features. And the last worst crime of all beyond 
 which crime itself could go no further was the awfully defiant attitude of moral evil, 
 which led them while they were fully aware of God's sentence of death, 2 pro- 
 nounced on willing guilt not only to incur it themselves, but, with a devilish 
 delight in human depravity and human ruin, to take a positive pleasure in those who 
 practise the same. Sin, as has been truly said, reaches its climax in wicked maxims 
 and wicked principles. It is no longer Vice the result of moral weakness, or the 
 outcome of an evil education, but Vice deliberately accepted with all its conse- 
 quences, Vice assuming the airs of self -justification, Vice in act becoming Vice in 
 elaborate theory the unblushing shamelessness of Sodom in horrible aggravation of 
 its polluting sin.* 
 
 Thus did Paul brand the insolent brow of Pagan life. It is well for the 
 world it is above all well for the world in those ages of transition and decay 
 when there is ever an undercurrent or tendency towards Pagan ideals to 
 know what Paganism was, and ever tended to become. It is well for the 
 world that it should have been made to see, once for all, what features lurked 
 under the smiling mask, what a heart of agony, rank with hatred, charred 
 with self-indulgence, 4 lay throbbing under the purple robe. And in St. Paul's 
 description not one accusation is too terrible, not one colour is too dark. He 
 does but make known to us what heathen writers unblushingly reveal in those 
 passages in which, like waves of a troubled sea, they foam out their own mire 
 and dirt. 6 It is false to say that Christianity has added to the gloom of the 
 world. It is false that it has weakened its literature, or cramped its art. It 
 has been wilfully perverted ; it has been ignorantly misunderstood. Rightly 
 interpreted it does not sanction a single doctrine, or utter a single precept, 
 which is meant to extinguish one happy impulse, or dim one innocent delight. 
 
 refused . . . God gave them to a refuse mind" (Vaughan, ad loc.). St. Paul was 
 deeply impressed (24, 26, 28) with the ethic retributive law of the punishment of sin 
 with sin. It was recognised both by Jews and Gentiles (Pirke Abhtith, iv. 2; Sen. Ep. 16). 
 
 1 i. 30, e^euperas xajcSiv (2 Mace. vii. 31). Pliny (H. N. xv. 5) applies this very expres- 
 sion to the Greeks. Some of these words occur in speaking of corruptions within the 
 Church (2 Tim. iii. 2); "of so little avail is nominal Christianity" (Vaughan); evperip 
 
 ayaScoi/ (Prov. xvi. 20). 
 
 2 i. 32, TO SiKou'cu/xa, "the just decree;" WOIOVITIV, "single acts;" irpatr<rov<r<.v, "habitual 
 condition. " Possibly an OVK has dropped out before eiriyv<W$ ( ' ' they did not fully know "), 
 of which some readings show a trace. 
 
 3 i. 16 32. The Apostle is fond of these accumulative lists (<rwa0p<n<7>io) of good 
 and evil (2 Cor. xii. 20 ; Gal. v. 19 ; Eph. v. 3, 4 ; 1 Tim. i. 9 ; 2 Tim. iii. 2). No satis- 
 factory classification of the order can be made. Bengel says, "Per membra novem, in 
 aff ectibus ; duo in sermone ; tria respectu Dei et sui, et proximi ; duo in rebus gerendis ; 
 sex respectu necessitudinum." On verses 27, 28, the best comment is to be found in 
 Aristophanes, Juvenal, and Suetonius ; on 29 31, in Thuc. iii. 82 84. See the contem- 
 porary testimony of Sen. De Ird, ii. 8, " Omnia sceleribus ac vitiis plena sunt . . . 
 nee furtiva jam scelera sunt." The special horror of the age is reflected in Tac. H. i. 2, 
 and passim. " Le premier siecle de notre ere a un cachet infernal qui n'appartient qu'fc 
 lui ; le siScle des Borgia pent eul lui 6tre compare" en fait de sceleratesse " (Renan, 
 Melanges, p. 167). 
 
 i. 27, ^atffcjow. Jud. 13; Isa. Ivii. 20.
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOOT OF ST. PAUL. 4(57 
 
 What it does is to warn us against seeking and following the lowest and most 
 short-lived pleasures as a final end. This was the fatal error of the popular 
 Hedonism. St. Paul's sketch of its moral dissolution and the misery and 
 shame which it inevitably involved, is but another illustration of the truth that 
 
 " Who follows pleasure, pleasure slays, 
 
 God's wrath upon- himself he wreaks ; 
 But all delights attend his days 
 Who takes with thanks but never seeks." 
 
 ii. Having thus accomplished his task of proving the guilt of the Gentiles, 
 he turns to the Jews. But he does so with consummate tact. He does not 
 at once startle them into antagonism, by shocking all their prejudices, but 
 begins with the perfectly general statement, " Therefore * thou art inexcusable, 
 O man every one who judgest." The " therefore " impetuously anticipates 
 the reason why he who judges others is, in this instance, inexcusable namely, 
 because he does the same things himself. He does not at once say, as he 
 might have done, "You who are Jews are as inexcusable as the Gentiles, 
 because in judging them you are condemning yourselves, and though you 
 habitually call them ' sinners ' you are no less sinners yourselves." 2 This is 
 the conclusion at which he points, but he wishes the Jew to be led step by 
 step into self-condemnation, less hollow than vague generalities. 3 He is of 
 course speaking alike of Jews and of Pagans generically, and not implying 
 that there were no exceptions. But he has to introduce the argument against 
 the Jews carefully and gradually, because, blinded by their own privileges, they 
 were apt to take a very different view of their own character. But they were 
 less excusable because more enlightened. He therefore begins, " O man," and 
 not " O Jew," and asks the imaginary person to whom he is appealing whether 
 he thinks that God will in his case make an individual exception to His own 
 inflexible decrees? or whether he .intends to despise the riches of God's endur- 
 ance, by ignoring 4 that its sole intention is to lead him to repentance and so 
 to heap up against himself a horrible treasury of final ruin ? God's law is 
 rigid, universal, absolute. It is that God will repay every man according to 
 his works. 6 This law is illustrated by a twofold amplification, which, begin- 
 ning and ending with the reward of goodness, and inserting twice over in the 
 
 1 This Aifc of Ii. 1 is clearly proleptic. 
 
 8 Gal. ii. 15, i^iets <f>u<r 'lov&uoi, KOI OVK tfouv o/noprwAoi. Meyer truly says this 
 judging of the Gentiles (which they little dreamt would be pointed out to them as self- 
 condemnation, by one of themselves) was a characteristic of the Jews. 
 
 3 Thus the High-priest said oyer the scapegoat, "Thy people have failed, sinned, and 
 transgressed before Thee " ( Yoma, 66 a). 
 
 * Ver. 4, &yvoG>v. "Ayei, "Deus ducit volentem duel . . . non cogit necessitate" 
 (Bengel). 
 
 5 The apparent contradiction to the fundamental theme of the Epistle is due to his 
 speaking here of ordinary morality. "The divine valuation placed on men apart from 
 redemption" (Tholuck). Fritzsche's comment that "the Apostle is here inconsistent, 
 and opens a semita per honestatem near the via regia of justification " is very off-hand and 
 valueless.
 
 468 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 middle clause the punishment of sin, 1 expresses the thought that this rule 
 applies to all, by twice repeating that it applies to the Jew first and also to 
 the Greek ; but to the Jew first, only because of Ms fuller knowledge and, 
 therefore, deeper responsibility. And having thus introduced the name of the 
 Jew, he lays down with a firm hand the eternal principle so infinitely 
 blessed, yet so startlingly new to the prejudices of a nation which for more 
 than a thousand years had been intoxicating itself with the incense of spiritxial 
 pride that there is no respect of persons with God. Each section of humanity 
 shall be judged in accordance with its condition. 
 
 " As many as sinned without the Law, shall also without the Law perish ; and 
 as many as sinned in the Law, shall be condemned by the Law." Righteousness 
 before God depends, not on possession of the Law, but on obedience to it. Gentiles as 
 well as Jews had a law ; Jews the Mosaic law, Gentiles a natural law written on 
 their hearts, and sufficiently clear to secure, at the day of judgment, 2 their acquittal 
 or condemnation before the prophetic session of their own consciences, in accordance 
 with the decision of Christ the Judge. 8 Jew, then, and Gentile stand before God 
 eqiially guilty, because equally condemned of failure to fulfil the moral law which 
 God had laid down to guide tbeir lives. The word "ALL" as has been truly ob- 
 served, is tbe governing word of tbe entire Epistle. All for whatever may be the 
 modifications which may be tbougbt necessary, St. Paul doe's not himself make 
 them all are equally guilty, all are equally redeemed. All have been temporarily 
 rejected, all shall be ultimately received. All shall be finally brought into living 
 harmony with tbat God wbo is above all, and through all, and in all, by whom, 
 and from whom, and unto wbom, all things are, and all things tend. 4 
 
 And then Paul turns upon the self-satisfied Jew, who has been thus 
 insensibly entrapped (as it were) into the mental admission of his own 
 culpability, and after painting in a few touches his self-satisfied pretensions 
 to spiritual, moral, and intellectual superiority, and then leaving his sentence 
 unfinished, bursts into a question of indignant eloquence, in which there is no 
 longer any masked sarcasm, but terribly serious denunciation of undeniable 
 sins. He does not use one word of open raillery, or give offence by painting 
 in too glaring colours the weaknesses, follies, and hypocrisies of the Pharisee, 
 yet the picture which stands out from phrases in themselves perfectly polished, 
 and even apparently complimentary, is the picture of the full-blown religionist 
 
 1 The figure of speech is called Chiasrmis, or intro verse parallelism. " Glory and 
 honour, and immortality precious pearls ; eternal life the goodly pearl, Matt. xiii. 46 " 
 (Lange). 
 
 2 ii. 16, leg. *piV, "is judging," not npim," shall judge." 
 
 3 ii. 1 16. St. Paul adds KO.TO. TO evayWAiov /utov. " Suum appellat ratione ministerii" 
 fCalv.). It means, of course, the Gospel of free grace which he preached to Gentiles 
 (Gal. ii. 7). In verse 14, "Do by nature the things of the law." St. Paul (who is not 
 here speaking with theologic precision, but dealing with general external facts) recog- 
 nises even in heathens the existence of the nobler nature and its better impulses. See 
 the remarkable expression of Aristotle, 6 cXeuflepo* ourws |et o'ov vo^xos ii/ avru> (Eth. 
 Nic. iv. 14, 9). It is strange to see so great a commentator as Bengel joining <f>v'<m with 
 TO. fi)( POJUOC I xoira, and interpreting it to mean "do the same things that the Law does," 
 i.e., commanding, condemning, punishing, &c. ! Nothing would have been more amazing 
 to St. Paul than the notion that he discouraged good works. The phrase occurs no less 
 than fourteen times in his three last short Epistles. 
 
 See Rom. v. 15-20 x 12; I Cor. xv. 28 ; Col. iii. 11 ; 2 Cor. v. 15 ; Heb. ii. 8 ; 4o.
 
 EPISTLE TO THE BOMANfc, AtfD THEOLOGY OF ST PAUL. 469 
 
 in all his assumed infallibility, and the very air of the " Stand aside, for I am 
 holier than thou." 
 
 "But if" 1 (so we may draw out the splendid rhetoric), " if thou vauntest the 
 proud name of Jew, 2 and makest the Law the pillow of thy confidence, 8 and boastest 
 thy monopoly in God, and art the only one who canst recognise His will, and dia- 
 criminatest the transcendent 4 in niceties of moral excellence, being trained in the 
 Law from infancy, if thou art quite convinced that thou art a Leader of the 
 blind, a Light of those in darkness, one who can train the foolishness, and instruct 
 the infancy of all the world besides, possessing as thou dost the very form and body 
 of knowledge and .of truth in the Law thou then that teachest another, dost thou not 
 teach thyself? thou that preachest against theft, art thou a thief P thou that for- 
 biddest adultery, art thou an adulterer? 6 leather of idols, dost thou rob temples ? 6 
 boaster in the Law, by violation of the Law dost thou dishonour God ? For " and 
 here he drops the interrogative to pronounce upon them the categorical condemnation 
 which was as true then as in the days of the Prophet " for on your account the 
 name of God is being blasphemed among the Gentiles." 7 They had relied on sacri- 
 fices and offerings, on tithes and phylacteries, on ablutions and mezuzoth, but " omnia 
 vanitas praetcr amare Deum et illi soli servire," " all things are emptiness save to love 
 God, and serve Him only," and this weightier matter of the Law they had utterly 
 neglected in scrupulous attention to its most insignificant minutiae. In fact, the 
 difference between Heathenism and Judaism before God was the difference between 
 Vice and Sin. The Jews were guilty of the sin of violating express commands ; 
 the heathens sank into an actual degradation of nature. The heathens had been 
 punished for an unnatural transposition of the true order of the universe by being 
 suffered to pervert all natural relations, and so to sink into moral self -debasement ; 
 but the Jews had been " admitted into a holier sanctuary," and so were " guilty of 
 a deeper sacrilege." 8 
 
 1 ii , 17, el 8, and not !**, is almost unquestionably the true reading, s, A, B, D, K, 
 " oratio vehemens et splendida " (Est.). 
 
 eflWDfjiaCn. * Verse 17, iiro.vo.rra.vrj- 
 
 * Verse lo, JocijAaei TO. 5ia</>epoira. See Heb. V. 14. The S(.eurro\) a.yicw jtai /3rjAa>i' 
 
 (rbUo) was the very function of a Rabbi ; and the Pharisee was a Separatist, because of 
 his scrupulosity in these distinctions. 
 
 6 Verse 21, on the morality of the Pharisees and llabbis, Eee Surenlmsius, Mishna, ii. 
 200293, and of. Jaa. iv. 413 ; v. 16 ; Matt. xix. 8 ; xxiii. 1325. Josephus calls his 
 own generation the most xingodlv of all, and says that earthquake and lightning must have 
 destroyed them if the Romans had not coine. B. J. iv. 8, 3 ; v. 9, 4 j 10, 5 ; 13, 6. 
 Take the single fact that the " ordeal of jealousy " had been, abolished, because of the 
 prevalence of adultery, by K. Johanan ben Zaccai quoting Hos. iv. 14 (Sotah, f. 47, 1). 
 
 6 Verse 22, 6 /S5Au<r<r6fievos. They called idols rain, /sScXiryftara, 2 Kings xxiii. 13, &o. 
 ItXX. iepoavXet?. The reference is not clear, but see Deut. vii. 25 ; Acts xix. 36, 37 ; Jos. 
 ArM. iv. 8, 10; xx. 9, 2. Or does it refer to defrauding then- own Temple ? (Mai. i. 8 ; 
 iii. 8 10.) <rrri)\at.ov \ri<rriav (Matt. xxi. 13). Josephus quotes a Greek historian, Lysima- 
 chus, who said that from the conduct of the Jews in robbing the Temples of their charms 
 that city was called Eierosyla (Temple-plunder) and afterwards changed to Hierosolyma; 
 story which he angrily rejects (c. Ap. i. 34). 
 
 7 ii. 17 24. In verse 24 the words of Isa. Iii. 5 are curiously combined with the sense 
 of Ezek. xxxvi. 2123. 
 
 8 The needfulness of this demonstration may be seen from the fact that some of the 
 Talmudists regarded perfection as possible. They denied the sinfulness of evil thoughts 
 by interpreting Ps. Ixvi. 18 to mean "If I contemplate iniquity in my heart, the Lord 
 does not notice it" (Kiddushin, f. 40, 1). R. Jehoshua Ben Levi, admitted to Paradise 
 without dying, is asked if the rainbow has appeared in his days, and answers " Yes." 
 "Then," said they, "thou art not the son of Levi, for the rainbow never appears when 
 there is one perfectly righteous man in the world." " The fact was that no rainbow had 
 appeared, but he was too modest to say so " I (Kiddushin, f. 40, 1).
 
 470 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 From this impassioned strain he descends in a manner very characteristic 
 of his style into a calmer tone. " But" some Jew might urge, in accordance 
 with the stubborn prejudices of theological assumption, which by dint of 
 assertion, has passed into invincible belief " but we are circumcised I Surely 
 you would not put its on a level with the uncircumcised the dogs and sinners 
 of the Gentiles?" To such an implied objection, touching as it does on a 
 point wholly secondary, however primary might be the importance which the 
 Jew attached to it, St. Paul can now give a very decisive answer, because with 
 wonderful power he has already stripped them of all genuine precedence, and 
 involved them in a common condemnation. He therefore replies in words 
 which, however calm and grave, would have sounded to a Jerusalem Pharisee 
 like stinging paradox. 
 
 " Circumcision is indeed an advantage if thou keepest the Law ; but if thou art 
 as I have generically shown that thou art a violator of the Law, then thy circum- 
 cision has become uncircumcision. 1 If, then, the circumcision of the disobedient Jew 
 is really uncircumcision, is it not conversely plain that the ' uncircumcision of the 
 obedient Gentile is virtually circumcision,' 2 and is even in a position to pass judg- 
 ment upon Jewish circumcision ? God (strange and heretical as you may think it) 
 loves the man who does Ms duty more than the man who bears a cutting in his 
 flesh. You praise literal circumcision ; God praises the unseen circumcision of the 
 heart. Offensive as the antithesis may sound to you, the faithless Jew is but a 
 Gentile ; the faithful Gentile is, in God's sight, an honoured Jew ! Though none 
 may have told you this truth before though you denounce it as blasphemous, and 
 dangerous, and contrary to Scripture yet, for all that, the mere national Judaism 
 is a spiritual nonentity ; the Judaism of moral faithfulness alone is dear to God." * 
 
 IV 
 
 OBJECTIONS AND CO NFIEM ATION8. 
 
 " The stars of morn shall see Him rise 
 Out of His grave, fresh as the dawning light ; 
 Thy ransom paid, which man from death redeems. 
 His death for man, as many as offered life 
 Neglect not, and the benefit embrace 
 Of faith, not void of works." MILTON, Par. Lost, xii. 422. 
 
 So far then, both by fact and by theory, he has shown that Jews and Gentiles 
 are equal before God ; equally guilty, equally redeemed. But here a Jew 
 might exclaim in horror, " Has the Jew then no superiority ? Is circumcision 
 wholly without advantage p " Here St. Paid makes a willing concession, and 
 
 1 This is reluctantly admitted even in the Talmud. The Rabbis hold generally that 
 " no circumcised man can see hell " (Midr. Tittin, 7, 2) ; but they get over the moral 
 danger of the doctrine by saying that when a guilty Jew comes to Gehenna, an angel 
 makes his irepiro^rj into o(cpo^v<rr'a (Sheni. Rabbah, 138, 13 ; cf. 1 Mace. i. 15 ; Jos. Antt. 
 xii. 6, 2), and they even entered into minute particulars to show how it was done. 
 
 a Ford quotes an Imitation from Tillotson if we walk contrary to the Gospel "our 
 baptism is no baptism, and our Christianity is heathenism " (Sermon on 2 Tim. ii, 19). 
 
 ii. 2529.
 
 SPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 4#1 
 
 replies, " Much advantage every way. First, because they were entrusted 
 with the oracles of God." The result of that advantage was that the Jew 
 stood at a higher stage of religious consciousness than the Gentile. Judaism 
 was the religion of revelation, and therefore the religion of the promise ; and 
 therefore the religion which typically and symbolically contained the elements 
 of Christianity ; and the religion of the idea which in Christianity was realised. 
 Christianity was, indeed, spiritualised Judaism, an advance from servitude to 
 freedom, from nonage to majority, from childhood to maturity, from the flesh 
 to the spirit ; yet even in this view Judaism had been, by virtue of its treasure 
 of revelation, preparatory to the absolute religion. 1 This was its first 
 advantage. What he might have added as his secondly and thirdly, we may 
 conjecture from a subsequent allusion, 2 but at this point he is led into a 
 digression by his eagerness to show that his previous arguments involved no 
 abandonment on God's part of His own promises. This might be urged as 
 an objection to what he has been saying. He answers it in one word : 
 
 Some of the Jews had been unfaithful ; shall their unfaithfulness nullify God's 
 faith ? Away with the thought ! 3 Alike Scripture and reason insist on God's 
 truthfulness, though every man were thereby proved a liar. The horror with 
 which he rejects the notion that God has proved false, interferes with the clearness 
 of his actual reply. It lies in the word " some." God's promises were true ; true 
 to the nation as a nation ; for some they had been nullified by the moral disobedience 
 which has its root in unbelief, but for all true Jews the promises were true. 4 
 
 A still bolder objection might be urged "All men, you say, are guilty. In 
 their guilt lies the Divine necessity for God's scheme of justification. Must not 
 God, then, be unjust in inflicting wrath?" In the very middle of the objection the 
 Apostle stops short first to apologise for even formulating a thought so blasphemous 
 " I am speaking as men speak ; " 6 " these thoughts are not my own ;" then to 
 repudiate it with horror, "Away with the thought!" lastly, to refute it by 
 'anticipation, " If it were so, how shall God judge the world ? " 6 Thus fortified, as 
 lit were, by the reductio ad absurdum, and purified by the moral justification, he 
 follows this impious logic to its conclusion " God's truth, it seems, abounded in my 
 ialseness ; why, then, am I still being judged as a sinner ? and why " " such [he 
 pauses to remark] is the blasphemous language attributed to me ! " " why may we 
 ,not do evil that good may come ? " To this monstrous perversion of his teaching 
 he deigns no further immediate reply. There are in theology, as in nature, admitted 
 antinomies. The relative truth of doctrines, their truth as regards mankind, is not 
 affected by pushing them into the regions of the absolute, and showing that they 
 involve contradictions if thrown into syllogisms. We may not push the truths of 
 the finite and the temporal into the regions of the infinite and the eternal. Syllo- 
 gistically stated, the existence of evil might be held to demonstrate either the weak- 
 ness or the cruelty of God ; but such syllogisms, without the faintest attempt to 
 answer them, are flung aside as valueless and irrelevant by the faith and conscience 
 of mankind. The mere statement of some objections is their most effective re- 
 
 1 iii. 2. "In vetere Testamento Novum latet, in Novo Testamento vetus patet." 
 
 ' ix. 4, 5. 
 
 8 Ten times in this Epistle (iii. 4, 6, 31; vi. 2, 15; vii. 7, 13; be. 14; xi. 1, 11), and 
 in 1 Cor. vi. 15; Gal. ii. 17 ; iii. 21. 
 
 iii. 1-4. 
 
 4 iii. 5. There is an interesting reading, Kara. av8pu>ir<av. " Is God unjust who inflicts 
 His anger against men ? " (MSS. mentioned by Rufinus). ri fpov^v ; of. vi. 1 ; vii. 7 ; 
 ix. 14, 30. It is found in no other Epistle. 
 
 6 For similar instances of entangled objection and reply, Tholuck refers to vii. and 
 iGaL iii. See, too, Excursus XXI., " On the Antinomies of St. Paul."
 
 472 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 f utation. It shows that they involve an absurdity easily recognisable. However 
 logically correct, they are so morally repulsive, so spiritually false, that silence is 
 the only answer of which they are worthy. Such an objection is the one which 
 Paul has just stated. It is sufficient to toss it away with the sense of shuddering 
 xepulsion the horror naturalis involved in a ^ ytroiro. It is enough to bid it 
 'avaunt, as we might avert with a formula an evil omen. People say that Paul has 
 'taught the hideous lie that we may sin to get experience or sin to add to Christ's 
 redeeming glory or that the end justifies the means ; or that we may do evil that 
 
 good may come. " They say What say they? Let them say!" All that Paul 
 
 has to say to them is merely that " their judgment is just." * 
 
 What further, then, can the Jew allege ? * Absolutely nothing ! In spite of 
 every objection, Jew and Gentile are all proved to be under sin. Here this section 
 of the proof might close, and on a demonstrated fact of human history Paul might 
 have based his Gospel theology. But neither to himself nor to his readers would 
 the proof have seemed complete without Old Testament sanction. He therefore 
 proceeds to quote a number of fragmentary passages from the fifth, tenth, fourteenth, 
 and hundred-and-f ortieth Psalms, and from the fifty-ninth of Isaiah, the validity of 
 which, in this connexion, he rests upon their use of the word " all," which implies 
 Jews as well as Gentiles. The Law (which here means the Old Testament 
 generally) must include the Jews, because it is specially addressed to Jews. The 
 intention, then, of the Law " is that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world 
 be recognised as guilty before God ; " guilty because 3 by the works of the Law 4 
 seeing that, as a fact, neither Jew nor Gentile has obeyed it no flesh shall be 
 justified before God. Half, then, of his task is done. For before he could prove 
 the thesis of i. 17, that in the Gospel was being revealed a justification by faith it 
 was necessary for him to demonstrate that by no other means could justification bo 
 attained. " For " and here he introduces an anticipative thought, which later on 
 in his epistle he will have seriously to prove " by the Law is the full knowledge 
 of sin." * 
 
 V. 
 
 JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 
 
 } 
 
 Justitia 2 
 
 8. [ Dei et fidei, coram Deo justificat." 
 
 _ LUTHEK, Colkqu, i. 30. 
 
 iii. "But now," he says, and this introduces one of the fullest and weightiest 
 passages in all his writings, " without the Law" which all have failed to keep 
 
 1 iii. 58. 
 
 2 iii. 9, jrpoex6jx0a properly means "use as a pretext;" the reading jrpoicoTexoftev n-epio-ow 
 of D, G, Syr. is a gloss to give the meaning of n-poe'xo/io', "do we excel?" which suits the 
 sense far better. , "Wetstein renders it "are we (the Jews) surpassed by the Gentiles?" 
 But as the Greek Fathers made it mean "have we the advantage?" (Vulg. praecellimus), 
 perhaps the sense is admissible here. 
 
 3 iii. 19. Ae'yei speaks, \oAei utters : cf . John viii. 48, XoAiW, \6-vov. This is the only 
 place in the New Testament where our translators have rendered SCori by "therefore, ' 
 though it occurs twenty-two times. Everywhere else they render it "for " or "because." 
 It may mean " therefore " in classical Greek, but ib is the usual New Testament word in 
 this sense. If rendered "because," a comma only should be placed after e6. 
 
 4 epyo. 1/o/j.ou, the works of any law, whether ritual, Mosaic, or general, and whether as 
 to the works prescribed by it, or those produced by it. 
 
 5 iii. 9 20. ewiyi/wo-is oftoprias, and therefore the Law cannot justify, since, as Calvia 
 says, " Ex eadem scatebra non prodeunt vita et mors."
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 473 
 
 !< the righteousness of God," both in itself and as an objective gift of justification 
 to man, " has been manifested, being witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets." 
 The nature of that witness he will show later on ; at present he pauses to give a 
 fuller, and indeed an exhaustive, definition of what he means by " the righteousness 
 of God." " I mean the righteousness of God accepted by means of faith in Jesug 
 Christ, coming to and upon all believers all, for there is no difference. For all 
 sinned, and are failing to attain the glory of God, being justified freely by His 
 grace, by means of the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as 
 a propitiation, 1 by means of faith in His blood, for the manifestation of His own 
 righteousness" which righteousness might otherwise have been doubted or mis- 
 understood " because of the pretermission of past sins in God's forbearance; with 
 a view (I say) to the manifestation of this righteousness at this present epoch, that 
 He might, by a divine paradox, and by a new and divinely predestined righteousness, 
 be just and the justifier of him whose life springs from faith in Jesus." a 
 
 Lot us pause to enumerate the separate elements of this great statement. 
 It brings before us in one view 
 
 1. Justification, the new relation of reconcilement between man and God. 
 
 2. Faith, man's trustful acceptance of God's gift, rising to absolute self- 
 surrender, culminating in personal union with Christ, working within him as 
 a spirit of new life. 
 
 3. The universality of this justification by faith, a possibility offered to, 
 because needed by, all. 
 
 4. This means of salvation given, not earned, nor to be earned ; a free gift 
 due to the free favour or grace of God. 
 
 5. The object of this faith, the source of this possibility of salvation, the 
 life and death of Christ, as being (i.) a redemption that is, a ransom of 
 mankind from the triple bondage of the law, of sin, and of punishment ; 
 (ii.) a propitiatory victim, 8 not (except by a rude, imperfect, and most mis- 
 
 1 Ver. 25. This verse is " the Acropolis of the Christian faith " (Olshausen). 
 'AffoAvTpwero (not inLXX.) implies i., bondage ; ii., ransom; iii., deliverance (Eph. i. 7). 
 Many most eminent theologians (Origen, Theodoret, Theophylact, Augustine, Erasmus, 
 Luther, Calvin, Grotius, Calovius, Olshausen, Tholuck, &c.) make i\a<rrrjpiov mean 
 "mercy-seat," since lAcurnjpiov is the invariable word for the cappweth in the LXX. 
 (Ex. xxv., passim, &c.), which never uses it for an expiatory sacrifice (00^a). Philo also 
 (Tit. Mos., p. 668; cf. Jos. Antt. iii. 6, 5) calls the mercy-seat a symbol, iXeu wa>c(u$. 
 It is, therefore, difficult to suppose how Hellenist readers of this Epistle could attach 
 any other meaning to it. The capporeth between the Shekinah and the Tables of the 
 Law, sprinkled with atoning blood by the High Priest as he stood behind the rising 
 incense, is a striking image of Christ (Heb. ix. 25). I quite agree with Lange in calling 
 Fritzsche's remark, "Valeat absurda explicatio," an "ignorantly contemptuous one;" 
 but as Christ is nowhere else in the New Testament compared to the mercy-seat, and 
 the comparison would here be confined to the single word, I cannot help thinking that 
 the word, though ambiguous, must here bear an analogous meaning to iAj>ibs, also 
 rendered " a propitiation " in 1 John iv. 10. 
 
 2 iii. 22 27. Bengel points out the grandeur of this evangelic paradox. In the Law 
 God is just and condemns; in the Gospel He is just and forgives. God's judicial 
 righteousness both condemns and pardons. On God's " pretermission " of past sins 
 (iii. 25, jra'pem?, praetcrmissio, not a^co-is, remissio) compare Ps. Ixxxi. 12 ; Acts xiv. 16 ; 
 xvii. 30 ; Lev. xvi. 10. Tholuck calls the Atonement "the divine theodicy for the past 
 history of the world." 
 
 3 "Here is a foundation for the Anselmic theory of satisfaction, but not for its 
 grossly anthropopathic execution." Schaff. ad loc. (Lange's Romans, 27). And this is 
 only the external aspect of the death of Christ, the merely judicial aspect pertaining to
 
 4#4 1EU LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAtTt. 
 
 leading anthropomorphism) as regards God, but from the finite and imperfect 
 standpoint of man ; and therefore the Apostle adds that Christ becomes such 
 to us by means of faith in His blood. 
 
 6. The reason for this, the manifestation of God's righteousness, which 
 might otherwise have been called in question, because of the pretermission of 
 past sins. 
 
 7. The end to be attained, that, in perfect consistency with justice, God 
 might justify all whose new lif e had its root in faith. 
 
 Boasting then is impossible, since merit is non-existent. By worJcs it is 
 unattainable ; by the very conception of faith it is excluded. Tliis holds true 
 alike for Jew and Pagan, and Justification is God's free gift to man as man, 1 
 because He is One, and the God alike of Jews and Gentiles. To the Jew 
 faith is the source, to the Gentile the instrument of this justification. 8 
 
 But here another objection has to be combated. The Jew might say, " By this 
 faith of yours you are nullifying the Law" meaning by the Law the whole Mosaic 
 dispensation, and generally the Old Testament as containing the history of the 
 covenant people. On the contrary, St. Paul replies, I am establishing it on a firmer 
 basis; 8 for I am exhibiting it in its true position, manifesting it in its true relations ; 
 showing it to be the divinely -necessary part of a greater system ; adding to the 
 depth of its spirituality, rendering possible the cheerful obedience to its require- 
 ments ; indicating its divine fulfilment. I am showing that the consciousness of 
 sin which came by the Law is the indispensable preparation for the reception of 
 grace. Let us begin at tbe very beginning. Let us go 'back from Moses even to 
 Abraham. What did he, our father, gain by works? 4 By his works he gained 
 nothing before God, as St. Paul proves by tbe verse that " He believed God, and it 
 was imputed to him for righteousness."" That word "imputed" repeated eleven 
 
 the sphere of Law. The inward motive the element in which God's essential nature is 
 revealed, is the grace of God (Horn. iii. 24). 
 
 1 Ver. 28, Therefore [but yap, , A] we reckon that a man is justified by faith 
 without the works of the Law." This is the verse in which Luther interpolated the word 
 "alone" "Vox SOLA tot clamoribus lapidata " (Erasm.). Hence the name Solifidian. 
 It was a legitimate inference, and was already existing in the Nuremberg Bible (1483) 
 and the Genoese (1476), but was an unfortunate apparent contradiction of oinc IK n-iorew? 
 iiovov (James ii. 24). But Luther's famous preface shows sufficiently that he recognised 
 the necessity of works in the same sense as St. James (see Art. xi., xii.). Luther was 
 not guilty or the foolish error which identifies faith with mere belief ; and yet, perhaps, 
 bis mode of dealing with this verse led to his rash remark as to the impossibility of 
 reconciling the two Apostles (Colloqu. ii. 203). 
 
 2 iii. 27 30, irepiTOfHjv c TTiorccot . . . ojrpojSvcrrtav Sia. rljs iria-reiat Seems to imply 
 some real difference in the Apostle's view, though Meyer (usually such a purist) here 
 denies it. Calvin sees a shade of irony in it " This is the grand difference : the Jew is 
 saved ex fide, the Gentile per fidem 1 Bengel is probably right when he says that it 
 implies the priority of the Jews, and the acceptance of the Gospel from them by the 
 Gentiles ; the Jews as an outgrowth of faith, the Gentiles by the means of the faith, 
 (see Gal. iii. 2226). 
 
 8 iii. 31. See chap. vi. ; viii. 4 ; xiii. 10. 
 
 4 iv. 1. If we do not Omit vpr]<ceV<u (with B), itaTa trap** must go with ev'plKeW. 
 
 not as in A. V. with jrarepa. It means, " What did he obtain by purely human efforts ? 
 e.g., by circumcision (Baur); propriis viribus (Grot.); Nach rein menschlichcr Weise 
 (De Wette). St. Paul here attacks a position which afterwards became a stronghold of 
 Talmudists. 
 
 5 St. Paul here follows the LXX., which changes the active into the passive. The 
 faith of Abraham was a common subject of discussion in Jewish schools. See some 
 remarkable parallels in 1 Mace. ii. 52 ; Philo's eulogy of faith, De Abrakamo, ii. 39 : De
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY Of ST. PAUL. 475 
 
 times in the chapter, is the keynote of the entire passage, and is one of very primary 
 importance in the argument with the Jews, who held that Abraham obeyed the Law 
 before it was given. 1 To us, perhaps, it is of secondary importance, since the 
 Apostle did not derive his views from these considerations, but discovered the truths 
 revealed to him in passages which, until he thus applied them, would not have been 
 seen to involve this deeper significance. It required, as De "Wette says, no small 
 penetration thus to unite the climax of religious development with the historic 
 point at which the series of religious developments began. To a worker, he argues, 
 the pay is not " imputed" as a favour, but paid as a debt ; but Abraham's faith was 
 " imputed" to him for righteousness, just as it is to all who believe on Him who 
 justifies the ungodly. This truth David also indicates when he speaks of the 
 blessedness of the man to whom God imputeth righteousness, or, which comes to the 
 same thing, " does not impute sin." Now this imputation can have nothing to do 
 with circumcision, because the phrase is used at a time before Abraham was circum- 
 cised, and circumcision was only a sign* of the righteousness imputed to him 
 because of his faith, that he might be regarded as " the father of the faithful," 
 whether they be circumcised or uncircumcised. Had the great promise to Abraham, 
 on which all Jews relied, come to him by the Law? Not so, for two reasons. 
 First, because the promise was long prior to the Law, and would have been nullified 
 if it were made to depend on a subsequent law ; and, secondly, because the Law 
 causes the sense of wrongdoing, 3 and so works wrath, not promise. Hence, it was 
 the strength of Abraham's faith looking to God's promise in spite of his own and 
 Sarah's age, 4 which won him the imputed righteousness ; and this was recorded for 
 us because the faith, and the promise, and the paternity, are no mere historic circum- 
 stances, but have all of them a spiritual significance, full of blessedness for all who 
 " believe on Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up 
 for our sins, and raised for our justification." 6 
 
 This, then, is the proof that the doctrine of Justification is not contrary to 
 Scripture, and does not vilipend, but really establishes the Law ; and into the 
 last vorse are skilfully introduced the new conceptions of Christ's death for 
 our sin, and His resurrection to procure our imputed righteousness, which are 
 further developed in the subsequent chapters. 
 
 But first, having proved his point, he dwells on its blessed consequences, 
 which may be summed up in the two words Peace and Hope. 
 
 These are treated together. We have Peace,' because through Christ we have 
 our access into the free favour of God, and can exult not only in the hope of the 
 
 Mul. Nom. i. 586. Nay, since the plural "laws" is used in Gen. xxvi. 5, Kabh held 
 that he kept both the written and the oral law ( Yoma, f. 28, 2). 
 
 1 Kiddushin, f. 82, 1. 
 
 2 iv. 11. The word " seal " (m) occurs in the formula of circumcision (BeracMlh, 
 xiii. 1). A circumcised child was called " an espoused of blood " &c.. to God 
 (Ex. iv. 26). 
 
 3 See vii. 7, seqq. 
 
 4 In iv. 19 the ov should be omitted (M, A, B, 0, Syr., &c.). He did perceive and con- 
 sider the weakness of his own body, but yet had faith. In fact, " not considering his own 
 body " contradicts Gen. xvii. 17. 
 
 * iv. 1 25. In verse 25 the first Sii is retrospective, the second is prospective ; Sea TO 
 napa.irTu>ii.aTa, " on account of our transgressions ; " Sto. TIJV SiKatWiv, " to secure our being 
 justified." Luther calls this verse " a little covenant, in which all Christianity is com- 
 prehended." 
 
 6 v. 1, ex<ancv is the better supported reading (, A, B, 0, D, K, L) ; but ex<v*ev gives 
 by far the better sense, and the other reading may be due to the Pietistic tendency of the 
 Loctioiiarics to make sentences hortative, which apparently began to work very early. 
 For a defence of ix<a^ev, I may refer to the Rev. J. A. Beet's able commentary on the 
 Epistle, which reached me too late for use.
 
 476 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PA.TTL. 
 
 future, but even in the afflictions of the present, which tend to hope because first 
 they work endurance, then approved firmness. 1 The certainty of our Hope is due' 
 to the love of God poured into our hearts by His Holy Spirit, and unmistakable to 
 us, since, by a stretch of self-sacrifice unknown to humanity, 2 Christ died for us, : 
 not because of any justice, much less any goodness of ours, but while we were yet 
 sinners and enemies. And since we have been reconciled to God by His death,' 
 much more shall we be saved by His life, so that our hope founded on this recon- 
 ciliation to God may even acquire a tinge of exultation. 8 Our Peace, then, is an 
 immediate sentiment "which requires no external proof ; and our Hope is founded on 
 the love of God assured to us in three ways namely, by Christ's death for us while 
 we were yet enemies to God ; on the strength to endure afflictions and BOG their 
 blessed issue ; and above all on union with Christ in death and life. 4 
 
 And this universality of Sin, and universality of Justification, leads Paul 
 to one of his great sketches of the religious history of humanity. To him 
 that history was summed up in three great moments connected with the lives 
 of Adam, Moses, and Christ, of which the mission of Moses was the least: 
 important. Those three names corresponded to throe stages in the world's- 
 religious history Promise, Law, and Faith of which the third is the realisa- 
 tion of the first. Adam was a type of Christ, and each stood as it were at 
 the head of long lines of representatives. Each represents the principle of 
 a whole aeon. Adam's first sin developed a principle from which none of 
 his posterity could be free ; and Christ introduced the possibility of a new 
 and saving principle, the necessity for which had been made manifest by the 
 dispensation of Moses. Here, however, as so often, the logical statement is 
 incomplete and entangled, owing to the rush of the Apostle's thoughts. 6 
 
 " So then, at by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so 
 death extended to all men on the ground that all sinned," ' he probably meant to 
 
 i Matt. v. 1012 ; Acts v. 41 ; 1 Pet. iv. 13, 14 ; 2 Cor. xii. 10, 11. 
 
 8 v. 7, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Erasmus, Calvin, Meyer, &c., make 110 difference 
 between oyoflbs, "good," and Siicaio*, "just," as though St. Paul meant "one would 
 scarcely die for a good man, though possibly one might." It is, however, more probable 
 that St. Paul meant " one would not die merely for a man of ordinary integrity, but for 
 a truly good man one might even dare to die " (cf . Cic. De Off. iii. 15). 
 
 8 v. 11, oAAi KM Kavxw^eroi. 4 Verses 1 12. 
 
 8 1 Cor. xv. 45. The difference between Adam and Eve (1 Tim. ii. 14) was a smaller 
 matter, and one which had little or no bearing on the destiny of the human being, 
 whether male or female. 
 
 6 Pages and almost volumes of controversy have been written on verse 12. <' c5 wai/re? 
 foaprov. Many make the <S masc., and, referring it to Adam, render it " hi whom (Aug.), 
 or, " by whose means " (Grot.), or " on whose account " (Chrys.). There can, however, 
 be no doubt that <? is neuter (cf. 2 Cor. v. 4 ; Phil. iii. 12, iv. 10), and that it means 
 neither "unto which (death)," as a final cause, nor any variation on this meaning, but 
 " inasrcmch as." Since, however, the argument of St. Paul seems simply to be that sin 
 was universal, and that the universality of death was a proof of this, it certainly seems 
 admissible to understand ty' <L in the universal sense of "in accordance with the fact 
 that." It is here used in a larger and looser causal connexion than usual. Sin and 
 death are universal, and are inseparably linked together ; it might be supposed that 
 where there was no law there was no sin ; it is true that sin is not fully imputed where 
 there is no law ; but death entered the world through sin, and so death passed upon all 
 men, " which shows that which involves the presupposition that all sinned." This is 
 Baur's view, and if it be tenable, the discussions about "original sin," "inherent total 
 depravity," &c., are irrelevant to this passage (Baur, Paul. ii. 183 186). Let us, at any
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 477 
 
 fedd as the second half of the parallel, " so, too, by one man came justification, and 
 so life was offered to all." The conclusion of the sentence was, however, displaced 
 by the desire to meet a difficulty. He had said, " all sinned," but some one might 
 object, " How so ? you have already told us that where there is no law there is no 
 transgression ; how, then, could men sin between Adam and Moses ?" The answer 
 is far from clear to understand. St. Paul might perhaps have referred to the law 
 of nature, the transgression of which involved sin ; but what he says is that " till 
 the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law." If he 
 had said, " sin is not brought into prominent self-consciousness," his meaning 
 would have been both clear and consistent, but the verb used (t\\oyeiTcu) does not 
 admit of this sense. Perhaps we may take the word popularly to imply that " it is 
 not so fully reckoned or imputed," a view which may find its illustration in our 
 Lord's remark that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was less unpardonable than 
 that of Chorazin and Bethsaida. It seems as if he meant to imply a distinction 
 between " tin " in general, and the " transgression " of some special law or laws in 
 paiticular. 1 "Every sin," as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "may be called a trans- 
 gression in so far as it transgresses a natural law ; but it is a more serious thing to 
 transgress a law both natural and written. And so, when the law was given, trans- 
 gression increased and deserved greater anger." But the only proof which St. Paul 
 offers that there was sin during this period is that, throughout it, death also 
 reigned. 2 When, however, he passes from this somewhat obscure reply (13, 14), 
 to show how Adam was a type of Christ, his meaning again becomes clear. He 
 dwells first on the points of difference (15 18), and then on those of resemblanc 
 (18, 19). The differences between the results'caused by Adam and Christ are dif- 
 ferences both qualitative and quantitative both in degree and kind. 
 
 i. By Adam's one transgression the many died, but the free grace of Christ 
 abounded to the many in a far greater degree. 8 
 
 rate, imitate St. Paul in dwelling rather on the positive than the negative side, rather on 
 Christ than Adam, rather on the superabundance of grace than the origin of sin. 
 
 1 So most of the commentators. " Sine lege palest csse quis iniquus sed nan praevari- 
 cator" (Augustine). Luther explains AAoyeIr<u, " sin is not minded " " man achtet ihrer 
 nicht." 
 
 2 Ver. 14, "Even over those who had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's 
 transgression " i.e., who had broken no positive direct command whose a^apria. was 
 not a definite ir<xpo/Sa<ris. Dr. Schaff (Lange's Romans, p. 191, E.T.) gives a useful sketch 
 of the theories about original sin and imputation. 1. The PANTHEISTIC and Necessitarian 
 makes sin inherent in our finite constitution, the necessary result of matter. 2. The 
 PELAGIAN treats Adam's sin as a mere bad example. 3. The PRS-ADAMIC explains sin 
 by antenatal existence, metempsychosis, &c. 4. The AUGOSTINIAN all men sinned in 
 Adam (cf. Heb. vii. 9, 10). "Persona corrumpit naturam, natura corrumpit personam" 
 i.e., Adam's sin caused a sinful nature, and sinful nature causes individual sin. This 
 has many subdivisions according as the imputation of Adam's sin was regarded as 
 (a) Immediate ; () Mediate ; or (y) Antecedent. 5. The FEDERAL vicarious represen- 
 tation of mankind in Adam, in virtue of a one-sided (liovov^evpov) contract of God with 
 man (foedus operum, or naturae) ; with subdivisions of (a) The Augustino-federal; (0) The 
 purely federal or forensic. 6. The NEW ENGLAND CALVINISTS, who deny imputation and 
 distinguish between natural ability and moral inability to keep innocence. 7. The 
 ARMINIAN, which regards hereditary corruption not as sin or guilt, but as infirmity, a 
 maladive condition, &c. I ask, would Paul have been willing to enter into all these 
 questions ? Have they in any way helped the cause of Christianity or deepened vital 
 religion ? Can they be of primary importance, since the traces of them in Scripture are 
 BO slight that scarcely any two theologians entirely agree about them ? Do they tend to 
 humility and charity and edification, or to " vain word-battlings " ? 
 
 3 The contrast is between plurality and unity ; the phrase " the many " (not "many," 
 as in Luther and the E.V.) does not for a moment imply any exception (e.g., Enoch, or 
 Elijah). It is merely due to the fact that " all " may sometimes be " a few " (Aug.). 
 "Adamus et Christus," says Bengel, "secundum rationes contrarias, conveniunt in 
 positive, differunt in comparative. See Bcntley, Sermon upon Popery Opp. iii. 244. 
 Observe the parallel between the xsW, Ko.ra K p^ia, \*p<,<riM, St/couwpa, of verse 16 and the
 
 478 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 ii. The condemnation of the race to death sprang from the single transgression 
 of one ; the sentence of acquittal was freely passed in spite of many transgressions. 
 
 iii. By the transgression of Adam began the reign of death ; far more shall all 
 who are receiving the superabundance of grace of the gift of righteousness reign 
 in life by the One, Jesus Christ. But with these differences there is also a parallel 
 of deeper resemblance. One transgression (Adam's sin), and one sentence of con- 
 demnation on all ; one act of righteousness (Christ's death), and one justification 
 which gives life to all; by the disobedience of the one, 1 the many were made 
 sinners ; 2 by the obedience of the one, the many shall be made righteous. 3 Thus 
 St. Paul states the origin of sin in this passage ; but however he might have solved 
 the antinomy of its generic necessity and individual origin, which he leaves unsolved, 
 he would certainly have been ready to say with Pseudo-Baruch that " every one of 
 us is the Adam to his own soul." 
 
 But here once more the question recurs, What then of the Law ? Is that 
 divine revelation to go for nothing P To that question St. Paul has already 
 given one answer in the Epistle to the Galatians : he now gives another, 
 which till explained might well have caused a shock. To the Galatians he had 
 explained that the ante- Messianic period was the tirocinium of the world, and 
 that during this period the Law was necessary as a paedagogic discipline. 
 To the Romans he presents a new point of view, and shows that the Law 
 was not merely a corrective system thrust in between the promise and its ful- 
 filment,, but an essential factor in the religious development of the world. It 
 appears in the new aspect of a " power of sin," in order that by creating the 
 knowledge of sin it may mediate between sin and grace. The Law, he says, 
 came in (the word he uses has an almost disparaging sound,* which probably, 
 however, he did not intend) " that transgression might multiply." A terrible 
 purpose indeed, and one which he subsequently explained (chap, vii.) : but 
 even here he at once hastens to add that where sin multiplied, grace super- 
 
 irapairrufia, Karaxpijua, 5tKou'<Djiia, and 5iK<uiucrif of verse 18. The distinction between these 
 words seems to be as follows : 1. &i K a.;<ana, actio justificative,, Rechtsfertigungsthat, the 
 act which declares us just. 2. SucaiWn, the process of justification. 3. Sucatoinvri, the 
 condition of being justified. Rothe quotes Arist., Eth. Nic., v. 10, where Sucai'w^a is 
 defined as TO n-acopdw^a TOV aSutrj^a-ro^. In verse 16, D, E, F, G, read <x/napnjfji.aTo?. 
 
 1 Adam, says Luther, stuck his tooth, not into an apple, but into a stachel, namely, 
 the Divine command. Pelagius, in his commentary on Romans (preserved in Augustine's 
 works), renders &C evb? &.v6pu>nav, "per unum hominem, Evam/" Philo's views about the 
 Fall may be seen in his Legg. Alleg. ii. 73 106. He regards gluttony and lust as the 
 source of all evil, and considers that all men are born hi sin, i.e., under the dominion of 
 sensuality (De Mundi Opif. 37 ; Vit. Mos. iii. 675). " God made not death, but ungodly 
 men with then- works called it to them " (Wisd. i. 13 16). 
 
 2 In what way they were made sinners St. Paul nowhere defines. There is no 
 distinctive Pelagianism, or Traducianism, lure. To say with Meyer, "men were placed 
 in the category of sinners because they sinned in and with Adam's fall," is, as Lange 
 remarks, not exegesis, but Augustinian dogmatics. St. Paul simply accepted the uni- 
 versal fact of death as a proof of the universal fact of sin, and regards death and sin 
 as beginning with Adam. Beza, Bengel, Reuss, &c., understand Ka.Te<rra.8i\aa.v and 
 K<na.<naJSr)<Tomaj. in an imputative sense "regarded as sinners" which ia a defensible 
 translation, and makes the parallel more complete. 
 
 Vs. 1220. 
 
 4 v. 20, jraperijA0ev, Vulg. Sulintravit, "supervened," "came in besides," cf. jrpo<rTe'0rj, 
 Gal. iii. 19. In Gal. ii. 4 the surreptitious notion of tropo is derived from tke context. 
 The notion of "between," "media tern/pore subingreesa est," is not in tke word itself.
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 479 
 
 abounded, that as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through 
 righteousness into life eternal, by Jesus Christ our Lord. 1 
 
 The next chapter (vi.) is of vast importance as stating an objection which 
 might well be regarded as deadly, and as showing us how best to deal with an 
 apparent paradox. If grace superabounds over sin, why should we not con- 
 tinue in sin P After first throwing from him the hateful inference with a 
 " Perish the thought ! " he proceeds in this chapter to prove, first in a mystic 
 (vi. 1 15), and then in a more popular exposition (15 23), the moral conse- 
 quences of his doctrine. In the first half of this chapter he uses the 
 metaphor of death, in the latter the metaphor of emancipation, to illustrate 
 the utter severance between the Christian and sin. 
 
 Ideally, theoretically, it should be needless to tell the Christian not to sin ; he is 
 dead to sin ; the very name of " elect " or " saint " excludes the entire conception 
 of sin, because the Christian is " IN CHRIST." Those two words express the very 
 quintessence of all that is most distinctive in St. Paul's theology, and yet they are 
 identical with the leading conception of St. John, who (we are asked to beHeve) 
 rails at him in the Apocalypse as Balaam and Jezebel, a sham Jew, and a false 
 apostle ! That the two words " in Christ " sum up the distinctive secret, the 
 revealed mystery of the Christian life, especially as taught by St. Paul and by St. 
 John, will be obvious to any thoughtful reader. If this mystic union, to which 
 both Apostles again and again recur, is expressed by St. Paul in the metaphors of 
 stones in a temple of which Christ is the foundation, 2 of members of a body of 
 which Christ is the head, 3 St. John records, and St. Paul alludes to, the metaphor of 
 the branches and the vine, 4 and both Apostles without any image again and again 
 declare that the Christian life is a spiritual life, a supernatural fife, and one which 
 we can only live by faith in, by union with, by partaking of the life of the Son of 
 God. 8 With both Apostles Christ is our life, and apart from Him we have no true 
 life. 6 St. Paul, again, is fond of the metaphor of wearing Christ as a garment, 
 putting on Christ, putting on the new man, 7 reflecting Him with ever-brightening 
 splendour. 8 In fact, the words " in Christ " and " with Christ " are his most con- 
 stantly recurrent phrases. "We work for Him, we live in Him, we die in Him, 
 we rise with Him, we are justified by Him. We are His sheep, His scholars, His 
 soldiers, His servants. 
 
 1 v. 20, 21. The old Protestant divines thus stated the uses of the Law : L Usus 
 primus, civil or political to govern states. 2. Usus secundus, convictive or paedagogio 
 to convince us of sin. 3. Usus tertius, didactic or formative to guide the life of a 
 believer (Formula, Concordiae, p. 594). Dr. Schaff, in his useful additions to the trans- 
 lation of Lange's Romans, points out that these three correspond to the German sentence 
 that the Law is a Zugel (1, a restraint) ; a Spiegel (2, a mirror) ; and a Rieyel (3, a rod). 
 The Law multiplies transgressions because i. " Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimus 
 que negata." "Ignoti mdla cupido." ii. "Because desires suppressed forcibly from 
 without increase in virulence" (St. Thomas), iii. "Because suppressive rules kindle 
 anger against God " (Luther). But the real end of the Law was not the multiplication 
 of transgressions per se, but that the precipitation of sin might lead to its expulsion ; 
 that the culmination of sin might be the introduction of grace. " Non crudeliter hoc 
 fecit Deus sed ratione medicinae augebatur morbus, crescit malitia, quaeritur inedicus, 
 et totum sanatur" (Aug. in Ps. cii.). 
 
 a Eph. ii. 1922 (1 Pet. ii. 5 ; Isa. xxviii. 16). 
 
 8 Rom. xii. 5 ; Eph. iv. 16 ; 1 Cor. xii. 12, 13, 27 ; Col. i. 18. 
 
 * John xv. 5 ; Rom. vi. 5 ; Phil. i. 11. 
 
 s 2 Cor. v. 17 ; Rom. vi. 8 ; Gal. ii. 20 ; Eph. iii. 6 ; Col. iii. 3 ; John x. 28 ; xiv. 19 ; 
 xv. 410 ; 1 John v. 20 : ii. 24. &c. 
 
 6 John v. 24 ; xi. 25 ; xiv. 20 : Gal. ii. 20 ; CoL iii. 4 ; 1 John i. 1 ; v. 12, &o. 
 
 7 Gal. iii. 27 ; Rom. xiii. 14 ; Eph. iv. 24 ; Col. iii. 10. 
 
 2 Cor. iii. 18.
 
 480 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 The life of the Christian being hid with Christ in God, his death with Christ is 
 a death to sin, his resurrection with Christ is a resurrection to life. The dipping 
 under the waters of baptism is his union with Christ's death ; his rising out of the 
 waters of baptism is a resurrection with Christ, and the birth to a new life. " What 
 baptism is for the individual," it has been said, " Christ's death is for the race." If 
 the Christian has become coalescent with Christ in His death, he shall also in His 
 resurrection. 1 The old sin-enslaved humanity is crucified with Christ, and the new 
 man has been justified from sin, because he is dead to it, and lives in Christ. This 
 is the ideal. Live up to it. Dethrone the sin that would rule over your frail 
 nature. " Be not ever presenting your members as weapons of unrighteousness, 
 but present yourselves once for all, 2 to God as alive from the dead, and your 
 members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not lord it over 
 you ; for ye are not under the Law, but under grace." s Die to sin, die to 
 lust, die to your old vulgar, enslaved, corrupted self, die to the impulses 
 of animal passion, and the self-assertion of worldly desire ; for Christ too died, 
 and you are one with him in death, that you may be one in life. But 
 these words, again, raise the ghost of the old objection. " Shall we then sin, 
 since we are not under the Law, but under grace ?" and this objection St. Paul 
 again refutes by the same argument, clothed in a more obvious and less mystic 
 illustration, in which he amplifies the proverb of Jesus, ' ' Ye cannot serve two 
 masters." A man must either be a slave of sin unto death, or of obedience unto 
 righteousness. 4 Thank God, from that old past slavery of sin you were freed, when 
 you submitted to the form of doctrine to which you were handed over by God's 
 providence; and then if in condescension' to your human weakness I may use an 
 imperfect expression you were enslaved to righteousness. 5 The fruit of that 
 former slavery was shame and misery ; its end was death. This new enslavement 
 to God is perfect freedom ; its fruit is sanctification, its end eternal life. " For the 
 wages of sin is death ; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesua our 
 Lord." 
 
 iv. At this point of his argument the Apostle felt it imperative to de- 
 fine more clearly, and establish more decisively, his view as to the position of 
 the Law in the scheme of salvation. Apart from his discussion of this question 
 in the Epistle to the Galatians, he has already, in this Epistle, made three inci- 
 dental remarks on the subject, which might well horrify those Jews and 
 Jewish Christians who were unfamiliar with his views. He has said 
 
 1. That " by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified before God : 
 for by the Law is the full knowledge of sin " (iii. 20). 
 
 2. That "the Law came in as an addition that transgression might 
 abound "(v. 20). 
 
 3. That the Christian " is not under the Law, but under grace," and that 
 therefore sin is not to lord it over him (vi. 14). 
 
 1 vL 5, <ruV<J>vTou The Vulg. " complantati" is too strong. It is from <f>uw, not </>imrw>. 
 3 vi. 13, irapio-Tai/ere . . . mzpaanjouTe. In the New Testament oTrXa is always " weapons. " 
 Cf. Rom. xiii. 12 ; 2 Cor. vi. 7. 
 
 3 vi. 115. 
 
 4 vi. 16. The phrase " a slave of obedience " is strange. Perhaps he used uircucoijt 
 instead of ^uauwravip, because of the two senses of the word, "righteousness" and "justi- 
 fication." 
 
 5 vi. 18, 'ESovAwfrp-e. "Deo servire vera libertas est" (Aug.). "Whose service is 
 perfect freedom." ' \vdp<awi.vov Xeyo> Calvin, following Origen and Chrysostom, renders 
 this clause^ " I require nothing which your fleshly weakness could not do,"
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY Of ST. PAUL. 481 
 
 Such statements as these, if left unsupported and unexplained, might well 
 turn every Jewish reader from respectful inquiry into incredulous disgust ; 
 and he therefore proceeds to the difficult task of justifying his views. 
 
 The task was difficult because he has to prove scripturally and dialectically 
 the truths at which he had arrived by a wholly different method. The central 
 point of his own conviction was that which runs through the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, 1 that if salvation was to be earned by " doing " if the Law was 
 sufficient for justification then Christ's death was needless and vain. If he 
 were right in his absolute conviction that only by faith in the blood of Christ 
 are we accounted righteous before God, then clearly the Law stood condemned 
 of incapacity to produce this result. Now by the Law St. Paul meant the 
 whole Mosaic Law, and there is not in him a single trace of any distinction 
 between the degree of sacredness in the ceremonial and the moral portion of 
 it. If there had been, he might perhaps have adopted the luminous principle 
 of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and shown that the Law was 
 only abrogated by the completeness of its fulfilment ; that its inefficiency only 
 proves its typical character ; and that the type disappeared in the fulness of 
 the antitype, as a star is lost in the brightness of the sun. This method of 
 allegory was by no means unfamiliar to St. Paul ; he not only adopts it 
 freely, 2 but must have learnt it as no small element of his Rabbinic training 
 in the school of Gamaliel. But, on the one hand, this attribution of a spiritual 
 depth and mystery to every part of the ceremonial Law would have only 
 tended to its glorification in the minds of Jndaisers who had not yet learnt 
 its abrogation ; and, on the other hand, it was not in this way that the relation 
 of the Law to the Gospel had specially presented itself to the mind of Paul. 
 The typical relation of the one to the other was real, and to dwell upon it 
 would, no doubt, have made St. Paul's arguments " less abrupt and less op- 
 pressive to the consciousness of the Jews ; " 3 but it would also have made 
 them less effective for the emancipation of the Church and the world. The 
 Law must be deposed, as it were, from its long primacy in the minds of 
 the Jews, into that negative, supplementary, secondary, inefficient position 
 which alone belonged to it, before it could with any prudence be rein- 
 stalled into a position of reflected honour. It had only a sxiboi-dinate, pro- 
 visional importance; it was only introduced per accidens. Its object waa 
 psedagogic, not final. St. Paul's reasoning might inflict pain, but the pain 
 which he inflicted was necessary and healing; and it was well for the Jews 
 and for the world that, while he strove to make his arguments acceptable 
 by stating them in a tone as conciliatory as possible, he did not strive to 
 break the shock of them by any unfaithful weakening of their intrinsic 
 force. 
 
 i. His first statement had been that the Law could not justify.* That 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 21 ; iil. 21. 
 
 2 The muzzled ox, 1 Cor. Ix. 9 ; Sarah and Hagar, Gal. Iv. 24 ; the evanescence of the 
 light on the face of Moses, 2 Cor. iii. 7 13 ; the following rock, 1 Cor. x. 4 ; the cloud 
 and sea, 1 Cor. x. 1, 2. 
 
 8 Pflejderer, Pavlinismus, L 73, E. T. * Rom. iii. $0,
 
 482 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 it could not justify he saw at once, because had it been adequate to do so, 
 then the death of Christ would have been superfluous. But why was it 
 that the Law was thus inefficacious ? St. Paul rather indicates than clearly 
 states the reason in the next chapter (viii.). It is because the Law, as re- 
 gards its form, is external ; it is a command from without ; it is a letter 
 which denounces sentence of death on its violators ; * it has no sympathy 
 wherewith to touch the heart; it has no power whereby to sway the will. 
 " Spiritual " in one sense it is, because it is " holy, just, and good ; " but it is 
 in no sense a "quickening spirit," and therefore can impart no life. And 
 why ? Simply because it is met, opposed, defeated by a strong counter- 
 principle of man's being the dominion of sin in the flesh. It was " weak 
 through the flesh " that is, through the sensuous principle which dominates 
 the whole man in body and soul. 2 In the human spirit, Paul perceived 
 a moral spontaneity to good; in the flesh, a moral spontaneity to evil; 
 and from these different elements results " the dualism of antagonistic 
 moral principles." s Man's natural self-will resists the Divine determina- 
 tion ; the subjective will is too strong for the objective command. Even 
 if man could obey a part of the Law he could not be justified, because the 
 Law laid a curse on him who did not meet all its requirements, which the 
 moral consciousness knew that it could not do. 4 
 
 ii But St. Paul's second proposition that the Law multiplied trans- 
 gressions 6 sounded almost terribly offensive. " The Law," he had already 
 said in the Galatians, was added until the coming of the promised seed, 
 "for the sake of transgressions." 6 To interpret this as meaning "a safeguard 
 against transgressions " though from another point of view, and hi another 
 order of relations, this might be true 7 is in this place an absurdity, because 
 St. Paul is proving the inability of the Law to perform this function at all 
 effectually. It would, moreover, entirely contradict what he says namely, 
 that the object of the Law was the multiplication of transgressions. Apart 
 from the Law, there may indeed be " sin " (a/j.aprla), although, not being 
 brought into the light of self -consciousness, man is not aware of it (Rom. v. 
 13 ; vii. 7) ; but he has already told us that there is not " transgression " 
 (iv. 15), and there is not "imputation " (v. 13), and man lives in a state of 
 relative innocence, little pained by the existence of objective evil. 8 It was, 
 
 1 2 Cor. iii. 6. 
 
 2 The <r<p is not only the material body, but an active inherent principle, which 
 influences not only the ^vx) or natural life, but even the i-oSs or human spirit (Baur, 
 Paul. ii. 140). 
 
 3 Gal. v. 17 ; Pfleiderer, i. 54. To this writer I am much indebted, as well as to 
 Baur and Reuss, among many others, for my views of Pauline theology. I must content 
 myself with this large general acknowledgment, because they write from a standpoint 
 widely different from my own, and because I find in the pages of all three writers very 
 much with which I entirely disagree. 
 
 4 Gal. iii. 10 ; James ii. 10. * Eom. v. 20. 
 ' Gal. iii. 19, x*P iv Tapa0a<recuv irpo<reT0ij. 
 
 7 The usus primus or politicus of the Law v. supra, p. 479. It is a safeguard 
 against acts which, when the law is uttered, become transgressions. 
 
 8 To be " naked and not ashamed " is, in the first instance, the prerogative of inno- 
 cence ; but it becomes ultimately the culmination of guilt.
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 483 
 
 therefore, St. Paul's painful and difficult task to sever the Law finally from 
 all direct connexion with salvation, by showing that, theologically considered- 
 and this was the point which to the Jew would sound so paradoxical and so 
 wounding God had expressly designed it, not for the prevention of sin, and 
 the effecting of righteousness, but for the increase of sin, and the working of 
 ivrath. 1 It multiplied sin, because, by a psychological fact, which we cannot 
 explain, but which St. Paul here exhibits with marvellous insight into human 
 nature, the very existence of a commandment acts as an incitement to its 
 violation (" Permission fit vile nefas ") ; and it worked wrath by forcing all 
 sin into prominent self-consciousness, 2 and thus making it the source of acute 
 misery ; by bringing home to the conscience that sense of guilt which is the 
 feeling of disharmony with God ; by darkening life with the shadows of dread 
 and self-contempt ; by creating the sense of moral death, and by giving to 
 physical death its deadliest sting. 3 
 
 iii. The third proposition that "we are not under the Law, but under 
 grace"* has been already sufficiently illustrated; and it must be borne in 
 mind that the object of St. Paul throughout has been to show that the true 
 theological position of the Law its true position, that is, in the Divine 
 reconomy of salvation is to come in between sin and grace, to be an impulse 
 in the process of salvation. He has already shown this, historically and exe- 
 getically, in the fifth chapter, as also in Gal. iii., by insisting on the fact that 
 the Law, as a supplementary ordinance, 6 cannot disannul a free promise which 
 was prior to it by 430 years, and which had been sanctioned by an oath. The 
 Law, then, shows (1) the impossibility of any oilier way of obtaining the ful- 
 filment of the promise, except that of free favour ; and (2) the impossibility 
 of regarding this promise as a debt (o<pei\i}p.a) when it was a free gift. In 
 this point of view the Law fulfils the function of driving man to seek that 
 justification which is possible by faith alone. Objectively and historically, 
 therefore, the history of man may be regarded in four phases Sin, Promise, 
 Law, Grace Adam, Abraham, Moses, Christ; subjectively and individually, 
 also in four phases relative innocence, awakened consciousness, imputable 
 transgression, free justification. The one is the Divine, the other is the 
 human side of one and the same process ; and both find their illustration, 
 though each independently of the other, in the theology of St. Paul. 6 
 
 1 Pfleiderer, L 81. "Whoever separates himself from the words of the Law is con- 
 sumed by fire " (Babha Bathra, f. 79, 1). 
 
 2 " The strength of sin is the Law " (1 Cor. xv. 56), because it is what it is essentially 
 through man's consciousness of it. It strengthens the perception of sin, and weakens the 
 consciousness of any power in the will to resist it. 
 
 " And therefore Law was given them to evince 
 Their natural pravity, by stirring up 
 Sin against Law to fight ; that when they see 
 Law can discover sin, but not remove, 
 Save by those shadowy expiations weak, 
 The blood of bulls and goats, they may conclude 
 Some blood more precious must be paid for man." Milton, P. L. xii. 285. 
 
 The last three lines express the argument in the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 
 Kom. iv. 15 ; vu. 10-13. * Bom. vi. 1*. * Qfal. ijL 
 
 f Bom. v. u vii., xi. j GaL iii., Iv,
 
 484 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 And if it be asserted, by way of modern objection to this theology, and to 
 St. Paul's methods of argument and exegesis, that they suggest multitudes of 
 difficulties ; that they pour new wine into old wine-skins, which burst under 
 its fermentation ; that they involve a mysticising idealisation of 1,500 years of 
 history and of the plain literal intention of large portions of the Old and 
 New Testament Scriptures ; that Moses would have been as horrified to be 
 told by St. Paul that the object of his Law was only to multiply transgres- 
 sion, and intensify the felt heinousness of sin, as he is said to have been when 
 in vision he saw Rabbi Akhibha imputing to him a thousand rules which he 
 had never sanctioned ; that the Law was obviously given with the intention 
 that it should be obeyed, not with the intention that it should be broken ; that 
 St. Paul himself has spoken in this very Epistle of "doers of the Law being 
 justified," and of "works of the Law," and of "working good," and of a 
 recompense for it, 1 and of "reaping what we have sown;" 2 that he has in 
 every one of his Epistles urged the necessity of moral duties, not as an 
 inevitable result of that union with Christ which is the Christian's life, but as 
 things after which Christians should strive, and for the fulfilment of which 
 they should train themselves with severe effort; 3 and that in his Pastoral 
 Epistles these moral considerations, as in the Epistles of St. Peter and 
 St. James, seem to have come into the foreground, 4 while the high theological 
 verities seem to have melted farther into the distance if these objections be 
 urged, as they often have been urged, the answers to them are likewise mani- 
 fold. We have not the smallest temptation to ignore the difficulties, though 
 it would be easy by separate examination to show that to state them thus is to 
 shift their true perspective. As regards St. Paul's style of argument, those 
 who see in it a falsification of Scripture, a treacherous dealing with the Word 
 of God, which St. Paul expressly repudiates, 6 should consider whether they 
 too may not be intellectually darkened by suspicious narrowness and ignorant 
 prepossessions. 6 St. Paul regarded the Scripture as the irrefragable Word of 
 God, and yet, even when he seems to be attaching to mere words and sounds 
 a " talismanic value," he never allows the letter of Scripture to becloud the 
 illumination (4>&>Tr/^s) of spiritual enlightenment. 7 Even when he seemed to 
 have the whole Pentateuch against him, he never suffered the outward expres- 
 sion to enthral the emancipated idea. He knew well that one word of God 
 cannot contradict another, and his allegorising and spiritualising methods 
 (which, in one form or other, are absolutely essential, since the Law speaks in 
 the tongue of the sons of men, and human language is at the best but an 
 asymptote to thought) are not made the vehicle of mechanical inference or 
 individual caprice, but are used in support of formative truths, of fruitful 
 ideas, of spiritual convictions, of direct revelations, which are as the Eternal 
 
 Bom. ii. 6-13 ; iv. 4. ' Gal. vi. 7 ; 2 Thess. iii. 13 ; 1 Cor. xv. 58. 
 
 1 Cor. ix. 2527 ; Phil. iii. 14. 
 
 4 Mic. vi. 12; 1 Tim. iv. 7, 8; ii. 3; Tit. iii. 8; ii. 14; 2 Pet. i. 10, 11} James U. 
 17,24. 
 
 6 2 Cor. ii. 17, ov icamjAc'voires ; 2 Cor. Iv. 2. unSe SoAovires. 
 
 2 Cor. iv. I 7. * 3Cor.iv. 4,
 
 PISTLK tO THE EOMANS, AND THEOLOOT OF ST/ PAUL. 486 
 
 Temple, built within the temporary scaffolding of abrogated dispensations. 
 In this way of dealing with Scripture he was indeed regarded as a blasphemer 
 by a Pharisaism which was at once unenlightened and unloving ; but he was a 
 direct successor of the Prophets, who dealt in a spirit of sacred independence 
 with earlier revelations, 1 and with their mantle he had caught a double portion 
 of their spirit. He felt that the truths his opponents characterised as " teme- 
 rities " and " blasphemies " were as holy as the Trisagion of the Seraphim ; 
 that his "apostasy from Moses" 2 was due to a reverence for him far deeper 
 than that of his upholders, and that there was an immemorial, nay, even an 
 eternal validity, in the most extreme of his asserted innovations. 
 
 And as for apparent contradictions, St. Paul, like all great thinkers, was 
 very careless of them. It is even doubtful whether they were distinctly pre- 
 sent to his mind. He knew that the predestinations of the Infinite cannot be 
 thrust away as though they were ponderable dust inurned in the Columbaria 
 in the systems of the finite. He knew that in Divine as well as in human 
 truths there are certain antinomies, irreconcilable by the mere understanding, 
 and yet perfectly capable of being fused into unity by the divinely enlightened 
 reason, or, as he would have phrased it, by the spirit of man which has been 
 mystically united with the Spirit of Christ. As a scheme, as a system, as a 
 theory of salvation abstractly considered, ideally treated he knew that his 
 line of argument was true, and that his exposition of the Divine purpose was 
 irrefragable, because he knew that he had received it neither^ f rom man, nor 
 by any man, 3 but by the will of God. But there is a difference between the 
 ideal and the actual between the same truths regarded in their theological 
 bearing as parts of one vast philosophy of the plan of salvation, and stated in 
 everyday language in their immediate bearing upon the common facts of life. 
 In the language of strict and accurate theology, to talk of the " merit " of 
 works, and the " reward " of works, or even the possibility of " good " works, 
 was erroneous ; but yet without any of such Protestant after- thoughts as 
 that these works are the fruits of unconscious faith, or that without this faith 
 they cannot in any sense be good, and without dreaming of any collision with 
 what he says elsewhere, and untroubled by any attempt to reconcile his state- 
 ments with the doctrine of original sin he could and did talk quite freely 
 about " Gentiles doing by nature the things of the Law," and says that "the 
 doer of the Law shall be justified," and that God will render to every man 
 according to his works.* St. Paul would probably have treated with contempt, 
 as a mere carping criticism, which allowed no room for common sense in dealing 
 
 1 Jer. xxxi. 29. Ezek. rviii. 2 ; xx. 25, " Wherefore I gave them also statutes that 
 were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live." Hos. vi. 6, "I desired 
 mercy and not sacrifice ; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offering." Jer. vii. 
 22, 23, "I spake not unto your fathers concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices, but this 
 thing commanded I them, saying, Obey my voice. 
 
 2 Acts xxi. 21, " They have been indoctrinated with the view that you teach apostasy 
 from Moses." 
 
 s Gal. i. 1, OVK an' OLf8p<amav, ov&f Si avOpairov. 
 
 * Kom. li 13, 14 ; xiv. 10. See, too, 2 Cor. v. 10 ; Gal. vi. 7 ; Eph. vi. 8 ; Col. lii, 
 24, 2o>
 
 486 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST: PAtTfc. 
 
 with the truths of revelation, any attempt to show that in such passages- 
 both on this and on other subjects he appears to contradict himself. 1 He 
 would very briefly, and with profound indifference, have contented himself 
 with saying that his remarks in these passages are not in pari material He 
 is not there speaking or thinking at all of the doctrine of redemption. He is 
 there talking about " the justification of the Law," which is a very different 
 thing from " the justification by faith." He is there using general language, 
 altogether irrespective of the GospeL Protestant commentators with all their 
 elaborate and varying theories that in these works faith is included as the 
 highest work; 3 that they are perfected in faith; 4 that "works will be adduced 
 in the day of judgment, not as meriting salvation, but as proofs and results of 
 faith ;" 6 that " the imperfect works of the sanctified will be rewarded, not on the 
 ground of the Law, but on the ground of grace;" 6 that he was mentally refer- 
 ring to a " prevenient grace " over the Gentile world, and so on are doubtless 
 dogmatically right, but they are far more anxious to save St. Paul's orthodoxy 
 and consistency than he would have been himself. It is at least doubtful 
 whether such considerations were consciously present to his mind. He would 
 have held it enough to reply that, in these passages, he was only applying 
 the current language of morality to the concrete relations of actual life ; 7 and 
 that " the doctrine of justification cannot conflict with the doctrine of God's 
 righteousness by virtue of which He will reward every man according to his 
 works." 8 When St. Paul was using the language of accurate theology, he 
 would have shown the nullity of righteousness by works. But, in any case, 
 he would have thought far more highly of the possibility of such righteous- 
 ness than of the righteousness of dogmatic orthodoxy, or the righteousness of 
 the letter ; the righteousness of the jealous heresy-hunter, or the righteousness 
 of the religious partisan. 9 
 
 Lastly, it will be seen how little St. Paul is troubled by the apparent para- 
 doxes which result from the doctrines which he enforces. By those who 
 manipulated truth to suit their own parties and purposes ; by those who huck- 
 stered the Word of Life ; by those who pushed truths into extravagant infer- 
 ences, and then condemned them on the ground of their possible misapplication 
 his doctrines were denounced as " dangerous ;" and we know as a fact that, 
 even in his own lifetime, what he taught was made a handle for evil doctrine, 10 
 and was subjected to perilous perversions. 11 When such arguments as these 
 wore urged against him, St. Paul treated them with entire disdain. Truth 
 
 1 For these antinomies, which exist in theology as they exist in nature, and are com- 
 plementary truths of which the harmony is to he found in the Infinite, see Excursus XXI. 
 
 3 "Haeo descriptio justitiae legis, quae nihil impedit alia dicta de justitia fidei" 
 (Melancthon in Horn. ii. 13). He is here " laying down those general principles of justice, 
 according to which, irrespective of the Gospel, all men are to be judged " (Hodge on 
 Rom. ii. 6). 
 
 8 Limborch. 4 Luthardt. 5 Gerhard. 6 Stuart. 
 
 7 Baur, N. Test. Thed. 181 ; Pfleiderer, i. 78. 8 Lange on Eom. ii. 6^10. 
 
 9 Lehrgerechtigkeit ; Buchstabende Echtigkeit, Negationsgerechtigkeit, Parteigerech- 
 tigkeit (Lange, ubi supra). 
 
 1 Kom. iii. 8. H 2 Pet. 111. 16, orpe^Xovo-iv . . . irpbs TT\V I6ia.t> avrSiy
 
 EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY Ofc ST. PAUL. 487 
 
 lhay bo wrested, truth may be distorted, truth may be made an instrument of 
 self-destruction but truth is truth, and can take care of itself, and needs no 
 "lying for God" to servo as its buttress. 1 The doctrine of free grace might 
 be, and was, quoted in the cause of antinomianism, and degraded into a justi- 
 fication of sensuality. The predominance of grace over sin was twisted into a 
 reason for doing evil that good might come. The hope of future forgiveness 
 was pleaded as a ground for continuing in sin. Well, let it be so. The ocean 
 of truth did not cease to bo an ocean because here and there a muddy river of 
 error flowed stealthily in its tides. In answer to the moral perversity which 
 abused truth into an occasion of wickedness, St. Paul thought it sufficient to 
 appeal to the right feeling of mankind. If a man chooses to pervert a Divine 
 and gracious doctrine into a " dangerous downfall," he does so at his own 
 peril. Evil inferences St. Paul merely repudiates with a " God forbid ! " 2 of 
 malignant misiuterpreters he thought it enough to say that " their condemna- 
 tion was just!" 3 
 
 After these preliminary considerations we are in a position to proceed 
 uninterruptedly with our sketch of the Epistle, since we are now hi possession 
 of its main conceptions. Proceeding then to a further expansion of his 
 views respecting the Law, and speaking (chap, vii.) to those who know it, 
 the Apostle further enforces the metaphor that the Christian is dead to his 
 past moral condition, and has arisen to a new one. A woman whose 
 husband is dead is free to marry again; we are dead to the Law, and 
 are therefore free to be united to Christ. Obviously the mere passing 
 illustration must not be pressed, because if used as more than an illustration 
 it is doubly incomplete incomplete because the word "dead" is here used 
 in two quite different senses; and because, to make the analogy at all 
 perfect, the Law ought to have died to us, and not we to the Law. But 
 St. Paul merely makes a cursory use of the illustration to indicate that the 
 new life of the Christian involves totally new relationships; 4 that death 
 naturally ends all legal obligations; and that our connexion with the risen 
 Christ is so close that it may be compared to a conjugal union. Hence our 
 whole past condition, alike in its character and its results, is changed, and a 
 new Law has risen from the dead with our new life a Law which we 
 must serve in the newness of the spirit, not in the oldness of the letter. 
 He who is dead to sin is dead to the Law, because the Law can only 
 reign so long as sin reigns, and because Christ in His crucified body has 
 destroyed the body of sin. 5 
 
 But St. Paul is conscious that in more than one passage he has placed the 
 Law and Sin in a juxtaposition which would well cause the very deepest 
 
 1 Job xiiL 7, 8. 
 
 2 Horn. iii. 4, 6, 31 ; vi. 2, 15 ; vii. 7, &o. ; Gal. ii. 17 ; iii. 21 ; vi. 14 ; 1 Cor. vi. 15. 
 Rom. iii. 8. 4 2 Cor. xi. 2 ; Eph. v. 25. 
 
 8 vii. 17-6. The very harshness of the construction iitoQwovm lv $ ("by dying to 
 that in which we were held fast ") seems to make it more probable than the TOV 9a.va.rov of 
 D, E, If, G, The E.V. renders itroeavovTos, the unsupported conjecture of Beza, or 
 Erasmus,
 
 488 THE LIFE AKD WORK OF ST. PAtit. 
 
 offence. To show his meaning he enters on a psychological study, of which 
 the extreme value has always been recognised entirely apart from its place 
 in the scheme of theology. Here he writes as it were with his very heart's 
 blood; ho dips his pen in his inmost experience. He is not here dealing 
 with the ideal or the abstract, but with the sternest facts of actual daily 
 life. There have been endless discussions as to whether he is speaking of 
 himself or of others ; whether he has in view the regenerate or the unre- 
 generate [man. Let even good men look into their own hearts and answer. 
 Ideally, the Christian is absolutely one with Christ, and dead to siu; in 
 reality, as again and again St. Paul implies even of himself, his life is a 
 warfare in which there is no discharge. There is an Adam and a Christ 
 in each of us. "The angel has us by the hand, and the serpent by the 
 heart." The old Adam is too strong for young Melancthon. 1 Here, then, 
 he explains, from a knowledge of his own heart, confirmed by the knowledge 
 of every heart, that the Law, though not the cause of sin, is yet the occa- 
 sion of it ; and that there are in every human being two laws that is, two 
 opposing tendencies which sway him from time to time, and in greater or 
 less degree in opposite directions. And in this way he wrote an epitome 
 of the soul's progress. When we have once realised that the " I " of the 
 passage is used in different senses sometimes of the flesh, the lower nature, 
 in the contemplation of which St. Paul could speak of himself as the chief 
 of sinners; sometimes of the higher nature, which can rise to those full 
 heights of spiritual life which he has been recently contemplating; some- 
 times generically of himself as a member of the human race it is then 
 easy to follow his history of the soul. 
 
 The Law is not sin Heaven forbid! but it provokes disobedience, 9 and it 
 creates the consciousness of sin. Without it there is sin indeed, but it is dead ; in 
 other words, it is latent and unrecognised. That is the age of fancied innocence, 
 of animal irreflective life, of a nakedness which is not ashamed. But it is a condi- 
 tion of "immoral tranquillity" which cannot be permanent ; of misplaced confidence 
 which causes many an aberration from duty. When the blind tendency of wrong 
 becomes conscious of itself by collision with a direct command, then sin acquires 
 fresh life at the expense of that misery and shame which is spiritual death. 8 Thus 
 sin, like Satan, disguises itself under the form of an angel of light, and seizes the 
 opportunity furnished by the command which in itself is holy, just, and good, 4 to 
 utterly deceive and to slay me.* 
 
 1 " Our little lives are kept in equipoise 
 
 By struggles of two opposite desires : 
 The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, 
 And the more noble instinct that aspires." 
 
 2 Of this thought there are many interesting classical parallels. Liv. xxxiv. 4 : 
 " Parricidae cum lege coeperunt, et illis facinus poenamonstravit." Sen, De Clem. i. 23 : 
 "Gens humanaruit per vetitum et nefas." ILor.Carm. 13, 26 : "Quod licet ingratum est, 
 quod non licet acrius urit." Ov. Amor. ii. 19, &c. : " The Law produces reflection on the 
 forbidden object, curiosity, doubt, distrust, imagination, lust, susceptibility of the seed 
 of temptation and of seduction, and finally rebellion the n-opaSao-w (Lange). 
 
 8 " More peccati vita est hominia; vita peccati mors hominis " (Calvin). "By the 
 jetser ha-rd " (the evil impulse), says Rabbi Simeon Ben Lakish, " is meant the angel of 
 death " (Tholuck). 
 
 4 Holy in its origin, just in its requirements, good in its purpose. * vii. 7-12.
 
 RPISTLE TO THB ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 489 
 
 "What?" one may ask, "did that which is good become death to me?" Nay, 
 but sin by meant of that which was good effected my death, because by means of th 
 commandment sin's exceeding sinfulness was dragged into recognition. How came 
 this P It came out of the struggle of the higher and the lower elements of our being ; 
 out of the contest between my fleshen and servile nature l and the Law*-* spirituality 
 of origin, the result of which is that I am two men in one, and live two lives in 
 one, not doing wh&t I desire, and doing what I detest. In me that is, in my flesh 
 dwelleth no good thing ; but I am not my flesh. I identify my own individuality 
 with that higher nature which wills what is noble, but is too often defeated by the 
 indwelling impulses of sin. 2 My true self, my inward man, 8 delights in the law of 
 God; but my spirit, my intellect and my reason are in constant warfare with 
 another law a sensual impulse of my fleshy nature which often reduces me into 
 the bondage of its prison-house. Wretched duality of condition which makes my 
 life a constant inconsistency ! Wretched enchainment of a healthy, living organism 
 to a decaying corpse ! Who shall rescue me from these struggles of a disintegrated 
 individuality ? 
 
 " Thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord ! " It is a sign of the intensity 
 of feeling with which he is writing that he characteristically omits to mention the 
 very thing for which he thanks God. But the words " through Jesus Christ our 
 Lord " sufficiently show that his gratitude is kindled by the conviction that the deli- 
 verance is possible that the deliverance has been achieved. 4 I, my very self the 
 human being within me* serve with my mind the law of God. Through my 
 weakness, my inconsistency, my imperfect faith, my imperfect union with Christ, I 
 still serve with my flesh the law of sin ; 6 but that servitude is largely weakened, is 
 practically broken. There is no condemnation for those who by personal union 
 with Christ 7 live in accordance with the Spirit. Sin is slavery and death ; the 
 Spirit is freedom and life. The Law was rendered impotent by the flesh, but God, 
 by sending His own Son in the form of sinful flesh 8 and as a sin-offering, 9 con- 
 
 1 vii. 14. vapiuvot, "fleshen," carneua; voftuiAt, " fleshly, " carnalis. The former is 
 here the true reading, and involves (of course) less subjection to the flesh than the latter. 
 
 2 The most commonly -quoted of the classic parallels is Ovid's "Video meliora pro- 
 boque, Deteriora sequor " ( Met. vii. 19). The nearest is 5 fv fie\c (6 ifi.apTa.inav) ov irocet *ol 
 3 tut 0\. irotet. Au'o -yap <rcu/>w$ x< <fx* (Xen. Cyr. vi. 1). Chrysostom calls ver. 21 
 aerate? ciprnifvov, but the obscurity is only caused by the trajection of on, which involves 
 the repetition of i^oC. It means " I find, then, the law that evil is close at hand to me 
 when my will is to do good." 
 
 8 Of. 1 Pet. iii. 4. 6 KPVTJTO* T^S xopiux? u'dptoTrof. German writers apeak of the 
 
 " pseudo-plasmatic man" with Ms vovs TTJ? <rapKb, <j>p6vrnj.a. rrjs crapxbs, c-wfxa Tijs iftapritis. 
 
 j-6/aos iv rots jme'\o-i, ^apl, &c. Schuh. Pathologie und Therapie des Pseudo-plasmen, 18. 
 "This double personality is a dethronement of the ey*> in favour of the afiofrui.." 
 
 4 Instead of " I thank God " (evxaptorw), the easier, and therefore less probable reading, 
 cf D, E, F, G is rt x<*p' rov 6eov, or Kvpiov. More probable is the xp<? T s "i> f B an d the 
 Sahidic. 
 
 * vii. 25, ouT09 yw. I believe this to be the true meaning, though many reject it. 
 St. Paul is speaking in his own person, not by perooxwumojufe (see 1 Cor. iv. 6). An 
 "infection of nature " remains even in the regenerate (Art. ix.). 
 
 6 There is a determining power in the "flesh "which Paul calls "a law in th members," 
 and which by its predominance becomes " a law of sin." This is opposed by the rational 
 principle, the vovs or human jri/ev^a the e<rw ai/flp<o7ros the higher spiritual consciousness, 
 which can however never, by itself, invade and conquer the flesh. Its power is rather 
 potential than actual. Reason is the better principle in man, but the flesh ia the stronger. 
 It is not the Divine m>fv^a. Nothing but union with Christ can secure to the vovs the 
 victory over the o-opj (Baur, Paul. ii. 146). 
 
 ' viii. 3. "Christus in homine, ubi fides in corde " (Aug.). The true reading is, 
 "There is, then, now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus." The rest of the vers? 
 IB a gloss. 
 
 8 Lit., " in a flesh-likeness of sin." 
 
 ' *pt o.uop-u'at "as a sin-offering" rtKign, chattath. Lev. xvi. 5: X^TM 3vb
 
 4s90 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 demned to death 1 the victorious power of sin in the flesh, and so enabled us, by a 
 spiritual life, to meet the otherwise impossible requirements of the Law. Our life 
 is no longer under the dominion of the flesh, which obeys the law of sin, but of the 
 spirit 2 The death of Christ has, so to speak, shifted the centre of gravity of our 
 will. If Christ be in us, the body indeed is still liable to death because of sin, but 
 the spirit our own spiritual life (he does not say merely ' contains the elements of 
 life,' but in his forcible manner) is life, because of the righteousness implanted by 
 the sanctifying Spirit of God. If that Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead dwell 
 in us, He who raised Christ from the dead will also quicken us to full life, partially 
 but progressively here, but triumphantly and finally beyond the grave. 8 And even 
 here, in a measure, we attain to the "life of the spirit." Never, indeed, can we 
 fulfil the whole Law (Gal. iii. 10^ ; but for the quantitative is substituted a quali- 
 tative fulfilment, and the " totality of the disposition contains in itself the totality 
 of the Law." In that stage life becomes life indeed. The "law of the spirit" is 
 the " law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." 
 
 This, then, shows us the true law, and the final issue of our lives. If we are led 
 by the Spirit of God we are the sons of God, and the spirit of fear becomes the spirit 
 of sonship, and the cry of slavery the cry of confident appeal to a Father in heaven. 
 Thus we become joint-heirs with Christ ; and, therefore, to share His glory we must 
 share His sufferings. The full glory of that sonship is to be ours beyond the grave, 
 and in comparison with it the sufferings of this life are nothing. The life of all 
 creation is now in anguish, in bondage, in corruption, yearning for a freedom which 
 shall be revealed when we too have entered on the full glory of our inheritance as 
 the children of God. We, though we have the first-fruits of the spirit, share in the 
 groaning misery of nature, as it too shares in inarticulate sympathy with our 
 impatient aspirations. We live, we are saved BY HOPE, and the very idea of 
 Hope is the antithesis of present realisation. 4 
 
 Hope is not possession, is not reality ; it can but imply future fruition ; it is Faith 
 in Christ directed to the future. But we have something more and better than 
 Hope. We have the help in weakness, the intercession even in prayer that can find 
 no utterance, of the Holy Spirit Himself. We know, too, that all things work 
 together for good to all them that love God and are called according to His purpose. 
 He ends the Divine work that He begins. Election predestination to conformity 
 and brotherhood with Christ vocation justification these four steps all follow, 
 all must inevitably follow each other, and must end in glorification. So certain is 
 this glorification, this entrance into the final fulness of sonship and salvation, that 
 St. Paul with one of those splendid flashes of rhetoric which, like all true rhetoric, 
 come directly from the intensities of emotion, and have nothing to do with the tech- 
 nicalities of art speaks of it in the same past tense which he has employed for every 
 other stage in the process. Those whom He foreknew,* predestined, called, justified 
 them He also glorified.* 
 
 " What shall we then say to these things ?" What, but that magnificent burst 
 
 Itepl e.jj.apTu!t. Ps. zl. 7 ! wept a/xaprt'ar OVK flTTjcrar (Heb, X. 5). JJ6V. iv. 25 : a)rb TOU aifuxrof 
 TOV TTJS a^apria?. 
 
 1 Ko.-reiipi.vtv, "condemned to execution" (Matt, xxvii. 13). 
 
 2 Ver. 6. On the ^po^/ao. T^S o-apxbs, see Art. ix. Philo also dwells strongly on the 
 impotence of man apart from Divine grace (Legg. Alleg. i. 48, 55, 101). 
 
 3 vii. 13 Vlii. 11. The change from TOV eyeipaz/ros 'I^o-ow to 6 vipa rbv Xpiarbf is 
 remarkable. " Appellatio Jesu spectat ad ipsum, Christi refertur ad nos" (Bengel,viii. 11) 
 partly resumes the subject of v. 11 after the separate points handled in v. 12 21 ; 
 vi. 123 ; vii. 16, 725. 
 
 4 viii. 1825. 
 
 5 There are four explanations of " foreknew," aud each is claimed alike by Calviniats 
 and Arminians ! (Tholuck.) But, " in the interpretation of Scripture, if we would feel 
 as St. Paul felt, or think as he thought, we must go back to that age in which the water 
 of life was still a running stream." 
 
 viii. 2630,
 
 PREDESTINATION AND FEEE WILL. 491 
 
 of confidence and rapture 1 which we will not degrade by the name of peroration, 
 because in St. Paul no such mere artificiality of construction is conceivable, but 
 which fitly closes this long and intricate discussion, in which he has enunciated 
 truths never formulated since the origin of the world, but never to be forgotten till 
 its final conflagration. The subtleties of dialectic, the difficulties of polemical argu- 
 ment, the novelties of spiritualising exegesis, are concluded ; and, firm in his own 
 revealed conviction, he has urged upon the conviction of the world, and fixed in the 
 conviction of Christians for ever, the deepest truths of the Gospel entrusted to his 
 charge. What remains but to give full utterance to his sense of exultation in spite 
 of earthly sufferings, and " to reduce doubt to absurdity " by a series of rapid, eager, 
 triumphant questions, which force on the minds of his hearers but one irresistible 
 answer ? In spite of all the anguish that persecution can inflict, in spi^e of all the 
 struggles which the rebellious flesh may cause, " we are more than conquerors 
 through Him that loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor 
 angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor 
 depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us for a moment 2 from 
 God's love manifested towards us in Christ Jesus our Lord." In spite of failure, 
 in spite of imperfection, our life is united with the life of Christ, our spirit quick- 
 ened by the Spirit of Christ, and what have we to fear if all time, and all space, and 
 all nature, and all the angels of heaven, and all the demons of hell, are utterly 
 powerless to do us harm ? 8 
 
 CHAPTER XXXYIH. 
 
 PREDESTINATION AND FEEE WILL. 
 
 "Everything is foreseen, and free will is given. And the world is judged by 
 grace, and everything is according to work." K. AKHIBHA in Pirke AbMth, iii. 24. 
 'Op$s STI ov <pvffta>s o68i uAoojj avdyitris tffrl rd tlvai -jfjfvffovv ff bff-rpiKivov &AA.& 
 TTJS qntTtpas TTpoaipfffews. CHRYS. ad 2 Tim. ii. 21. 
 
 " Reasoned high 
 
 Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 
 And found no end in wandering mazes lost." 
 
 MILTON, Paradise Lott, ii. 
 " Soil ich dir die Gegend Zeigen 
 Musst du erst das Dach besteigen." GO"THH. 
 
 WE now come to the three memorable chapters (ix., x.. xi.) in which St. Paul 
 faces the question which had, perhaps, led him to state to the Jews and Gen- 
 tiles of Rome the very essence of his theology. He has told them " his 
 Gospel" that revealed message which he had to preach, and by virtue of 
 
 1 Compare the outburst in 1 Cor. xv. 54. " In fact, as verses 19 23 may be called 
 a sacred elegy, so we may term 31 39 a sacred ode ; that is as tender and fervent as this 
 Is bold and exalted that, an amplification of "we do groan being burdened" (2 Cor. 
 v. 4) ; this, a commentary on " this is the victory that overcometh the world" (1 John, 
 T. 4). Philippi, ad loc. 
 
 * viil. 39, xiapLuai.. 
 
 8 Compare this rapture of faith and hope with the aching despair of materialism. 
 " To modern philosophical unbelief the beginning of the world, as well as its end, is sunk 
 in mist and night, because to it the centre of the world the historical Christ is sunk 
 in mist and night " (Lange). The time was ripe for the recognition of a deliverer. Plato 
 and Seneca had clearly realised and distinctly stated that man was powerless to help 
 himself from his own misery and sin. (Sen. JEp. 53. Cf. Tac. Ann. iii. 18 : Cic. De Off. 
 14,18.)
 
 492 TflS LIFE jLSb WORK Of St. PAUL. 
 
 which he was the Apostle of the Gentiles. He has shown that Jews and 
 Gentiles were equally guilty, equally redeemed. The Redemption was achieved ; 
 but only by faith, in that sense of the word which he has so fully explained, 
 could its blessings be appropriated. Alas ! it was but too plain that while the 
 Gentiles were accepting this great salvation, and pressing into the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, the Jews were proudly holding aloof, and fatally relying on a system 
 now abrogated, on privileges no longer exclusive. Their national hopes, their 
 individual hopes, were alike based on a false foundation, which it has been the 
 Apostle's duty inexorably to overthrow. Their natural exclusiveness he meets 
 by the unflinching principle that there is no favouritism with our Heavenly 
 Father; he meets their attempts after a legal righteousness by proving to 
 them that they, like the Gentiles, are sinners, that they cannot attain a legal 
 righteousness, and that no such endeavour can make them just before God. 
 Obviously he was thus brought face to face with a tragic fact and a terrible 
 problem. The fact was that the Jews were being rejected, that the Gentiles 
 were being received. Even thus early in the history of Christianity it had 
 become but too plain that the Church of the future would be mainly a Church 
 of Gentiles, that the Jewish element within it would become more and more 
 insignificant, and could only exist by losing its Judaic distinctiveness. The 
 problem was, how could this be, in the face of those immemorial promises, in 
 the light of that splendid history ? Was God breaking TTi.s promises P Was 
 God forgetting that they were " the seed of Abraham His servant, the children 
 of Jacob whom He had chosen ? " l To this grave question there was (1) a 
 theologic answer, and (2) an historic answer. (1) The theologic answer was 
 that acceptance and rejection are God's absolute will, and in accordance with 
 His predestined election to grace or wrath. (2) The historic answer was that 
 the rejection of the Jews was the natural result of their own obstinacy and 
 hardness. The two answers might seem mutually irreconcilable ; but St. Paul, 
 strong in faith, in inspiration, in sincerity, never shrinks from the seeming 
 oppositions of an eternal paradox. He often gives statements of truth 
 regarded from different aspects, without any attempt to show that they are, to 
 a higher reason than that of man, complementary, not (as they appear) contra- 
 dictory, of each other. Predestination is a certain truth of reason and of 
 revelation ; free will is a certain truth of revelation and of experience. They 
 are both true, yet they seem mutually exclusive, mutually contradictory. The 
 differences between Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians do not really touch 
 the question ; God's foreknowledge is always recognised, but in no way does it 
 solve the difficulty of the absolute decree. If we say that St. Paul is here 
 mainly arguing about great masses of men, about men in nations, and the 
 difference between Jews and Gentiles, that is partially true; but he most 
 
 1 " Who hath not known passion, cross, and travail of death, cannot treat of foreknow- 
 ledge without injury and inward enmity towards God. Wherefore, take heed that thou 
 drink not wine while thou art yet a sucking babe " (Luther). He also said, " The ninth 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is the ninth. Learn first the eight chapters which 
 precede it."
 
 PREDESTINATION AND FREE WILL. 493 
 
 definitely recognises the case of individuals also, and God is tlio God not only 
 of nations, "but of individuals. In any case, this sacrifice of the individual to 
 the interests of the mass would be but a thrusting of the difficulty a little 
 further back. The thought that many, though Edomites, will be saved, and 
 many, though of Israel, will be lost, may make the antenatal predilection for 
 Israel and detestation of Esau less startling to us, and it is quite legitimate 
 exegetically to soften, by the known peculiarities of Semitic idiom, the painful 
 harshness of the latter term. But even then we are confronted with the pre- 
 destined hardening of Pharaoh's heart. St. Paul recognises all Scripture 
 recognises the naturalness of the cry of the human soul ; but the remorseless 
 logic of a theology which is forced to reason at all about the Divine prescience 
 can only smite down the pride of finite arguments with the iron rod of revealed 
 mysteries. Man is but clay in the potter's hands. God is omnipotent ; God 
 is omniscient ; yet evil exists, and there is sin, and there is death, and after 
 death the judgment ; and sin is freely forgiven, and yet we shall receive the 
 things done in the body, and be judged according to our works. All things 
 end in a mystery, and all mysteries resolve themselves into one the existence 
 of evil. But, happily, this mystery need in no way oppress us, for it is lost in 
 the Plenitude of God. The explanation of it has practically nothing to do 
 with us. It lies in a region wholly apart from the facts of common life. 
 When St. Paul tells us " that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that 
 runneth," he is dealing with one order of transcendental ideas ; but when he 
 comes to the common facts of Christian life, he bids us will, and he bids us 
 run, and he bids us work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; 
 exactly as he tells us that justification is of faith alone, and not of works, and 
 yet constantly urges us to good works, and tells us that God will reward every 
 man according to his works. 1 Beyond this we cannot get. " Decretum 
 horribile fateor," said Calvin, "at tamen verum." Theology must illustrate 
 by crushing analogies its irreversible decrees, but it cannot touch the sphere of 
 practical experience, or weaken the exhortations of Christian morality. God 
 predestines ; man is free. How this is we cannot say ; but so it is. St. Paul 
 makes no attempt to reconcile the two positions. " Neither here nor anywhere 
 else does he feel called upon to deal with speculative extremes. And in what- 
 ever way the question be speculatively adjusted, absolute dependence and 
 moral self-determination are both involved in the immediate Christian self- 
 consciousness." 8 The finite cannot reduce the infinite to conditions, or express 
 by syllogisms the mutual relations of the two. The truths must be stated, 
 when there is need to state them, although each of them belongs to separate 
 orders of ideas. Since they cannot be reconciled, they must be left side by 
 side. It is an inevitable necessity, implied throughout all Scripture, that, as 
 regards such questions, the sphere of dogma and the sphere of homily should 
 often be regarded as though they were practically separate from each other, 
 
 1 oiroSiWvai (Bom. il. 6; 2 Tim. iv. 8); iirrr.oo- (Col. lii. 24); pirfi* (1 Cor. iii. 8j 
 jix. 17), &c. 
 
 * Bftur, Paul. II. 269.
 
 494 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 though in reality they intersect each other. And the reason of this is that 
 both are enclosed in the circumference of a sphere by far more vast thai, 
 sphere of the Divine, of which for us the centre is everywhere, and the 
 circumference, not indeed "nowhere," but immeasurably beyond our ken. 1 
 This is one comfort. And again, just as St. Paul refuses to find the sub- 
 stantial essence of morality anywhere but in the inmost disposition, so he does 
 away with the individual ego by raising it to the universal ego to that 
 humanity which is present, and is identified with itself, in every separate 
 individual. 2 It is unquestionable that he categorically asserts, and that 
 without limitations, the redemption of the universe and of the race. 3 In that 
 thought, and in : the thought of God's infinite love, lies the gleam of light 
 in the saddest destinies or the most perplexed enigmas of the individual. 
 The logical conclusions of an exaggerated dogmatism are rectified by the 
 unchangeable certainties of moral conviction, and the inspired hopes of a 
 child-like love. 
 
 " Ah, truly," says Beuss, 4 " if the last word of the Christian revelation 
 is contained in the image of the potter and the clay, it is a bitter derision 
 of all the deep needs and legitimate desires of a soul aspiring towards its 
 God. This would be at once a satire of reason upon herself, and the suicide 
 of revelation." But it is neither the last word, nor the only word; nor 
 has it any immediate observable bearing on the concrete development of 
 our lives. It is not the only word, because in nine-tenths of Scripture it 
 is as wholly excluded from the sphere of revelation as though it had been 
 never revealed at all; and it is not the last word, because throughout the 
 whole of Scripture, and nowhere more than in the writings of the very 
 Apostle who has faced this problem with the most heroic inflexibility, we 
 see bright glimpses of something beyond. How little we were intended to 
 draw logical conclusions from the metaphor, is shown by the fact that we 
 are living souls, not dead clay ; and St. Paul elsewhere recognised a power, 
 both within and without our beings, by which, as by an omnipotent alchemy, 
 mean vessels can become precious, and vessels of earthenware be transmuted 
 into vessels of gold. 6 Vessels fitted for destruction may be borne with 
 much long-suffering. Apparent loss is made the immediate instrument of 
 wider gain. Partial rejection is to pave the way for universal acceptance. 
 God wills the salvation of all. 6 Where sin abounds, there grace super- 
 abounds/ God giveth freely to all, and freely calleth all, and His gifts 
 and calling are without repentance. Israel is rejected, Israel in part is 
 hardened, yet "all Israel shall be saved." 8 "God shut up all into 
 
 1 The Rabbis, to avoid even the most distant semblance of irreverent anthropo- 
 morphism, often spoke of God as Ha-Mak6m, "the place ; " and it is one of their grand 
 sayings that " the Universe is not the place of God, but God is the Place of the 
 Universe." 
 
 2 Baur, Three Centuries, p. 32. 
 
 See Roin. viii. 1924 ; xi. 32; 1 Tim. ii. 36 (Acts iii. 21 ; Rev. xxi. 4 ; xxii. 3). 
 * ThloL Chr&t. ii. 115. 
 
 2Tim. ii. 21. 1 Tim. ii. 4; Tit. ii. 11; 2Pet. iii. 9, 
 
 7 Bom. v. 20, 21. Bom. zi. 26.
 
 MiEDtfSTINATION A.ND FREE WILL, 495 
 
 disobedience, that He might pity all." 1 The duality of election resolves 
 itself into the higher unity of an all-embracing counsel of favour ; and the 
 sin of man, even through the long Divine ceconomy of the ceons, is seen to 
 be but a moment in the process towards that absolute end of salvation, 
 which is described as the time when God shall be " all things in all things," 
 and therefore in all men; and when the whole groaning and travailing 
 creation shall be emancipated into " the freedom of the glory of the children 
 of God." 2 If disobedience has been universal, so too is mercy ; and Divine 
 mercy is stronger and wider, and more infinite and more eternal, than human 
 sin. Here, too, there is an antinomy. St. Paul recognises such a thing as 
 " perdition ; " there are beings who are called " the perishing." 3 There are 
 warnings of terrible significance in Scripture and in experience. But may we 
 not follow the example of St. Paul, who quite incontestably dwells by prefer- 
 ence upon the wide prospect of infinite felicity; who seems always lost in the con- 
 templation of the final triumph of all good P However awful may be the future 
 retribution of sinful lives, we still cannot set aside what true Christian would 
 wish to set aside? the Scriptures, which say that "as in Adam all die, even 
 so in Christ shall all be made alive ; " that all things tend " unto God," as all 
 things are from Him and by Him ; * that Christ shall reign until He hath put 
 all enemies under His feet, and that the kst which shall be destroyed is death. 5 
 
 Let us, then, see more in detail how the Apostle deals with a fact so shock- 
 ing to every Jew as the deliberate rejection of Israel from every shadow of 
 special privilege in the kingdom of God ; let us see how he proves a doctrine 
 against which, at first sight, it might well have seemed that the greater part 
 of the Old Testament and 1,500 years of history were alike arrayed. 
 
 It should be observed that in his most impassioned polemic he always 
 unites a perfect conciliatoriness of tone with an absolute rigidity of statement. 
 If he must give offence, he is ready to give offence to any extent, so far as the 
 offence must inevitably spring from the truth which it is his sacred duty to 
 proclaim. Doubtless, too, much that he said might be perverted to evil 
 results; be it so. There are some who abuse to evil purposes God's own 
 sunlight, and who turn the doctrine of forgiveness into a curse. Are we to 
 quench His sunlight ? are we to say that He does not forgive P Some Jews 
 were, doubtless, dangerously shaken in all their convictions by the pro- 
 clamation of the Gospel, as some Romanists were by the truths of the 
 Reformation. Is error to be immortal because its eradication is painful ? Is 
 the mandrake to grow, because its roots shriek when they are torn out of the 
 ground ? Or is it not better, as St. Gregory the Great said, that a scandal 
 should be created than that truth should be suppressed P There is no style of 
 
 i Bom. 3d. 32. 
 
 8 1 Cor. xv. 22 ; Rom. 3d. 15 86 ; viii. 1923. See Banr, First Three Centuries, 
 p. 72 ; Pfleiderer, ii. 256, 272275 ; Reuss, Thlol. Ghrdt. ii. 23, seqq. 
 
 3 'AfroAAvVurvoi. This word does not mean "the lost," a phrase which does not exist 
 In Scripture, but "the perishing." 
 
 Rom. xi. 36 ; 1 Cor. viii. 6 ; Col. i. 16, 17. 
 
 * 1 Cor. xv. 2528; Eph. i. 2022; 2 Tim. i. 10 (Matt. 3d. 27; Heb. ii. 8, 14),
 
 498 THE LIFE ANI WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 objection to the proclamation of a new or a forgotten truth which is so false, 
 so faithless, and so futile, as the plea that it is " dangerous." But one duty 
 is incumbent on all who teach what they believe to be the truths of God. It 
 is that they should state them with all possible candour, courtesy, forbearance, 
 eonsiderateness. The controversial method of St. Paul furnishes the most 
 striking contrast to that of religions controversy in almost every age. It is 
 as different as anything can be from the reckless invective of a Jerome or of a 
 Luther. It bears no relation at all to the unscrnpulousness of a worldly 
 ecclesiasticism. It is removed by the very utmost extreme of distance from 
 the malice of a party criticism, and the Pharisaism of a loveless creed. 
 
 Thus, though he knows that what he has to enforce will be most un- 
 palatable to the Jews, and though he knows how virulently they hate him, how 
 continuously they have thwarted his teaching and persecuted his life, he begins 
 with an expression of love to them so tender and so intense, that theologians 
 little accustomed to an illimitable unselfishness felt it incumbent upon them 
 to explain it away. 
 
 " I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the 
 Holy Spirit, that I have great grief and incessant anguish in my heart ; " and then, 
 in the intensity of his emotion, he omits to state the cause of his grief, because it is 
 sufficiently explained by what follows and what has gone before. It is grief at the 
 thought that Israel should be hardening their hearts against the Gospel. " For I 
 could have wished my own self to be anathema from Christ 1 on behalf of my 
 brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, seeing that they are Israelites, whose 
 is the adoption, 2 and the Shechinah,3 and the covenants, and the legislation, and the 
 ritual, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ, according to 
 the flesh, who is over all God blessed for ever. Amen." 4 On his solemn appeal 
 to the fact of his readiness even to abandon all hopes of salvation if thereby he could 
 save his brethren, I think it only necessary to say that the very form in which it ie 
 
 1 D?fl, Deut. ; Zech. xiv. 11 ; Gal. I. 8, 9 ; 1 Cor. xil. 3 ; xrl 22. Strong natures 
 have ever been capable of braving even the utmost loss for a great end. " If not, blot 
 me, I pray tb.ee, out of tbe book which Thou hast written " (Ex. xxxii, 32). " Que mon 
 nom soit fle'tri," said Danton, "pourvu que la France soit libre." " Let the name of 
 George Whitefield perish if God be glorified." 
 
 a 2 Oor. vi. 18. 8 Ex. xvi. 10 ; 1 Sam. iv. 22, &c. (LXX.) 
 
 4 Rom. ix. 15. On the punctuation of this last verse a great controversy has arisen. 
 Many editors since the days of Erasmus (and among them Lachmann, Tischendorf, 
 Riickert, Meyer, Fritzsche) put the stop at " flesh ;" others at " all" (Locke, Baum- 
 garten, Crusius) ; and regard the concluding words as a doxology to God for the grandest 
 of the privileges of Israel. In favour of this punctuation is the fact that Paul, even in 
 bis grandest Christological passages, yet nowhere calls Christ, " God over all, " nor ever 
 appUea to Him th word vXoyr)T<fe. (See i. 25; 1 Cor. iii. 23 ; viii. 6 ; 2 Cor. i. 3 ; xi. 31 ; 
 Eph. i. 17; iv. 6; 1 Tim. ii. 5, &c.) But, on the other hand, a doctrinal an-o Xeydfiecov 
 may, as Lange says, mark a culminating point ; and having regard (i.) to the language 
 which Paul uses (Phil. ii. 6 ; CoL i. 15 ; ii. 9 ; l.Cor. viii. 6; 2 Cor. iv. 4), and (ii.) to the 
 grammatical structure of the sentence, and (iii.) to the position of <-uA.o7rp-bs (which in 
 Sexologies in the New Testament stands always first), and (iv.) to the unanimity of all 
 ancient commentators, and (v.) to the fact that the clause probably alludes to Ps.lxviii.19 
 (LXX. ), and in Eph. iv. 8, St. Paul quotes the previous verse of this Psalm, and applies 
 it to Christ, the punctuation of our received text can hardly be rejected. Yet there is 
 weight in Baur's remark that Kara. o-dpica is added to show that it is as only " after the 
 flesh' 1 that the Jews could claim the birth of the Messiah, and that the "God over all 
 blessed for ever " would have been allowing too much to Jewish particularism. (Cf . 
 Gal. iv. 4, y>6|u.i ywaiKt*.) For a full examination of the question, I may refer to 
 my papers on the text in the Expositor, 1879-
 
 PREDESTINATION AND FREE WILL. 497 
 
 expressed shows MB sense that such a wish is by the very nature of things 
 impossible. Further explanation is superfluous to those who feel how natural, how 
 possible, is the desire for even this vast self-sacrifice to the great heart of a Moseg 
 or a Paul. 
 
 " Not, however, as though the Word of God has failed." l This is the point 
 which St. Paul has to prove, and he does it by showing that God's gifts are matters 
 of such free choice that the Jew cannot put forward any exclusive claim to their 
 monopoly. 
 
 In fact, all who are Jews naturally are not Jews spiritually are not, therefore, 
 in any true sense heirs of the promise. To be of the seed of Abraham is nothing in 
 itself. Abraham had many sons, but only one of them, the son of Sarah, was 
 recognised in the promise.* 
 
 Not only so, but even of the two sons of the son of promise one was utterly rejected; 
 and so completely was this a matter of choice, and so entirely was it independent of 
 merit, that before there could be any question of merit, even in the womb, the elder 
 was rejected to servitude, the younger chosen for dominion. And this is stated in 
 the strongest way by the prophet Malachi " Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." 8 
 
 "Is God unjust then?" To a natural logic the question might seem very 
 excusable, but St. Paul simply puts it aside as irrelevant and impossible, while he 
 re-states the fact which suggests it by quoting as decisive two passages of Scripture. 4 
 God has an absolute right to love whom He will ; for He says to Moses, " Whomso- 
 ever I pity, him I wUl pity ; and whomsoever I compassionate, him I will com- 
 passionate ; " so that pity is independent of human will or effort. And God has an 
 absolute right to hate whom He will ; for Scripture says to Pharaoh, " For this 
 very purpose I raised thee up, to display in thee my power, and that my name may 
 be proclaimed in all the earth." * 
 
 So then God pities, and God hardens, whom He will. 
 
 Again, the natural question presents itself " Why does He then blame ? If 
 wickedness be the result of Divine Will, what becomes of moral responsibility?" 
 
 In the first place, Paul implies that the question is absurd. Who are you, that 
 you can call God to account ? No matter what becomes of moral responsibility, it 
 does not at any rate affect God's decree. Man is but passive clay in the Potter's 
 hands ; He can mould it as He will.' 
 
 1 tKirivnanev, "fallen like a flower," Job xiv. 2 ; but see 1 Cor. xiii. 8 ; James i. 11. 
 
 2 ix. 6 9; comp. Nedarim, f. 31, 1. "Is not Ishmael an alien, and yet of the seed 
 of Abraham?" It is written, " In Isaac shall thy seed be called." "But is not Esau 
 tM alien, and yet of the seed of Isaac ? " " No. ' In Isaac," but not all Isaac." 
 
 s Mai. i. 2, 3. Hated =" loved less" (Gen. xxix. 31; Matt. yi. 24; x. 37, com- 
 pared with Luke xiv. 26); and the next verse shows that temporal position is alluded to. 
 
 4 "These arguments of the Apostle are founded on two assumptions. The first is 
 that the Scriptures are the word of God ; and the second, that what God actually does 
 cannot be unrighteous" (Hodge). At the same time it is most necessary, as Bishop 
 "Wordsworth says, "not to allow the mind to dwell exclusively or mainly on single 
 expressions occurring here or there, but to consider their relation to the context, to the 
 whole scope of the Epistle, to the other Epistles of St. Paul, and to the general teachings 
 of Holy Writ " (Epistles, p. 201). 
 
 * ix. 14 18. "Satis habet," says Calvin, "Scripturae testimoniis impurot latratua 
 compescere;" but the "impure barkings "(a phrase which St. Paul would never have 
 used) shows the difference between the Apostle of the Gentiles and the Genevan 
 Eeformer. SKAqpuVei, however, in ver. 18, cannot mean "treats hardly." Calovius says 
 that God does not harden tvepy>jTucais, "by direct action," but <rvyx<"p'jT"cws (permissively), 
 KeJs (by the course of events), ey/caTa\iimicws (by abandonment), and 
 
 (by handing men over to their worst selves). It may be said that this chapter contradicts 
 the next, and Fritzsche goes so far as to say that 'Paul would have better agreed with 
 himself if he had been the pupil of Aristotle, not of Gamaliel ; " but the contradiction, 
 or rather the antinomy, is not in any of St. Paul's arguments, but in the very nature 
 of things. 
 
 8 ix. !&?. It was a common metaphor (Jer. xviil. 6; ha. xlv. 9; Wisd. xv 7? 
 SSrach xxxiii. IJj.
 
 498 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 But Paul would not thus merely smite down the timid questioning of 
 sinners by the arbitrary irresponsibility of Infinite Power. He gives a gleam 
 of hope ; he sheds over the ultimate Divine purposes a flash of insight. He 
 asks a question which implies a large and glorious answer, and the very form 
 of the question shows how little he desires to dwell on the unpractical in- 
 soluble mysteries of Divine reprobation. 1 
 
 What if God, willing to display His wrath, and to make known His power (he 
 will not say, " created vessels of wrath," or " prepared them for destruction," but, 
 swerving from a conclusion too terrible for the wisest) " endured in much long- 
 suffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction . . . ? And what if He did this 
 that He might also make known the riches of His glory towards the vessels of 
 mercy which He before prepared for glory . . . ?" What if even those 
 decrees which seemed the harshest were but steps towards an ultimate good ? . . 
 By that blessed purpose we profit, whom God called both out of the Jews and out of 
 the Gentiles. This calling is illustrated by the language of two passages of Hosea, 2 
 in which the prophet calls his son and daughter Lo-ammi and Lo-ruhamah (Not- 
 my-people and Not-pitied) because of the rejection of Israel, but at the same time 
 prophesies the day when they shall again be His people, and H their God : and 
 by two passages of Isaiah s in which he at once prophesies the rejection of the masa 
 of Israel and the preservation of a remnant.* 
 
 Having thus established the fact on Scriptural authority, what is the conclusion P 
 Must it not be that so entirely is election a matter of God's free grace the 
 Gentiles, though they did not pursue righteousness, yet laid hold of justification by 
 faith; and that the Jews, though they did pursue a legal righteousness, have not 
 attained to justification ? How can such a strange anomaly be explained ? What- 
 ever may be the working of Divine election, humanly speaking, their rejection 
 is the fault of the Jews. They chose to aim at an impossible justification by works, 
 and rejected the justification by faith. Again St. Paul refers to Isaiah in support 
 of his views.* They stumbled at Christ. To them, as to all believers, He might 
 have been a firm rock of foundation ; they made Him a stone of offence. 6 The 
 desire of his heart, his prayer to God, is for their salvation. But their religious 
 zeal has taken an ignorant direction. They are aiming at justification by works, 
 and therefore will not accept God's method, which is justification by faith.' 
 
 In the path of works they cannot succeed, for the Law finds its sole end, and 
 aim, and fulfilment in Christ, 8 and through Him alone is justification possible. 
 Even these truths the Apostle finds in Scripture, or illustrates by Scriptural quota- 
 tions. He contrasts the statement of Moses, that he who obeyed the ordinances of 
 
 1 When we read such passages as Rom. viii. 22 24 ; 2 Cor. v. 18 ; Acts iii. 19, 21, 
 we think that St. Paul would have seen a phase of truth in the lines 
 " Safe in the hands of one disposing power, 
 Or in the natal or the mortal hour ; 
 All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee ; 
 All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see ; 
 All Discord, Harmony not understood ; 
 All partial evil, universal good." 
 
 * Hos. i. 9, 10 ; ii. 23. Isa. x. 22 ; i. 9. 
 
 4 ix. 22 30. Ver. 28 is an exegetical translation which St. Paul adopts from the 
 LXX. As the form of quotation has only an indirect bearing on the argument, the reader 
 must refer to special commentaries for its elucidation. 
 
 * Isa. viii. 14 ; xxviii. 16. 
 
 6 In ix. 33, the " be ashamed " of the LXX., followed by St. Paul, is an exgetioal 
 translation of "make haste" or "flee hastily. " 
 
 7 ix. 30 x. 4. 
 
 8 x. 4, T'X.OS i.e., the righteousness at which the Law aims is accomplished in Christ, 
 and the Law leads to Him ; He is its fulfilment and its termination. Its glory is done 
 away, but He remains, because His eternal brightness is the rcAoc roi) Karopyovpevov (Gal).
 
 PREDESTINATION AND FRKK WILL. 499 
 
 the Law should live by them, 1 with those other words which he puts into the mouth 
 of Justification personified, " Say not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven, 
 or who shall descend into the abyss, but the word is very nigh thee in thy mouth 
 and in thy heart," which (being used originally of the Law) he explains of the near- 
 ness and accessibility of the Gospel which was now being preached, and which was 
 summed up in the confession and belief in Him as a risen Saviour. This is again 
 supported by two quotations in almost the same words one from Isaiah (xxviii. 16), 
 " Every one that believeth on Him shall not be ashamed ;" and one from Joel 
 (ii. 32), " Every one that calleth on the name of the Lord shall be saved" and the 
 " every one " of course includes the Gentile no less than the Jew. z 
 
 But had the Jews enjoyed a real opportunity of hearing the Gospel ? In a 
 series of questions, subordinated to each other by great rhetorical beauty, St. Paul 
 shows that each necessary step has been fulfilled the hearing, the preachers, the 
 mission of those whose feet were beautiful upon the mountains, and who preach the 
 glad tidings of peace ; but, aks ! the faith had been wanting, and, therefore, also the 
 calling upon God. For all had not hearkened to the Gospel. It was not for want 
 of hearing, for in accordance with prophecy (Ps. xix. 4) the words of the preachers 
 had gone out to all the world ; but it was for want of faith, and this, too, had been 
 prophesied, since Isaiah said, " Who believed our preaching ?" Nor, again, was it 
 for want of warning. Moses (Deut. xxxii. 21) had told them ages ago that God 
 would stir up their jealousy and kindle their anger by means of those Gentiles 
 whom in their exclusive arrogance they despised as "no nation;" and Isaiah 
 (Ixv. 1, 2) says with daring energy, " I was found by such as sought me not, 
 I became manifest to such as inquired not after me," whereas to Israel he saith, 
 " The whole day long I outspread my hands to a disobedient and antagonistic 
 people." * 
 
 Thus, with quotation after quotation tnere are nine in tnis cnapter alone, 
 drawn chiefly from Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms does St. Paul state 
 his conviction as to the present rejection of the Gospel by his own nation ; 
 while he tries to soften the bitter rage which it was calculated to arouse both 
 against himself and against his doctrine, by stating it in words which would 
 add tenfold authority to the dialectical arguments into which they are 
 enwoven. But having thus established two very painful, and at first sight 
 opposing truths namely, that the Jews were being deprived of all exclusive 
 privileges by the decree of God (ix.), and that this forfeiture was due to their 
 own culpable disbelief (x.) he now enters on the gladder and nobler task of 
 explaining how these sad truths are robbed of their worst sting, when we 
 recognise that they are but the partial and transient phenomena incidental 
 to the evolution of a blessed, universal, and eternal scheme. 
 
 "I ask, then, did God reject His people ? Away with the thought ! for at worst 
 the rejection is but partial." Of this he offers himself as a proof, being as he is 
 " an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin;" and he then 
 quotes the analogy of the 7,000 whom God "reserved for Himself," who in the 
 days of Elijah had not bowed the knee to Baal. On this he pauses to remark that 
 the very phrase, " I reserved for myself," implies that this remnant was saved by 
 faith, and not by works. But how came it that the majority had missed the end 
 for which they sought? Because, he answers, they were hardened; God (as 
 
 ' X, A, B, ev aurjj. 
 
 3 x. 412. It is remarkable that in verse 11 the important word irSe is found neither 
 In the Hebrew nor in the T,XX. Of. be. 33. 
 * x. 14 21.
 
 500 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST PAUL. 
 
 Isaiah prophesied) had sent them a spirit of stupor which finds its illustration in the 
 phrase, " let their eyes he darkened," amid David's prayer for the humiliation and 
 bewilderment of his enemies. 1 
 
 But then another awful question occurs : is this hardening, this spiritual blind- 
 ness, to be final ? " Did they stumble that they may utterly fall ? " Again Paul 
 exclaims, Perish the thought! Their very fall was meant for salvation to the 
 Gentiles, and to stimulate their own hearts to better things. And here his readers 
 could not but feel that he was explaining facts which were taking place under their 
 very eyes. In every instance the Gospel had been offered first to the Jew ; in eveiy 
 instance the Jew had rejected it ; and it was through this very obstinacy that it 
 had now been offered everywhere to the Gentile. The Messiah rejected by the 
 Jew was daily being glorified as the Redeemer of the Gentile. The Church of the 
 Christ was now securely founded, but even already Antioch, and Rome, and 
 Ephesus, and Thessalonica were far more its capitals than the Holy City. But this 
 fact revealed a glorious anticipation. If their deficiency was thus the wealth of 
 the Gentiles, how much more would their replenishment ! It was his grand mission 
 to preach this to the Gentiles, and thereby, if possible, to stir the Jews to emulation, 
 for if their rejection be the world's reconciliation, what will be their acceptance but 
 life from the dead ? 
 
 And that there will be this restoration of Israel he illustrates by a 
 double metaphor 
 
 i. When the heave-offering was offered, the whole lump of dough acquired 
 eacredness from the fact that a portion of it was sanctified to the Lord. So with 
 Israel. Their first-fruits Abraham and their patriarchal fathers were holy, and 
 their holiness was ideally attributable to all the race. 
 
 ii. The second metaphor has a wider applicability. The root of the olive-tree 
 is the source of its fruitfulness ; but if some of its branches lose their fruitf ulness 
 and become withered, they are lopped off and are replaced by grafts of the wild 
 olive, which then shares the richness of the tree. Such withered branches were the 
 present unbelieving majority of Israel. That they should be lopped off is a part of 
 God's just and necessary severity. To explain this truth to bring it home to the 
 pained and angry consciousness of his people has been one of his objects in this 
 great Epistle , and he has carried it out, at whatever cost, with a most unflinching 
 sincerity. But meanwhile, if the Gentiles in their turn were tempted to assume 
 the airs of particularism with which the Jews had so long gloried over them, what 
 a warning should be conveyed to them by the state of things here shadowed forth ! 
 And how much consolation might the Jew find in this metaphor to revive the faint- 
 ing hopes of his patriotism, and to alleviate his wounded pride of nationality by 
 gentler and holier thoughts ! For Christ, after all, was a rod of the stem of Jesso, 
 and a branch out of his roots. The Gentiles were admitted into the Church through 
 the vestibule of the Temple. With the Jews had remained till this moment the 
 oracles of God. In Judaism its privileges, its promises, its prophecies were the 
 germs of Christianity. The new rich fruitfulness of the Gentiles was drawn from 
 the tree into which they had been grafted. Little cause had they to boast against 
 the natural branches. Deep cause had they to take warning by the fate which 
 those branches had undergone. They, in their turn, might be lopped off, and 
 though here the metaphor as such breaks down the old branches might be grafted into 
 their proper place once more. 2 Let them remember that faith was the source of 
 their new privileges, as the want of it had caused the ruin of those whom they 
 replaced ; let them not be high-minded, but fear.* 
 
 ri. 1-11. 
 
 * This of course was, physically, an impossible method of tyKtinpurrfs ; the other, if 
 adopted at all, was most rare. (V. supra, p. 12.) 
 
 * xi. 1624.
 
 FRUITS or FAITH. 501 
 
 The concluding words of this section of the Epistle open a glorious per- 
 spective of ultimate hope for all whose hearts are sufficiently large and 
 loving to accept it. He calls on the brethren not to ignore the mystery that 
 the partial hardening of Israel should only last till the fulness of the 
 Gentiles should come in ; and he appeals to Scripture (Isa. lix. 20) to sup- 
 port his prophecy that " all Israel shall be saved," beloved as they are for the 
 sake of their fathers as regajds the election of grace, though now alienated 
 for the blessing of the Gentiles as regards the Gospel. 
 
 For God's gifts and calling admit of no revocation; once given, they are given 
 for ever. 1 Once themselves disobedient, the Gentiles were now pitied in con- 
 sequence of the disobedience of the Jews ; so the Jews were now disobedient, but 
 when the pity shown to the Gentiles had achieved their full redemption, the Jews 
 in turn should share in it. 1 " For " such is the grand conclusion of this sustained 
 exposition of the Divine purposes " God shut up all into disobedience, 8 that He 
 might show mercy unto all." Many are anxious, in accordance with their theo- 
 logical views, to weaken or explain away the meaning of these words ; to show that 
 44 ail " does not really mean " all " in the glad, though it does in the gloomy 
 clause ; or to show that " having mercy upon all " is quite consistent with the final 
 nun of the vast majority. Be that as it may, the Apostle, as he contemplates the 
 universality of free redeeming grace, bursts into a paean of praise and prophecy : 
 " O the depth of the riches, and wisdom, and knowledge of God ! how unsearchable 
 are His judgments, and untrackable His ways ! For who ever fathomed the mind 
 of the Lord, or who ever became His counsellor ? Or who gave Him first, and it 
 shall be repaid to him ? For from Him, and through Him, and unto Him aro all 
 things. To Him be glory for ever. Amen." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 FRUITS OF FAITH. 
 
 44 La foi justifie quand il opere, mais il n'opere que par la charitS " (Quesnel). 
 
 41 Not that God doth require nothing unto happiness at the hands of man save 
 only a naked belief (for hope and charity we may not exclude), but that without 
 belief all other things are as nothing; and it is the ground of those other divine 
 virtues " (Hooker, Eccl. Pol. I. xi. 6). 
 
 " Faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be 
 joined with faith in every man that is justified ; but it shutteth them out from the 
 office of justifying " (Homily of Salvation, pt. i.). 
 
 [It is needless to point out that the sense of the word " faith " in these passages 
 is by no means the Pauline sense of the word."] 
 
 AT this point there is a marked break in the letter, and we feel that the 
 writer has now accomplished the main object for which he wrote. But to 
 
 1 Hos. xiii. 14, "I will redeem them from death . . . repentance shall be hid 
 from mine eyes." 
 
 2 xi. 41. If, as in this explanation, the comma is placed after ^iri0rj<rav, the connexion 
 of T(j> iifneTepta l\i?i is very awkward, and almost unparalleled. On the other haud, the 
 antithesis is spoiled if we place the comma after A, and render it, "So they too now 
 disbelieved (or disobeyed) the pity shown to VOTV" 
 
 s Iii the declaratory sens*.
 
 502 THE LE ANB WORK OS" ST. PAUL. 
 
 this, as to all his letters, he adds those noble practical exhortations, which are 
 thus made to rest, not on their own force and beauty, bnt on the securer basis 
 of the principles which he lays down in the doctrinal portion. No one felt 
 more deeply than St. Paul that it requires great principles to secure our 
 faithfulness to little duties, and that every duty, however apparently 
 insignificant, acquires a real grandeur when it is regarded in the light of those 
 principles from which its fulfilment springs. Since, then, the mercy and pity 
 of God, as being the source of His free grace, have been dwelt upon throughout 
 fche Epistle, St. Paul begins the practical part of it " I exhort you therefore, 
 brethren, by the compassions of God " for these, and not the difficult 
 doctrines of election and reprobation, are prominent in his mind " to present 
 your bodies, not like the dead offerings of Heathenism or Judaism, but " a 
 living sacrifice, holy, well-pleasing to God your reasonable service, and not to 
 be conformed to this world, but to be transformed * in the renewing of your 
 mind, that ye may discriminate what is the will of God, good and acceptable to 
 Him, and perfect." 
 
 This general exhortation is then carried into details, unsystematically 
 indeed, and even unsyntactically, but with an evident rush and glow of 
 feeling which gives to the language a perfection transcending that of conscious 
 art.* The prevalent thought is the duty of love : to the brethren, love without 
 dissimulation; to the Church, love without struggling self-assertion; 
 to the civil power, love without fear ; to the world, love without despising its 
 rights or mingling with its immoralities. 8 First, by the grace given to him, 
 he urges them " not to be high-minded above what they ought to be minded, 
 but to mind to be soberminded, 4 each in porportion to their God-apportioned 
 receptivity of faith ; " and he illustrates and enforces this duty of modest 
 simplicity in the fulfilment of their mutual ministries, 6 by touching once more 
 on the apologue of the body and the members, 6 which he has already applied 
 in his Letter to the Corinthians. The moral of the metaphor is that " Diversity 
 without unity is disorder; unity without diversity is death." 7 Then with 
 a free interchange of participles, infinitives, and imperatives, and with a mixture 
 of general and special exhortations, he urges them to love, kindliness, zeal, 
 hope, patience, prayer, generosity, forgiveness, sympathy, mutual esteem, self- 
 
 1 Ver. 2, <rv<rxjfi<mfe<r0, "fashioned in accordance;" fTafu>p<f>orfff#, "trans-formed.* 
 5xwa, as in Phil. ii. 8, is the outward, transitory fashion; ftop^, the abiding and 
 ubstantial form. 
 
 3 Ver. 3, fXT) virep^popeTv Trap' & Sel (frpovtlv, aAAct $povtr els TO mtfypbrtlv. 
 
 8 Lange ad loc. * ni. 3. 
 
 * In ver. 6 the "prophecy [i.e., high Christian teaching] according to the proportion 
 of faith" (/euro. rr)v ivaXoyCav T| TriVrew?) means that the Christian teacher is to keep 
 within the limits of his gift assigned him by his individuality (Tholuck), i.e., not to push 
 his xapK^a as a preacher into disproportionate prominence (Deut. rviii. 18). The 
 objective sense of inVris as a body of doctrines is later. Hence the common rule of 
 explaining Scripture, "according to the analogy of faith," though most true and 
 necessary, is a misapplication of the original meaning of the phrase. 
 
 6 1 Cor. xii. 1227. 
 
 7 Lange. The conception of Christian fellowship involves both unity and variety. 
 "The Spirit resolves the variety into unity, introduces variety into the unity, and 
 reconciles unity to itself through variety " (Baur).
 
 FRUITS or FAITH. 503 
 
 restraint, the steady lore of God, the steady loathing of evil, the deliberate 
 victory of virtue over vice. It is clear that the dangers which he most 
 apprehended among the Roman Christians were those exacerbations which 
 spring from an unloving and over-bearing self-confidence ; but he gives 
 a general form to all his precepts, and the chapter stands unrivalled as a 
 spontaneous sketch of the fairest graces which can adorn the Christian 
 life. 1 
 
 The first part of the thirteenth chapter has a more obviously special bear- 
 ing. It is occupied by a very earnest exhortation to obedience towards the 
 civil power, based on the repeated statements that it is ordained of God ; that 
 its aim is the necessary suppression of evil; that it was not, under ordinary 
 circumstances, any source of terror to a blameless life ; and that it should be 
 obeyed and respected, not of unwilling compulsion, but as a matter of right 
 and conscience. 8 This was, indeed, the reason why they paid taxes, 3 and why 
 the payment of them should be regarded as a duty to God. 4 
 
 , The warmth with which St. Paul speaks thus of the functions of civil 
 governors may, at first sight, seem surprising, when we remember that a 
 Helius was in the Praef ecture, a Tigellinus in the Praetorium, a Gessius Floras 
 in the provinces, and a Nero on the throne. On the other hand, it must be 
 borne in mind that the Neronian persecution had not yet broken out ; and that 
 the iniquities of individual emperors and individual governors, while it had 
 free rein in every question which affected their greed, their ambition, or their 
 lust, had not as yet by any means destroyed the magnificent ideal of Roman 
 Law. If there were bad rulers, there were also good ones. A Cicero as well 
 
 1 xii. 1 2L As regards special expressions in this chapter, we may notice ver. 9, 
 es "loathing;" icoAAw/wvoi, "bridal intimacy with. Ver. 10, rjj <f>tAo5eA<f>i* 
 , " love your brethren in the faith as though they were brethren in blood ; 
 i, Vulg. invicem praevenientee," " anticipating one another, and going before 
 one another as guides in giving honour " (ver. 11). The evidence between the readings, 
 Koipcp, " serving the opportunity," and Kvpi'y, the Lord," is very nicely balanced, but 
 probably rose from the abbreviation Kfxa. The other clause is, "In zealous work not 
 slothful ; boiling in spirit " (cf. the NU3, " a prophet " ). In ver. 13, pvtiax, " memories," 
 can hardly be the true reading. In ver. 14, the IWKOVTJ, " pursuing hospitality," may 
 
 have suggested the thought of SUOKOVTO.S, "persecutors; " ver. 16, TOI? ron-eivms ovvairayoju.eyot 
 
 is either " modestissimorum exempla sectantes" (Grot.), "letting the lowly lead you 
 with them by the hand" (masc.), or "humilibus rebus pbsecundantes," "going along 
 with lowly things" (neut.). Ver. 19, Sore TOWOV if opyjj, either (1) "Give place for the 
 divine wrath to work" (Chrys., Aug., &c.) ; or (2), "Give room to your own anger" 
 i.e., defer its outbreak this, however, would be a Latinism, "irae spatium dare (cf. 
 Virg. jEn. iy. 433); or (3) "Give place to, yield before, the wrath of your enemy." 
 The first is right. Ver. 20, "coals of fire " (Prov. xxv. 21, 22) to melt him to penitence 
 and beneficent shame. The chapter is full of beautiful trilogies of expression. 
 
 3 xiii. 5, ocayKD(7, 8, Aug.) in-ordero-eotf. (D, E, F, G, Vulg., Luther), "Yield to 
 necessity." "Pray for the established Government," said Rabbi Chaneena, " for with- 
 out it men would eat one another " (AbMda Za.ro., f. 4, 1). Josephus calls Judas the 
 Gaulonite " the author of the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy," who have " an inviolable 
 attachment to liberty," and say that God is to be the only Ruler (Antt. xxiii. 1, 6). 
 
 3 xiii. 6, reXetrt is the indicative ; not, as in the A.V., an imperative (Matt. xvii. 21). 
 In ver. 4 the ^axatpa refers to the jus gladii. A provincial governor on starting was 
 presented with a dagger by the Emperor. Trajan, in giving it, used the words Pro 
 me ; si merear, in me." 
 
 xiii. 17.
 
 504 THE LItfE AND WOEK OF Si, PA.VL. 
 
 as a Terres had once been provincial governors ; a Barea Soranus as well as a 
 Felix The Roman government, corrupt as it often was in special instances, 
 was yet the one grand power which held in check the anarchic forces which 
 but for its control were "nursing the impatient earthquake." If now and 
 then it broke down in minor matters, and more rarely on a large scale, yet the 
 total area of legal prescriptions was kept unravaged by mischievous injustice. 
 St. Paul had himself suffered from local tyranny at Philippi, but on the 
 whole, up to this time, he had some reason to be grateful to the impartiality of 
 Roman law. At Corinth he had been protected by the disdainful justice of 
 Gallic, at Ephesus by the sensible appeal of the public secretary; and not 
 long afterwards he owed his life to the soldier-like energy of a Lysias, and 
 the impartial protection of a Festus, and even of a Felix. Nay, even at his 
 first trial his undefended innocence prevailed not only over all the public 
 authority which could be arrayed against him by Sadducean priests and 
 a hostile Sanhedrin, but even over the secret influence of an Aliturns and a 
 Poppsea. Nor had the Jews any reason to be fretful and insubordinate. If 
 the ferocity of Sejanus and the alarm of Claudius had caused them much 
 suffering at Rome, yet, on the other hand, they had been protected by a 
 Julius and an Augustus, and they were in possession of legal immunities 
 which gave to their religion the recognised dignity of a religio licita. It may 
 safely be said that, in many a great city, it was to the inviolable strength and 
 grandeur of Roman law that they owed their very existence ; because, had it 
 not been for the protection thus afforded to them, they might have been liable 
 to perish by the exterminating fury of Pagan populations by whom they were 
 at once envied and disliked. 1 
 
 No doubt the force of these considerations would be fully felt by those 
 Jews who had profited by Hellenistic culture. It is obvious, however, that 
 St. Paul is here dealing with religious rather than with political or even theo- 
 cratic prejudices. The early Church was deeply affected by Essene and 
 Ebionitic elements, and St. Paul's enforcement of the truth that the civil 
 power derives its authority from God, points to the antithesis that it was not 
 the mere vassalage of the devil. It was not likely that at Rome there should 
 be any of that zealot fanaticism which held it unlawful for a Jew to recognise 
 any other earthly ruler besides God, and looked on the payment of tribute as 
 a sort of apostasy. 8 It is far more likely that the Apostle is striving to 
 counteract the restless insubordination which might spring from the preva- 
 lence of chiliastic notions such as those which we find in the Clementine 
 Homilies, that " the present world with all its earthly powers is the kingdom 
 of the devil," and that so far from regarding the civil governor as "the 
 minister of God for good," the child of the future could only look upon him 
 as the embodied representative of a spiritual enemy. This unpractical and 
 dualistic view might even claim on its side certain phrases alluding to the 
 
 1 Thus the later Eabhis found it necessary to say, with Shemuel, "The law of the 
 Gentile kingdom is valid " (Babha Kama, f. 113, 1). 
 Matt. xiii. 17.
 
 FRUITS OF FAITH. SOS 
 
 moral wickedness of the world, which had a wholly different application: 1 
 and therefore Paul, with his usual firmness, lays down in unmistakable terms 
 the rule which, humanly speaking, could alone save the rising Church from 
 utter extinction the rule, namely, of holding aloof from political distur- 
 bances. On thj whole, both Jews and Christians had learnt the lesson well, 
 and it was. therefore, the more necessary that the good effects of that faithful 
 fulfilment of the duties of citizenship, to which both Jewish historians and 
 Christian Fathers constantly appeal, should not be obliterated by the fanatical 
 theories of incipient Manichees. 
 
 The question as to the payment of civil dues leads St. Paul naturally to 
 apeak of the payment of other dues. The one debt which the Christian owes 
 to all men is the debt of love that love which prevents us from all wrong- 
 doing, and is therefore the fulfilment of the law. To this love he invites them 
 in a powerful appeal, founded on the depth of the night and the nearness of 
 the dawn, so that it was high time to put away the works of darkness and put 
 on the arms of light 2 nay, more, to put on, as a close-fitting robe, by close 
 spiritual communion, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. 3 
 
 The fourteenth chapter again reveals the existence of Ebionitic elements 
 in the Roman Church. In a strange city, and especially if he were ont free, 
 a scrupulous Jew, uninfluenced by Hellenism, would find it so impossible to 
 fulfil the requirements of the Law respecting clean and unclean meats, and 
 still more the many minute additions which Rabbinic Pharisaism had made to 
 those requirements, that he would be forced either to sacrifice his convictions, 
 or to reduce his diet to the simplest elements. As St. Paul does not allude 
 fco the Law, it is probable that he is here dealing with scruples even more 
 deeply seated. HIB object is to reconcile the antagonistic feelings of two 
 classes of Christians, whom he calls respectively the " strong " and the " weak." 
 The " strong " regarded all days as equally sacred, or, as the " weak " would 
 have said, as equally profane ; whereas the " weak " surrounded the Sabbath 
 and the Jewish festivals with regulations intended to secure their rigid observ- 
 ance. 4 Again, the " strong " ate food of every description without the smallest 
 scruple, whereas the " weak " looked on all animal food with such disgust 
 and suspicion that they would eat nothing but herbs. 6 It is obvious that in 
 adopting so severe a course they went far beyond the requirements of Levit- 
 
 1 John Xli. 81. 6 apx<av TOU ic6cr/xov rovrow ; Epll. ii. 2, ttsv apxovra Trj? <f outn'os rov ac'pos 
 
 3 xiii. 12, or ''the deeds of light " foya, A, D, E). 
 8 Of. Gal. ill. 27, Xprr6v fvrfvVaotfe. 
 
 4 Rom. riv. 6. The words, " and he who regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth 
 not regard it," are omitted by N, A, B, 0, D, E, F, G, Vet., It., Vulg., Copt. On the 
 other hand, the Syriac has it, and the omission may be due to the homoeoteleuton of <t>povtl, 
 or to doctrinal prejudices, which regarded the clause as dangerous. The clause is far too 
 liberal to have been inserted by a second century scribe ; but even if it be omitted, the 
 principle which it involves is clearly Implied in the first half of the verse, and in the 
 previous verse. 
 
 * Seneca tells us that in hia youth he had adopted from his Pythagorean teacher 
 Sotion the practice of vegetarianism, but his father made him give it up because it 
 rendered him liable to the suspicion of foreign superstitions (probably Judaism). See 
 Skelters after Ghd, p. 16.
 
 506 THE LIFE AND WORK OS 1 ST. PATTL. 
 
 ism, and when we find the very same views and practices existing in Borne 
 during the next century, 1 it is hardly possible to avoid the suspicion that the 
 Judaic Christianity of these " weak " brethren was tinged with those Essene, 
 Phrygian, or Pythagorean elements which led them to look on the material 
 and the sensuous as something intrinsically dangerous, if not as positively 
 evil. Epiphanius says that Ebion visited Borne ; * and although it is more 
 than doubtful whether there ever was such a person, yet the statement shows 
 the prevalence of such views. Now one of the Ebionitie principles was that 
 all meat is impure, 3 and in the Clementine Homilies the eating of meat is 
 attributed to impure demons and bloodthirsty giants ; and the Apostle Peter 
 is made to say to Clement that " he makes use only of bread and olives and 
 (sparingly) of other vegetables " * a tradition which we also find attached by 
 Clemens of Alexandria to the names of St. Matthew and James the Lord's 
 brother, and the latter we are told drank no wine or strong drink. 6 It is very 
 possible that St. Paul did not see the necessity of formally warning the Boman 
 Christians against the tendency to dualism. This might be the subterranean 
 origin of wrong notions long^ before it had risen into clear consciousness. 
 What St. Paul did see was the danger that if " the weak " prevailed, Chris- 
 tianity might be frittered away into a troublesome and censorious externalism ; 
 or that the " strong " might treat their weaker brethren with a rough and 
 self -exalting contempt which would either put force on tender consciences, or 
 create a permanent disruption between the different members of the Church. 8 
 He treats the difficulty in the same masterly manner broad yet sympa- 
 thetic, inflexible in convictions yet considerate towards prejudices which 
 he had already displayed in dealing with a similar question in his Epistle 
 to the Corinthians. But the difference between the tone adopted in this 
 chapter and that in the Epistle to the Galatians is very remarkable, and 
 shows the admirable tact and versatility of the Apostle. He is there es- 
 tablishing the rights of Christian freedom against the encroachments of 
 Pharisaism, so that the assertion of the liberty of the Gentiles was a matter 
 of essential importance. He therefore speaks, as it was a duty to speak, 
 with an almost rough contempt of attaching any vital importance to " beg- 
 garly elements." Here his tone is altogether different, because his object 
 is altogether different, as also were his readers. The right to enjoy our 
 liberty he can here in the most absolute manner assume. As to the merit 
 of the particular scrupulosities which were in vogue among the weak, he 
 has no occasion to do more than imply his own indifference. What is here 
 necessary is to warn the " strong " not to be arrogant in their condemna- 
 tions, and the " weak " not to be supercilious in their self-esteem. He has 
 shown the universality of guilt, and the universality of grace, and he has 
 now to show the sacred duty of unanimity among those thus universally 
 
 1 The Ebionites regarded the Sabbath as the holiest command of the Jewish religion. 
 3 Haer. xxx. 18. J Epiphan. Haer. in. 15. 
 
 * Horn. xii. 6. ' Paedag. ii. 1 ; Euseb. H. E. ii. 23 ; Baur, Paul. i. 358. 
 
 Gal. Ui. ; T.I 9; vi. 12,13.
 
 FBUITS OF FAITH. 607 
 
 called, defending this unanimity against censoriousness on the one hand, and 
 against disdain on the other. 
 
 He does not attempt to conceal the bent of his own sympathies ; he de- 
 clares himself quite unambiguously on the side of the " strong." The life of 
 the Christian is a life in Christ, and rises transcendently above the minutiae 
 of ritual, or the self-torments of asceticism. " The kingdom of God " such 
 is the great axiom which he lays down for the decision of all such questions 
 " is not meat and drink ; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost." The " strong," therefore, in St. Paul's judgment, were in the right 
 But, for this very reason, it was necessary to warn them against the contemp- 
 tuous assertion of their superior wisdom. 
 
 i. Let each party follow their own course if they believe it to be the best, but 
 let each abstain from the guilt and folly of condemning the other. God, not man, 
 is the judge, by whose judgment each man stands or falls. Nay, he snail stand, for 
 God is able to make him stand. Conceited illuminism is as deep an offence against 
 charity as saintly self-satisfaction. The first counsel, then, on which he strongly 
 insists is mutual forbearance, the careful avoidance of arguments and discussions 
 about disputed points. Let there be no intolerant scrupulosity, and no uncharitable 
 disdain, but an avoidance of dispute and a reciprocal recognition of honest convic- 
 tions. These differences are not about essentials, and it is not for any man to adopt 
 a violently dogmatic or uncharitably contemptuous tone towards those who differ 
 from himself respecting them. The party-spirit of religious bodies too often finds 
 the fuel for its burning questions in mere weeds and straw. l 
 
 ii. The second counsel is tbe cultivation of careful consideration which shall not 
 shock tender consciences ; it; is, in short, condescendence towards the weakness of 
 others, a willingness to take less tban our due, and a readiness to waive our own 
 rights, 2 and enjoy as a private possession between ourselves and God the confidence 
 of our faith. His own positive and sacred conviction is tbat these rules about food 
 are unessential ; that no food is intrinsically unclean. But if by acting on this con- 
 viction we lead otbers to do the same, in spite of the protest of their consciences, 
 then for a paltry self -gratification we are undoing God's work, and slaying a soul 
 for which Christ died. 3 Rather than do this, rather than place a needless stumbling- 
 block in any Christian's path, it were well neither to eat meat nor to drink wine, 
 because Christian love is a thing more precious than even Christian liberty. 4 
 
 iii. His third counsel is the obedience to clear convictions. 5 Happy the man 
 who has no scruples as to things intrinsically harmless. But if another cannot 
 
 1 adv. 1 12, irpo<r\afji.fi<ive<r6c, " take by the hand ;" M ty Staieola-tit JioAoyto>uoc, "not by 
 way of criticising for them their scrupulous niceties " (Tholuck). 
 
 2 2vyca.Ta/Jao-ts (see Rom. TV. 1), eAxuro-ovcrfcu (John iii. 30), i<rrepei<r0ai (Phil. IV. 12 ; 1 
 Cor. vi 7) ; three great Christian conceptions which have in the practice of " religious" 
 parties become perilously obsolete. 
 
 3 1 Cor. viii. 13. 4 xiv. 1321 
 
 * Augustine's " Omnis infidelium vita, peccatum est " is an instance of the many 
 extravagant inferences which are the curse of theology, and which arise from recklessly 
 tearing words from the context, and pushing them beyond their legitimate significance. 
 We have no right to apply the text apart from the circumstances to which it immediately 
 refers. As a universal principle it is only applicable to the party of which the Apostle is 
 speaking. When applied analogically, "faith "can here only be taken to mean "the 
 moral conviction of the rectitude of a mode of action" (Chrys., De Wette, Meyer, &c.). 
 To pervert the meaning of texts, as is done so universally, is to make a bad play upon 
 words. Our Art. XIII. does not in the least exclude the possibility of gratia, pracveniens 
 even in heathens (see Horn. ii. & 15). If Augustine meant that even the morality and 
 virtue of pagans, heretics, &c., is sin, his axiom is not only morose and repellent, Phari- 
 saical and nnti-smptural, but historically, spiritually, and morally false.
 
 508 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 emancipate himself from these scruples, however needless, and exhibits in his own 
 conduct the same freedom in defiance of his scruples, then he stands self-condemned. 
 Why f Because in that case he is acting falsely to that faith which is the ruling 
 principle of his Christian life, and whatsoever is not of faith, whatsoever involves 
 the life of self, and not the life of Christ is sin. 1 
 
 The true principle, then, is that we ought not to please ourselves, even as Christ 
 pleased not Himself, but to bear the infirmities of the weak, and aim at mutual 
 edification. This is the lesson of Scripture, and he prays that the God of that 
 patience and comfort which it is the object of Scripture to inspire, may give them 
 mutual unanimity in Jesus Christ. And addressing alike the " weak " Judaizers 
 and the " strong" Gentiles, he concludes his advice with the same general precept 
 with which he began, ' ' AVheref ore take one another by the hand, as Christ also 
 took us by the hand for the glory of God." * 
 
 And Christ had thus set His example of love and help to both the great divisions 
 of the Church. He had become the minister of the circumcision on behalf of 
 God's truth, to fulfil the promise made to the fathers ; and to the Gentiles out of 
 compassion. Christ therefore had shown kindness to both, and that the Gentiles 
 were indeed embraced in this kindness which, perhaps, in their pride of liberty 
 they did not always feel inclined to extend to their weaker brethren he further 
 proves by an appeal to Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms. 8 The last citation 
 ends with the words "shall hope," and he closes this section with yet another 
 prayer that the God of hope would fill them with all joy and peace in believing, 
 that they might abound in hope in the power of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 But once more he takes up the pen to assure them of his confidence in 
 them, and to apologise for the boldness of his letter. His plea is that Lr 
 wished to fulfil to the utmost that ministry to the Geutiles which he here call's 
 a priestly ministry, because he is as it were instrumental in presenting the 
 Gentiles as an acceptable offering to God. 4 Of this Apostolate (giving all 
 the glory to God) of the signs by which it had been accompanied of the 
 width of its range, from Jerusalem to Illyricum he may make a humble 
 boast. 
 
 And he is still ambitious to preach in regions where Christ has not been named. 
 He will not stay with them, because he has seen enough of the evil caused by tho.% 
 who built on a foundation which they had not laid ; but he has often felt a strong 
 desire to visit them on his way to Spain, 8 and after a partial enjoyment of their 
 society, 8 to be furthered on his journey by their assistance. He has hitherto been 
 prevented from taking that journey, but now since for the present his duties in the 
 feast are over he hopes to carry it out, and to gratify his earnest desire to see them. 
 At present, however, he is about to start for Jerusalem, to accompany the deputies 
 who are to convey to the poor saints there that temporal gift from the Christians of 
 Macedonia and Achaia which is after all but a small recognition of the spiritual 
 gifts which the Gentiles have received from them. When this task is over he will 
 
 1 xiv. 22, 23. It is at this point that some MSS. place the doxology of xvi. 25 27 ; 
 but this would be a most awkward break between the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters, 
 and the reasons for regarding the fifteenth chapter as spurious seem to me to be wholly 
 inconclusive. 
 
 2 rr. 18. 3 Deut. xxxii. 43 ; Ps. xviii. 49 ; cxvii. 1 ; Isa. xl. 10. 
 
 4 xv. 16, 'lepovfrfovvT-a. It is a in. teyofievov not due to any sacrificial conception of the 
 Christian ministry (of which there is not in St. Paul so much as a single trace), but to 
 the particular illustration which he here adopts. 
 
 6 xv. 24 omit fXevVo^ai jrpbs u/aa? with all the best MSS. " Having a desire for 
 years past to come to you whenever I journey into Spain." 
 
 " uon quantum vellem sed quantum hceret " (Grofc,),
 
 I-RTTITS OP FAITH. 509 
 
 turn his face towards Spain, and visit them on his way, and he is confident that he 
 shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He, there- 
 fore, earnestly entreats their prayers that he may be rescued from the perils which 
 he knows await him from the Jews in Jerusalem, and that the contribution due to 
 his exertions may be favourably received by the saints, that so by God's will he 
 may come to them in joy, and that they may mutually refresh each other. 1 " And 
 the God of peace be with you all. Amen."' 
 
 There in all probability ended the Epistle to the Romans. I have already 
 given abundant reason in support of the ingenious conjecture 3 that the 
 greater part of the sixteenth chapter was addressed to the Epliesian Church. 4 
 Even a careless reader could scarcely help observing whatVe should not at all 
 have conjectured from the earlier part of the Epistle that there were schisms 
 and scandals (17 20) in the Roman Church, and teachers who deliberately 
 fomented them, slaves of their own belly, and by their plausibility and 
 flattery deceiving the hearts of the simple. 5 Nor, again, can any one miss the 
 fact that the position of the Apostle towards his correspondents in verse 19 is 
 far more severe, paternal, and authoritative than in the other chapters. If 
 as is surely an extremely reasonable supposition St. Paul desired other 
 Churches besides the stranger Church of Rome to reap the benefit of his 
 ripest thoughts, and to read the maturest statement of the Gospel which he 
 preached, then several copies of the main part of the Epistle must have been 
 made by the amanuenses, of whom Tertius was one, and whose services the 
 Apostle was at that moment so easily able to procure. In that case nothing is 
 more likely than that the terminations of the various copies should have 
 varied with the circumstances of the Churches, and nothing more possible 
 than that in some one copy the various terminations should have been care- 
 fully preserved. We have at any rate in this hypothesis a simple explanation 
 of the three final benedictions (20, 24, 27) which occur in this chapter alone. 
 
 The fullest of the Apostle's letters concludes with the most elaborate of 
 his doxologies.' 
 
 1 xv. 32, KU avv*vairtt.v<miiM v^lv is omitted by B. 
 
 * xv. 933. First made by SchuLs. 
 
 4 "We may be very thankful for its preservation, as it has a deep personal Interest. 
 On deaconesses see Bingham i. 334 366. Phoebe was probably a widow. Verse 4, 
 vTtiS,)Ka.v, "laid their own necks under the axe," a probable allusion to some risk at 
 Corinth (Acts xviii. 12 ; adx. 32). In verse 5 the true reading is 'A<r'<. Verse 7, 
 owaixjxoAwTovs probably at Ephesus, emori/aoi ev Toi9 aTrooToAou, "illustrious among the 
 missionaries of the truth " (2 Cor. viii. 23 ; Acts xiv. 4), in the less restricted sense of 
 the word. It is hardly conceivable that St. Paul would make it a merit that the 
 Apostles knew them and thought highly of them (Gal. i. ii.) verse 13. Rufus, perhaps 
 one of the sons of Simon of Cyrene (Mark xv. 22) verse 14. Hermas, not the author 
 of The Shepherd, who could hardly have been born at this time. Verse 16, ^l^a. ayior, 
 1 Thess. v. 26 ; 1 Pet. v. 14 ; Luke vii. 45. The attempted identification of Tertius with 
 Silas, because the Hebrew for Tertius ('ttJ'V?}) sounds like Silas, is one of the imbecilities 
 of fanciful exegesis. On such names as Tryphaena and Tryphosa, voluptuous in sound 
 and base in meaning, which may have suggested to St. Paul the Kon-iwo-a? iv Kvpup as a 
 sort of noble paronomasia, see Merivale, Hist. vi. 260, and Wordsworth, ad loc, 
 
 5 Phil. iii. 2, 18 ; 2 Cor. xi. 20. 
 
 8 "Whether the Epistle proceeded in two forms from the Apostle's hands, the one 
 closing with chapter xiv. and the doxology, the other extended by the addition of the two 
 i&st chapters, or whether any other more satisfactory explanation can be offered of the
 
 510 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 " Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my Gospel, and the 
 preaching of Jesug Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, buried in 
 silence in eternal ages, but manifested now and made known by the prophetic 
 Scriptures, according to the command of the Eternal God unto obedience to the 
 faith to all nations : To the only wise God, through Jesus Christ to whom be the 
 glory for ever. Amen." 1 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 
 
 " Show me some one person formed according to .the principles he professes. 
 Show me one who is sick and happy ; in danger and happy ; dying and happy ; 
 exiled and happy ; disgraced and happy." EPICTBTUS. 
 
 IT was now about the month of February, A.D. 58, and the work which St. 
 Paul had set before him at Corinth was satisfactorily concluded. Having 
 been nine months in Europe, 2 he was anxious to get to Jerusalem by the Pass- 
 over, and intended to sail straight from Corinth to one of the ports of 
 Palestine. Every preparation was made ; it almost seems that he had got on 
 board sliip ; when he was informed of a sudden 3 plot on the part of the Jews 
 to murder him. As to all the details we are left in the dark. We know that 
 the previous plot of the Jews, nearly five years earlier, 4 had been foiled by the 
 contemptuous good sense of Gallic ; but even if their revenge were otherwise 
 likely to be laid aside, we cannot doubt that ample fuel had since been heaped 
 upon the smouldering fire of their hatred. From every seaport of the 
 JEgean, from the highlands of Asia Minor, from its populous shores, from 
 Troas under the shadows of Mount Ida, to Athens under the shadow of Mount 
 Pentelicus, they would hear rumours of that daring creed which seemed to 
 trample on all their convictions, and fling to the Gentiles their most cherished 
 hopes. The Jewish teachers who tried to hound the Judaising Christians 
 against St. Paul would stand on perfectly good terms with them, and these 
 Judaisers would take a pleasure in disseminating the deadliest misrepresenta- 
 tions of Paul's doctrine and career. But apart from all misrepresentation, 
 his undeniable arguments were quite enough to madden them to frenzy. We 
 
 phenomenon of omission, repetition, transposition, authenticity, must be left for further 
 investigation." "Westcott (Vaughan's Romans, p. xxv.). One theory is that xii. xiv. 
 were substituted later for IT. xvi., and then both were accumulated in one copy with 
 some modifications. 
 
 1 Of. Eph. iii. 20, 21. The text, as it stands, involves an anacoluthon, since the <L 
 should properly be eiceiVw. Tholuck, &c., think that the Apostle was led by the paren- 
 thesis from a doxology to God to a doxology to Christ. It may be that he meant to 
 insert the word xp> but lost sight of it in the length of the sentence. Here, as in 
 Hab. iii. 6, the word au6>ao? is used in two consecutive clauses, where in the first clause 
 all are agreed that it cannot mean " endless " since it speaks of things which have 
 already come to au end. 
 
 a He left Ephesus before the Pentecost of A.D. 57. 
 
 * Act! TX. 8, juMXAom >dyr0<u. ycyopfap. 4 A.D. 53.
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 511 
 
 may be sure that St. Paul taught as he wrote, and since we have noticed it as 
 a characteristic of his intellect that he is haunted by words and expressions, 1 
 we might infer, a priori, even if it were not abundantly evident in his 
 writings, that he is still more powerfully possessed and absorbed by any 
 thoughts which might have been forced into immediate prominence. We may 
 regard it as psychologically certain that his discourses at Corinth were the 
 echo of the arguments which fill the two Epistles which he wrote at Corinth ; 
 and to the Jews the conclusions which they were meant to establish would be 
 regarded as maddening blasphemies. " There is neither Jew nor Gentile " 
 where, then, is the covenant to Abraham and to his seed ? " There is neither 
 circumcision nor uncircumcision " where, then, is Moses and all the splen- 
 dour of Sinai P " Weak and beggarly elements " are these the terms to 
 apply to the inspired, sacred, eternal Thorah, in which God himself meditates, 
 which is the glory of the world ? We are not surprised that the Jews should 
 get up a plot. Paul, under the aegis of Roman authority, might be safe in 
 the city, but they would avenge themselves on him as soon as his ship had 
 left the shore. The wealthy Jewish merchants of Corinth would find no diffi- 
 culty in hearing of sailors and captains of country vessels who were sufficiently 
 dependent on them to do any deed of violence for a small consideration. 
 
 How was the plot discovered ? We do not know. Scenes of tumult, and 
 hairbreadth escapes, and dangerous adventures, were so common in St. 
 Paul's life, that neither he, nor any one else, has cared to record their details. 
 We only know that, after sudden discussion, it was decided, that Paul, 
 with an escort of the delegates, quite sufficiently numerous to protect him 
 from ordinary dangers, should go round by Macedonia. The hope of reaching 
 Jerusalem by the Passover had, of course, to be abandoned ; the only chance 
 left was to get there by Pentecost. It was doubtless overruled for good that 
 it should be so, for if St. Paul had been in the Holy City at the Passover he 
 would have been mixed up by his enemies with the riot and massacre which 
 about that time marked the insane rising of the Egyptian impostor who called 
 himself the Messiah.* 
 
 Of -the seven converts' who accompanied St. Paul Sosipater son of 
 Pyrrhus, 4 a Bercean, Aristarchus and Secundus of Thessalonica, Gains of 
 Dorbe, Timotheus of Lystra, Tychicus and Trophimus of Ephesus, and Luke 
 all except the latter left him apparently at Philippi, and went on to Troas 
 to await him there. 6 St. Luke was closely connected with Philippi, where St. 
 
 1 V. tupra, pp. 273, 387, 407 ; infra, pp. 516, 698. 8 Verse 3, *yVrro ywSfj. 
 
 * In verse 4 the reading, i^pl T>}S 'A<rw, is not quite certain, since it is omitted in , B, 
 Coptic (both versions), and the Jithiopic. Some, at any rate, of the converts Luke, 
 Aristarchus, and Trophimus, if not others accompanied him all the way to Jerusalem 
 xxi. 29, xxvii. 2, 1 Cor. xvi 3, 4. How is it that there were no Corinthian delegates ? 
 Had the large promises of Corinth ended, after all, in words ? or did they entrust their 
 contributions to some of the other deputies ? 
 
 4 The nuppov was, perhaps, added to distinguish him from the Sosipater of Bom. xri. 
 M, N, A, B, D, E. 
 
 8 Verse 5. If irp<xrA0dxT (N, A, B, E,) be the right reading, Tychicus and Trophinrai 
 must have met Paul at Troas.
 
 512 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Paul had left him on his first visit, 1 and the two stayed at the Roman colony 
 to keep the Passover. Very happy, we may be sure, was that quiet time spent 
 by St. Paul in the bosom of the Church which he loved best of all amid the 
 most blameless and the most warm-hearted of all his converts. Years must 
 have elapsed before he again spent a Passover in circumstances so peaceful 
 and happy. 2 
 
 The eight days of the feast ended in that year on Monday, April 3, and on 
 the next day they set sail. Detained by calms, or contrary winds, they took 
 five days 8 to sail to Troas, and there they again stayed seven days. 4 The delay 
 was singular, considering the haste with which the Apostle was pressing for- 
 ward to make sure of being at Jerusalem by Pentecost. It was now about the 
 10th of April, and as the Pentecost of that year fell on May 17, St. Paul, 
 dependent as he was on the extreme uncertainties of ancient navigation, had 
 not a single day to spare. We may be quite sure that it was neither the 
 splendour of the town, with its granite temples and massive gymnasium, that 
 detained him, nor all the archaic and poetic associations of its neighbourhood, 
 nor yet the loveliness of the groves and mountains and gleams of blue sea. 
 Although his former visits had been twice cut short once by the Macedonian 
 vision, and once by his anxiety to meet Titus it is even doubtful whether he 
 would have been kept there by the interest which he must have necessarily felt 
 in the young and flourishing Church of a town which was one of the Tory few 
 in which he had not been subjected to persecution. The delay was therefore 
 probably due to the difficulty of finding or chartering a vessel such as they 
 required. 6 
 
 Be that as it may, his week's sojourn was marked by a scene which is 
 peculiarly interesting, as one of the few glimpses of ancient Christian worship 
 which the New Testament affords. The wild disorders of vanity, fanaticism, and 
 greed, which produced so strange a spectacle in the Church of Corinth, would 
 give us, if we did not regard them as wholly exceptional, a most unfavourable 
 conception of these Sunday assemblies. Very different, happily, is the scene to 
 which we are presented on this April Sunday at Alexandria Troas, A.D. 58. 5 
 
 It was an evening meeting. Whether at this period the Christians had 
 already begun the custom of meeting twice early in the morning, before 
 dawn, to sing and pray, and late in the evening to partake of the Love Feast 
 and the Lord's Supper, as they did some fifty years after this time in the 
 neighbouring province of Bithynia we are not told. Great obscurity hangs 
 over the observance of the Lord's day in the first century. The Jewish 
 
 1 The first person plural is resumed in the narrative at xx. 5, having been abandoned 
 at xvi. 17. It is now continued to the end of the Acts, and Luke seems to have remained 
 with St. Paul to the last (2 Tim. iv. 11). 
 
 2 Lewin, Fasti Sacri, 1857. 
 
 3 It had only taken them two days to sail from Troas to Neapolis, the port of Philippi, 
 on a former occasion, xvi. 11. 
 
 4 Compare xx. 6, xd. 4, xxviil. 14. 2 Cor. ii. 13. 
 
 ' It was early called Sunday, even by Christians. TJ} nv 'HAi'ov tayopcVg iMMf (Just 
 Mart. Apul. ii. 228). 
 
 Plin. Ep. x. 96. "Quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem con venire , . . quibus
 
 ^ THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 513 
 
 Christians doubtless continued to keep the Sabbath, but St. Paul reprobates 
 the adoption of any such custom among the Gentiles; and, indeed, his 
 language seems to show that he did not regard with favour any observance of 
 times or seasons which savoured at all of Sabbatical scrupulosity. 1 All that 
 we know is, that from the Resurrection onwards, the first day of the week was 
 signalised by special Christian gatherings for religious purposes, and that on 
 this particular Sunday evening the members of the Church of Troas were 
 assembled, in accordance with their usual custom, to partake of the Love 
 Feast, and to commemorate the death of Christ in the Holy Communion. 2 
 
 The congregation may have been all the more numerous because it was 
 known that on the next day the Apostle and his little company would leave the 
 place. They were gathered in one of those upper rooms on the third storey, 
 which are the coolest and pleasantest part of an Eastern house. The labours 
 of the day were over, and the sun had set, and as three weeks had now elapsed 
 since the full moon of the Passover, there was but a pale crescent to dispel the 
 darkness. But the upper room was full of lamps, 3 and in the earnestness of 
 his overflowing heart, Paul, knowing by many a mysterious intimation the 
 dangers which were awaiting him, continued discoursing to them till midnight. 
 On the broad sill of one of the open windows, of which the lattice or enclosing 
 shutter had been flung wide open to catch the cool sea breeze, sat a boy named 
 Eutychus.* The hour was very late, the discourse unusually long, the topics 
 with which it dealt probably beyond his comprehension. Though he was 
 sitting in the pleasantest place in the room, where he would enjoy all the air 
 there was, yet the heat of a crowded meeting, and the glare of the many lamps, 
 and the unbroken stream of the speaker's utterance, 6 sent the lad fast asleep. 
 The graphic description of St. Luke might almost make us believe that he had 
 been watching him, not liking, and perhaps not near enough to awaken him, 
 and yet not wholly insensible of his danger, as first of all he began to nod, 
 then his head gradually sank down on his breast, and, at last, he fell with a 
 rush and cry from the third storey into the courtyard beneath. 8 We can 
 imagine the alarm and excitement by which the voice of the speaker was 
 suddenly interrupted, as some of the congregation ran down the outside 
 staircase 7 to see what had happened. It was dark, 8 and the poor lad lay 
 
 peractis morem sibi discedendi fuisse rursusque coeundi ad capiendum cibum, promiscuum 
 tamen et innoxium. 
 
 1 Rom. xiv. 5 ; Gal. iv. 10 ; Col. ii. 16. 
 
 3 This is implied by the expression owjjy^eVwx ^t&v icAa<r<u aprov. Cf. the word imawa.yu-vn, 
 Heb. x. 25, and <ruvots. 
 
 3 This is with St. Luke the casual incident mentioned by an eye-witness, on whose 
 mind the scene was vividly impressed. The lamps are sufficiently accounted for by the 
 darkness, but the mention of them is valuable, as showing how little of secresy or 
 disorder attended these late meetings. They had not as yet become subjects of suspicion, 
 but it was not long before they did. 
 
 4 It is a common slave name, but nothing more is known of him. 
 V 6T. 9, Sia\eyofLtvm> TOW IlauAou girl nAetoi/. 
 
 ' Ver.9, /caTa^npofievo? vinnp JJadci . . . KarevexOelt airb TOV vmxm iirt<ret>. Karcufie'pcafc . IB ft 
 
 vox tolemnis de hoc re. Aristot. de Insommis, iii. &c. 
 
 7 i>a0a0jiot. s Being now late at night, the crescent moon must have et.
 
 514 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 senseless, and " was taken up dead." * A cry of horror and wailing rose from 
 the bystanders; but Paul, going down-stairs, fell on him, and clasping his 
 arms round him, 2 said, " Do not bo alarmed, for his life is in him." After he 
 had calmed the excitement by this remark, he left the lad to the effects of rest 
 and quiet, and the kindly care, perhaps, of the deaconesses and other women 
 who were present ; for the narrative simply adds that the A postle went up- 
 stairs again, and after " breaking the bread," 3 words descriptive probably of 
 the eucharistic consecration and making a meal, which describes the subse- 
 quent Agapd, he continued in friendly intercourse with the congregation till 
 the dawn of day, and then went out. By that time Eutychus bid fully 
 recovered. " They led the boy alive " apparently into the upper chamber 
 " and were not a little comforted." 
 
 Next day the delegates these " first Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land " 
 went down to their vessel to sail round Cape Lectum, while Paul went by 
 land * across the base of the promontory to rejoin them at Assos. "Whether he 
 had friends to visit on the way, or whether he wished to walk those twenty 
 miles through the pleasant oak-groves along the good Roman roads in silent 
 commune with his own spirit, we do not know. Natures like his, however 
 strong may be their yearning for sympathy, yet often feel an imperious 
 necessity for solitude. If he had heard the witty application by Stratonicus, 
 of Homer's line, 
 
 *A<T(Toy tff" &s Key Buararov o\fOpov rtpfnaO' fcqcu, 
 
 he might, while smiling at the gay jest directed against the precipitous descent 
 from the town to the harbour, have thought that for him too on his way to 
 bonds and imprisonment, and perhaps to death itself there was a melancholy 
 meaning in the line. 5 Passing between the vast sarcophagi in the street of 
 tombs, and through the ancient gate which still stands in ruin, he made his 
 way down the steep descent to the port, and there found the vessel awaiting 
 him. St. Luke, who was one of those on board, here gives a page of his diary, 
 as the ship winged her way among the isles of Greece. The voyage seems to 
 have been entirely prosperous. The north-west wind which prevails at that 
 season would daily swell the great main-sail, and waft the vessel merrily 
 through blue seas under the shadow of old poetic mountains, by famous cities, 
 along the vernal shores. That same evening they arrived at Mitylene, the 
 bright -capital of Lesbos, the home of Sappho and Alcseus, and the cradle of 
 lyric song. Here they anchored, because the moonless night rendered it unsafe 
 to thread their course among the many intricacies of that sinuous coast. Next 
 
 1 De Wette, Olshausen, Meyer, Evald, and many others, take veicpbs to mean " as 
 dead," "apparently dead," "in a dead swoon," interpreting this word by St. Paul'i 
 ) 0opvpti<r6t . . . yap, but the r/yayov , . . <avra. of vs. 12 seems to show St. Luke'* 
 meaning. 
 
 2 ir<ire<riir . . . oviurtp&afiav, 1 Kings XVli. 21 ; 2 Kings IV. 34. 
 * Ver. 11, KAdtrat rov iprov, KCU. ytvtrafievos. 
 
 4 jrtfeveu' possibly, but not necessarily, on foot. 
 
 8 H, vi. 143. The pun may be freely rendered " Go to Assos, If yon want to meet 
 your fate." The Vulgate, too, confuses the name Assoa and the adverb asson ("near") 
 
 In .TTVn. IS,
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 515 
 
 day they anchored off rocky Chios, whose green fields wore the fabled birth- 
 place of Homer. 1 Next day they touched for a short time at Samos, and then 
 sailed across the narrow channel to anchor for the night in the island-harbour 
 of Trogyllium, under the ridge of Mycale, so famous for Conon's victory. 
 Next day, sailing past the entrance of the harbour of Ephesus, they came to 
 anchor at Miletus. St. Paul would gladly have visited Ephesus if time had 
 permitted, but he was so anxious to do all in his power to reach Jerusalem by 
 Pentecost, and therefore to avoid all delays, whether voluntary or accidental, 
 that he resisted the temptation. At Miletus, however, the vessel had to stop, 
 and Paul determined to utilise the brief delay. He had probably arrived 
 bout noon, and at once sent a messenger to the elders of the Church of 
 Ephesus to come and see him. 2 It was but a distance of from thirty to forty 
 niiles along a well-kept road, and the elders 3 might easily be with him by the 
 next day, which, reckoning from his departure at Troas, was probably a 
 Sunday. He spent the day in "their company, and before parting delivered 
 them an address which abounds in his peculiar forms of expression, and gives 
 a deeply interesting sketch of his work at Ephesus. 
 
 " Te know," he said, " how from the first day on which I set foot in Asia I 
 bore myself with you, serving the Lord with all lowly-mindedness, and tears, 
 and trials that happened to me in the plots of the Jews ; * how I reserved 
 nothing that was profitable, 6 but preached to you, and taught you publicly, 
 and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and Greeks repentance 
 towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. And now behold I, 
 bound in the spirit, 6 am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what may 
 happen to me there, save that in every city the Holy Spirit testifies to me, 
 saving that bonds and tribulations await me. But I regard it as of no 
 moment, nor do I hold my soul so precious to myself 7 as to finish my course, 8 
 
 1 TV<J>\b iT)p oljeei Si Xwa ivt jrcuiraXoeVon (dp. Thuc. ill. 104). 
 
 1 It is impossible to determine whether the vessel had been chartered by Paul and 
 his companions, or whether they were dependent on its movements. Verse 16 is not 
 decisive. 
 
 3 It is of course known that the words "presbyter" and "bishop" are used inter- 
 changeably in the New Testament" (see ver. 28, where the E.V. has "overseers" for 
 "bishops"). 'Eirric6jrovs rovt irpe&fivTipovt KoAei an<porepa yip tt\tv K.O.T cxetvoy TOV /ccupbr T 
 evoMaTa (Theodor. ad Phil. i. 1). 
 
 4 These are not mentioned in the narrative. This is one of the many casual indica- 
 tions that St. Luke knew many more particulars than it entered into his plan to detail. 
 
 ' Ver. 20, ljre<rriXofiiji< (lit. reefed up"). 
 
 The nautical word (cf. jrXripo^opi'a, Col. ii. 2, 
 
 Iv. 12 ; (rreAAdjoievot, 2 Thess. iii. 6 ; 2 Cor. viii. 20), so natural in a speaker who must have 
 heard the word every day in his voyage, is very characteristic of St. Paul, who constantly 
 draws his metaphors from the sights and circumstances immediately around him. He 
 uses it again in ver. 27. These little peculiarities of style are quite inimitable, and, as 
 Ewald says, "to doubt the genuineness of this speech is folly itself." Besides many 
 other indications of authenticity, it contains at least a dozen phrases and constructions 
 which are more or less exclusively Pauline. 
 
 * Ver. 22. Though the true order is Se/iVo* y, M, A, B, C, E, the emphasis is best 
 brought out in English, by putting "I" first. 
 
 " In the extreme varieties of the MSS. in this clause I follow , ovttvos Xdyov ov &>x, 
 This is the very spirit of Luther on his way to Worms. 
 
 8 Omit M er x p with , A, B, D. It is interpolated from Phil. L 4 ; Col. L 11 ; cf. 
 3 Tim. iv. 7.
 
 516 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus to testify l the Gospel 
 of the grace of God. And now behold I know that ye shall never see my face 
 again, all you among whom I passed proclaiming the kingdom. 2 Therefore, I 
 call you to witness this very day that I am pure from the blood of all. For I 
 reserved nothing, but preached to you the whole counsel of God. Take heed, 
 then, to yourselves, and to all the flock over which the Holy Ghost appointed 
 you bishops to feed the Church of the Lord 3 which He made His own by His 
 own blood. I know that there shall come after my departure grievous wolves 
 among you, not sparing the flock ; and from your own selves * shall arise men 
 speaking perverse things, so as to drag away disciples after them. Therefore 
 be watchful, remembering that for three years, night and day, 6 I ceased not 
 with tears 6 to admonish each one. And now I commend you to God, and to the 
 word of His grace, who is able to build you up, and give you an inheritance 
 among all the sanctified. No man's silver or gold or raiment did I covet. 
 Yourselves know that to my needs, and to those with me, these hands " and 
 
 1 The third time that this verb has occurred in these few verses. It is quite true of St. 
 Paul that " un mot 1'obsede." This is an interesting sign of the genuineness of the 
 speech. 
 
 2 St. Paul speaks partly with a view to the dangers he is about to face, partly with 
 reference to his intention to go to the far west. Hie ot&x was not necessarily infallible 
 (compare Phil. i. 25 with ii. 24), and in point of fact it is probable that he did visit 
 Ephesus again (1 Tim. i. 3, iii. 14, iv. 12 20). But that was long afterwards, and it is 
 quite certain that as a body (n-avres v^ets) the elders never saw him again. 
 
 3 I accept the reading Kvpiow here with A, 0, D, E, the Coptic, Sahidic, Armenian 
 versions, Irenseus, Didymus, Cyril, Jerome, Augustine, &c., rather than OeoC, the 
 remarkable reading of M, B, the Vulgate, Syriac, Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, &c., 
 because " the blood of God " is an expression which, though adopted perhaps from the 
 variation of this very text by some of the Fathers (Tert. ad Uxor. ii. 3), the Church 
 has always avoided. Athanasius, indeed, distinctly says, oiSajxoO Si at/ut Oeoii 8i'x<x <rap(cb 
 napa&eSiaKao-iv at ypaf>ai. That St. Paul held in the most absolute sense the Divinity of 
 the Eternal Son is certain ; but he would never have said, and never has said, anything 
 like ' ' the blood of God, " and I cannot but think it much more probable that he would 
 have used the uncommon but perfectly natural expression " Church of the Lord," than 
 seem to sanction the very startling "blood of God." I cannot attach much, if any, 
 importance to the fact that "Church of the Lord" is a less usual combination than 
 "Church of God ;" for just in the same way St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Philippians, 
 abandons his favourite expression of " the day of the Lord," and uses instead " day of 
 Christ " (Phil. i. 10, ii. 16). If he had written 0eo5, it seems to me very improbable 
 that the reading would have been early tampered with. Such a phrase would rank with 
 terms like Adelphotheos and Theotokos, which are at once unscriptural and ecclesiastical, 
 whereas, if St. Paul said Kvptov, the marginal EOU of some pragmatic scribe might 
 easily have obtruded itself into the text. Indeed, the very fact that "Church of the 
 Lord " is not Paul's normal phrase may have siiggested the gloss. If, however, 0eov 
 be the right reading, the nominative to n-epteiroiTJo-aro may simply have been suppressed 
 by a grammatical inadvertency of the Apostle or his amanuensis, (See further, 
 Scrivener, Introd. 540.) The mysterious doctrine of the jre/xx<opr)<ris is one which the 
 Apostle always treats with deepest reverence, and such a collocation as al^a coC would 
 have given at least primd facie countenance to all kinds of Sabellian, Eutychian, and 
 Patripassian heresies. (I have made some further remarks on this reading in the 
 Expositor, May, 1879 ) 
 
 4 This sad prediction was but too soon fulfilled (1 Tim. L 20 ; Rev. li. 6 j 1 John ii. 19). 
 * Undoubtedly this expression though not meant to be taken au pied de la lettre 
 
 tells against the theory of a visit to Corinth during this period. 
 
 6 Tears are thrice mentioned in this short passage tears of suffering (19) ; of pastoral 
 solicitude (31) ; and of personal affection (37). Monod, Cinq Discours (Les Larmes de
 
 STREET IN RHODES. 
 
 (From a Sketch by C. G. Danford.)
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 517 
 
 there he held up those thin, toilworn hands before them all " these hands 
 ministered. In all things I set you the example, that, thus labouring, you 
 ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how 
 He said, ' It is blessed rather to give than to receive.' " l 
 
 After these words, which so well describe the unwearied thoroughness, the 
 ieep humility, the perfect tenderness, of his Apostolic ministry, he knelt 
 lown with them all, and prayed. They were overpowered with the touching 
 solemnity of the scene. He ended his prayer amidst a burst of weeping, and 
 as they bade him farewell anxious for his future, anxious for their own 
 they each laid their heads on his neck, 2 and passionately kissed him, 3 pained 
 above all at his remark that never again should they gaze, as they had gazed 
 so often,* on the dear face of the teacher who had borne so much for their 
 sakes, and whom they loved so well. If Paul inspired intense hatreds, yet, 
 with all disadvantages of person, he also inspired intense affection. He 
 had to use the strong expression 5 of St. Luke to tear himself from them. 
 Sadly, and with many forebodings, they went down with him to the vessel, 
 which was by this time awaiting him ; and we may be very sure that Paul 
 was weeping bitterly as he stepped on board, and that sounds of weeping 
 were long heard upon the shore, until the sails became a white speck on the 
 horizon, and with heavy hearts the Elders of Ephesus turned away to face 
 once more, with no hope of help from their spiritual father, the trials that 
 awaited them in the city of Artemis. 
 
 The wind blew full in favour of the voyagers, and before the evening they 
 had run with a straight course to Cos. Neither the wines, nor the purple, nor 
 the perfumes of Cos, would have much interest for the little band ; ' but, if 
 opportunity offered, we may be sure that " the beloved physician" would not 
 miss the opportunity of seeing all that he could of the scientific memorials of 
 the Asclepiadse the great medical school of the ancient world. Next day the 
 little vessel rounded the promontory of Cnidus, and sped on for Rhodes, 
 where, as they entered the harbour, they would admire the proverbial fertility 
 of the sunny island of roses, and gaze with curiosity on the prostrate mass of 
 its vast Colossus, of which two legs still stood on their pedestal, 7 though the 
 huge mass of bronze had been hurled down by an earthquake, there to stay 
 till, thirteen centuries later, they were broken up, and carried away on 900 
 camels, to be the ignoble spoil of a Jew. 8 The monstrous image one of the 
 wonders of the world was a figure of the sun ; and, with whatever lingering 
 artistic sympathy it might have been regarded by the Gentile converts, 
 
 1 The only "unwritten saying" (S^pa^ov Myna.) of our Lord in the New Testament 
 not preserved for us in the Gospels. 
 
 2 cf. Gen. xlv. 14, xlvi. 29. 
 
 s KO.TC&I.OVV, deosculabantur (cf. Matt. xxvi. 49). 
 
 4 Ver. 38, 6t<ap*lv. He had only said 6^<r0e (cf. John n. 5, 6). The word implies the 
 feeling here alluded to. 
 
 4 XH. 1, iTro<rn-(T.(T6c'rTas ear O.VTWV (cf. Luke xxii. 41). 
 
 8 Strab. xiv. 2; Hor. Od. IV. ziii.13 ; Athen. i. 688 (Alf.L 
 1 Plan. H. N., xxiv. 18; Strab. rir. 2. 
 a Ccdremu, H\*t. p. 431.
 
 518 THK LIFE AND WOSK OS 1 ST. PAUL. 
 
 St. Paul would perhaps think, with a smile, of Dagon, " when he fell flat, and 
 shamed his worshippers," or point to it as a symbol of the coming day when 
 all idols should be abolished at the returning dawn of the Sun of Righteous- 
 ness. The empire of the sea, which this huge statue had been reared to com- 
 memorate, had not passed away more completely than the worship of Apollo 
 should pass away ; and to St. Paul the work of Chares of Lindos, spite of all 
 its grace and beauty, was but a larger idol, to be regarded with pity, whereas 
 the temple reared to that idol by the apostate Idumean usurper who had called 
 himself king of the Jews could only be looked upon with righteous scorn. 1 
 
 Next day, passing the seven capes which terminate the mountain ridge of 
 " verdant Cragus," and the mouth of the yellow river -which gave its name of 
 Xauthus to the capital of Lycia, and so catching a far-off glimpse of temples 
 rich with the marbles which now adorn our British Museum, the vessel which 
 bore so much of the fortune of the future, turned her course eastward to 
 Patara. Beneath the hill which towered over its amphitheatre rose also amid 
 its palm-trees, the temple and oracle of Apollo Patareus. A single column, 
 and a pit, used possibly for some of the trickeries of superstition, alone 
 remain as a monument of its past splendour; 2 and it was due in no small 
 measure to the lif e's work of the poor Jewish Apostle who now looked up at 
 the vast world-famed shrine, that Christian poets would tell in later days how 
 
 " The oracles are dumb, 
 
 No voice nor hideous hum 
 Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; 
 
 Apollo from his shrine 
 
 Can no more divine, 
 With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving; 
 
 No nightly trance or breathed spell 
 
 Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.* 1 
 
 They could now no longer avail themselves of the vessel in which BO far 
 they had accomplished a prosperous, and, in spite of all misgivings, a happy 
 voyage. Either its course ended there, or it would continue to coast along 
 the shores of Pamphylia and Cilicia. But here they were fortunate enough 
 to find another vessel bound straight for Phoenicia, and they at once went on 
 board, and weighed anchor. Once more they were favoured by wind and 
 wave. Sailing with unimpeded course through sunlight and moonlight at 
 the rate of a hundred miles a day, they caught sight 3 at dawn of the snowy 
 peaks of Cyprus, and passing by Paphos whore Paul would be reminded of 
 Sergius Paulus and Elymas in some four days, they put in at Tyre, where 
 their ship was to unload its cargo. The Apostle must have ceased to feel 
 anxiety about being at Jerusalem by Pentecost, since, owing to providential 
 circumstances, he had now a full fortnight to spare. There were some disciples 
 
 i The Pythium. 8 Sprat and Forbes, i. 30 ; ap. 0. and H. U. 232. 
 
 * jud. 3, ivcufxivivTts, of. aperire (see Ps. Luoian, Ver. Hist. 38, p. 687) ; the opposite 
 technical term is, in-oitpvirreiv, abscondere (Thuc. v. 65 ; Virg. J2n. iii. 275, 291).
 
 tHE LAST JOTTBNEY TO JERUSALEM. 519 
 
 at Tyre, and St. Paul may have seen them on previous occasions ; l but in so 
 populous and busy a town it required a little effort to find them. 2 With them 
 Paul stayed his usual period of seven days, and they by the Spirit told him 
 not to go to Jerusalem. He knew, however, all that they could tell him of 
 impending danger, and he too was under the guidance of the same Spirit which 
 urged him along a fettered but willing captive. When the week was over 3 
 St. Paul left them; and so deeply in that brief period had he won their affections, 
 that all the members of the little community, with their wives and children, 
 started with him to conduct him on his way. Before they reached the vessel 
 they knelt down side by side, men and women and b'ttle ones, somewhere on 
 the surf -beat rocks 4 near which the vessel was moored, to pray together he for 
 them, and they for him before they returned to their homes ; and he went 
 once more on board for the last stage of his voyage from Tyre to Ptolemais, 
 the modem Acre. There they finally left their vessel, and went to greet the 
 disciples, with whom they stayed for a single day, and then journeyed by land 
 across the plain of Sharon bright at that time with a thousand flowers of 
 spring the forty-four miles which separate Acre from Cassarea. Here St. Paul 
 lingered till the very eve of the feast. Eeady to face danger when duty 
 called, he had no desire to extend the period of it, or increase its certainty. 
 At Csesarea, therefore, he stayed with his companions for several days, and 
 they were the last happy days of freedom which for a long time he was 
 destined to spend. God graciously refreshed his spirit by this brief interval 
 of delightful intercourse and rest. For at Csesarea they were the guests of 
 one who must have been bound to Paul by many ties of the deepest sympathy 
 Philip the Evangelist. A Hellenist like himself, and a liberal Hellenist, 
 Philip, as Paul would have been most glad to recognise, had been the first to show 
 the large sympathy and clear insight, without which Paul's own work would 
 have been impossible. It was Philip who had evangelised the hated Samari- 
 tans ; it was Philip who had had the courage to baptise the Ethiopian eunuch. 
 The lots of these two noble workers had been closely intertwined. It was the 
 furious persecution of Saul the Pharisee which had scattered the Church of 
 Jerusalem, and thus rendered useless the organisation of the seven deacons. 
 Ifc was in flight from that persecution that the career of Philip had been 
 
 i Acts xrvi. 20 ; Gal. 1. 21. 
 
 3 xxi. 4, avtvpovrt* TOVS /uaflip-as, " Seeking out the disciples," not as in E. V. "finding 
 disciples." 
 
 3 xxi. 5. IfaprtW usually means "to refit, "but hers with i^e'pasit seems to mean 
 "complete." Hesychius makes it equivalent to reXsiwcrai, and so Theophylact and 
 (Ecumeuius understood it. Meyer is probably mistaken in giving the word its first 
 meaning here. 
 
 4 Ver. 5, aiyiaXw. Of. xxvii. 39. There is, indeed, a long range of sandy shore 
 between Tyre and Sidon, but near the city there are also rocky places. Dr. Hackett, 
 ad- loc., quotes a strikingly parallel experience of an American missionary, Mr. Schneider, 
 at Anrtab, near Tarsus : " More than a hundred converts accompanied us out of the 
 city ; and there, near the spot where one of our number had once been stoned, we halted, 
 and a prayer was offered, amid tears. Between thirty and forty escorted us two hours 
 farther . . . Then another prayer was offered, and with saddened countenances and 
 with weeping they forcibly broke away from us. (Cf. ajr<xnr<r0VTas, ver. 1.) It reallj 
 
 as though they could not turn back."
 
 520 tHE LI>E AND WORK Of ST. PAtTL. 
 
 changed. On the other hand, that new career had initiated the very line of 
 conduct which was to occupy the Me of Paul the Apostle. As Paul and 
 Philip talked together in those few precious hours, there must have flourished up 
 in their minds many a touching reminiscence of the days when the light of 
 heaven, which had once shone on the face of Stephen upturned to heaven in 
 the agony of martyrdom, had also flashed in burning apocalypse on the face 
 of a young man whose name was Saul. And besides a community of thoughts 
 and memories, the house of Philip was hallowed by the gentle ministries of 
 four daughters who, looking for the coming of Christ, had devoted to the 
 service of the Gospel their virgin lives. 1 
 
 To this happy little band of believers came down from Judaea the Prophet 
 Agabus, who, in the early days of St. Paul's work at Antioch, had warned the 
 Church of the impending famine. Adopting the symbolic manner of the 
 ancient prophets, 2 he came up to Paul, unbound the girdle which fastened 
 his cetoneth, and tying with it his own feet and hands said, " Thus saith the 
 Holy Spirit, Thus shall the Jews in Jerusalem bind the man whose girdle this 
 is, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles." They had long been 
 aware of the peril of the intended visit, but no intimation had been given them 
 so definite as this, nor had they yet foreseen that a Jewish assault would 
 necessarily end in a Roman imprisonment. On hearing it, St. Paul's com- 
 panions earnestly entreated him to stay where he was, while they went to 
 Jerusalem to convey the Gentile contribution; and the members of the 
 Caesarean Church joined their own tears and entreaties to those of his beloved 
 companions. Why should he face a certain peril P Why should he endanger 
 an invaluable life P Since the Spirit had given him so many warnings, might 
 there not be even something of presumption in thus exposing himself in the 
 very stronghold of his most embittered enemies ? St. Paul was not insensible to 
 their loving entreaties and arguments ; there might have been an excuse, and 
 something more than an excuse, for him had he decided that it was most unwise 
 to persist in his intentions; but it was not so to be. His purpose was inflexible. 
 No voices of even prophets should turn him aside from obedience to a call which 
 he felt to be from God. A captive bound to Christ's triumphant chariot- wheel, 
 what could he do? What could he do but thank God even if the Gospel, which 
 was to some an aroma of life, became to him an aroma of earthly deathP 
 When the finger of God has pointed out the path to a noble soul, it will not 
 swerve either to the right hand or the left. " What are ye doing, weeping 
 and breaking my heart? " he said. " I am willing not only to go to Jerusalem 
 to be bound, but even to die, for the name of the Lord Jesus." They saw that 
 further importunity would be painful and useless 
 
 " He saw a hand they could not see 
 
 Which beckoned him away, 
 He heard a voice they could not hear 
 Which would not let him stay." 
 
 1 Of. Plin. JSp. i. 96. Cf. 1 Kings xxii. 11 ; Isa. xx. 2 ; Jer. xiii. 1, 4*
 
 LA.ST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 521 
 
 They desisted and wiped away their tears, saying, "The Lord's will be 
 done." 
 
 Too soon the happy days of rest and loving intercourse came to an end. 
 It was seventy-five miles, an ordinary three days' journey, from Csesarea to 
 Jerusalem. That year the feast began at sunset on Wednesday, May 17. 1 
 The last day at Cajsarea was a Sunday. Next day they packed up their 
 baggage 2 and it was precious, for it contained the chaluka and, accompanied 
 by some of the Csesarean converts, who, with multitudes of other Jews, were 
 streaming up to Jerusalem on that last day before the feast began, 3 they started 
 for the Holy City, with hearts on which rested an ever-deepening shadow. 
 The crowd at these gatherings was so immense that the ordinary stranger might 
 well fail to find accommodation, and be driven to some temporary booth outside 
 the walls. But the brethren had taken care to secure for Paul and his delegates 
 a shelter in the house of Mnason, a Cyprian, and one of the original disciples. 
 St. Paul seems to have had a sister living at Jerusalem, but we do not know 
 that she was a Christian, and in any case her house which might be well 
 known to many Tarsian Jews would be an uncertain resting-place for an 
 endangered man. And so for the fifth time since his conversion Paul re-entered 
 Jerusalem. He had rarely entered it without some cause for anxiety, and there 
 could have been scarcely one reminiscence which it awoke that was not infinitely 
 painful. The school of Gamaliel, the Synagogue of the Libertines, the house 
 where the High Priest had given him his commission to Damascus, the spot 
 where the reddened grass had drunk the blood of Stephen must all have stirred 
 painful memories. But never had he trod the streets of the Holy City with so 
 deep a sadness as now that he entered it, avoiding notice as mueh as possible, 
 in the little caravan of Caesarean pilgrims and Gentile converts. He was 
 going into a city where friends were few, and where well-nigh every one of 
 the myriads among whom he moved was an actual or potential enemy, to whom 
 the mere mention of his name might be enough to make the dagger flash from 
 its scabbard, or to startle a cry of hatred which would be the signal for a 
 furious outbreak. But he was the bearer of help, which was a tangible proof 
 of his allegiance to the mother church, and the brethren whom he saw that 
 evening at the house of Mnason gave him a joyous welcome. It may have 
 cheered his heart for a moment, but it did not remove the deep sense that he 
 was in that city which was the murderess of the Prophets. He knew too well 
 the burning animosity which he kindled, because he remembered too well what 
 had been his own, and that of his party, against the Christian Hellenists of 
 old. The wrath which he had then felt was now a furnace heated sevenfold 
 against himself. 
 
 The next day till sunset was marked by the ceremonies of the feast, and the 
 
 1 Fasti Sacri, No. 1857. 
 
 2 Verse 15. Leg. tirt<ncva(r(/ivot, H, A, B, E, G, and a mass of cursives. In the 
 E. V. "carriages" means "baggage :" cf. Judges xviii. 21; 1 Sam. xvii. 22; Isa. x. 28. 
 ""We trussed up our fardeles," Genev. Vers. 
 
 3 That St. Paul had only arrived on the very eve of the feaat maybe at once inferred 
 from Acts xxiv. 11. 
 
 la
 
 522 ?HS LIFK AND WOSK O? ST. PAUL. 
 
 greater part of it was spent by St. Paul and his little company in an assembly 
 of the elders, who met to receive him under the presidency of James. 1 The 
 elders were already assembled when the visitors canie in, and we may imagine 
 that it was with something more than a thrill of curiosity that it must have 
 been with an almost painful shyriess that " iimid provincial neophytes " like 
 Timothy and Trop'amus (the laUer especially, an nncircumcised Gentile, whom 
 his teacher had encouraged to regard himself as entirely emancipated from the 
 Jewish law) found themselves in the awful presence of James, the Lord's 
 brother James, the stern, white-robed, mysterious prophet, and the conclave 
 of his but half-conciliated Judaic presbyters. No misgiving could assail them 
 in their own free Asiatic or Hellenic homes ; but here in Jerusalem, in fe the 
 Holy, the Noble city," under the very shadow of the Temple, face to face with 
 zealots and Pharisees, it required nothing loss than the genius of a Paul to claim 
 without shadow of misgiving that divine freedom which was arraigned in the 
 tame of a history rich in miracles, and a whole literature of inspired books. 
 That free spirit was a lesson which the Jews themselves as a body could not 
 learn. It required, indeed, the earthquake shock which laid their temple in 
 ruins, and scattered their nationality to the four winds of heaven, effectively 
 to teach them the futility of the convictions to which they so passionately 
 clung. They would have resisted without end the logic of argument had not 
 God Himself hi due tiroe refuted their whole theology by the irresistible logic 
 of facts. The destruction of Jerusalem did more to drive them from an im- 
 memorial " orthodoxy " than the Epistles of St. Paul himself. 
 
 As we read the narrative of the Acts in the light of the Epistles, it is diffi- 
 cult to resist the impression that the meeting between tho Apostle and tho 
 Elders of Jerusalem was cold. It is, of course, certain that tho first object of 
 the meeting was the presentation of the contribution from which Paul had 
 hoped so much. One by one he would call forward the beloved delegates, 
 that they might with their own hands lay at the feet of James tho sums of 
 money which his Gentile Churches had contributed out of their deep poverty, 
 and which in many and many a coin bore witness to weeks of generous self- 
 denial. There lay all this money, a striking proof of the faithfulness with 
 which Paul, at any rate, had carried out his share of the old compact at Jeru- 
 salem, when almost by way of return for concessions which the Judaisers had 
 done their best to render nugatory the Three had begged him to be mindful 
 cf the poor. It must have been a far larger bounty than they had any reason 
 to expect, and on this occasion, if ever, we might surely have looked for a 
 little effusive sympathy, a little expansive warmth, on the part of the com- 
 munity which had received so tangible a proof of the Apostle's kindness. Yet 
 we are not told about a word of thanks, and we sea but too plainly that Paul's 
 
 1 AJJ none of the Twelve are mentioned, it ia probable that none were present. The 
 twelve years which, as tradition tells us, had been fixed by Christ for their stay in Jem 
 salem, had long elapsed, and they were scattered on their various missions to evangelise 
 the world. St'. Luke was aware cf the contributions brought by St. Paul (ixiv, 17)j 
 though ha dofis not mention them here.
 
 THS LAST JCTJBSTEY TO JERUSALEM. 523 
 
 hardly disguiae-d misgiving as to the manner in wliieh his gift would be 
 accepted l was confirmed. Never in any ago iiavo the recipients of alms at 
 Jerusalem been remarkable for gratitude. 3 Was tlio gratitude of the Zealots 
 and Pharisees of the community extinguished in this instance by the fact that 
 one of the bags of money was carried by tho hands of an uncircumeised Gen- 
 tile P Had it been otherwise, nothing would have lain more entirely in the 
 scope of St. Luke's purpose to record. Though some at least of the brethren 
 received Paul gladly, the Elders of the Church had not hurried on tho previous 
 evening to greet and welcome him, and subsequent events prove too clearly 
 that his chief reward lay in the sense of having done and taught to his con- 
 verts what was kind and right, and not in any softening of the heart of the 
 Jadaie Christiana. Gratitude is not always won by considerateness. Tho 
 collection for the saint* occupies many a paragraph in St. Paul's Epistles, as 
 it had occupied many a year of his thoughts. But there is little or no 
 recorded recognition of his labour of lovo by tho recipients of the bounty 
 which but for him could never have been collected. 
 
 When the presentation was ever, Paul narrated in full detail 3 the work he 
 had done, and the Churches which he had confirmed or founded in that third 
 journey, of which wo have seen the outline. What lovo and exultation should 
 euch a narrative have excited ! All that wo are told is, that " they, on hearing 
 it, glorified God, and said" what? The repetition, the echo, of bitter and 
 even deadly reproaches against St. Paul, coupled with a suggestion which, 
 however necessary they may have deemed it, was none the less humiliating. 
 " You observe, brother, how many myriads of the Jews there are that have 
 embraced the faith, and they are all zealots of the Law." The expression is a 
 startling one. Were there, indeed, at that early date " many myriads " of 
 Jewish Christians, when we know how insignificant numerically were tho 
 Churches even at such places as Rome and Corinth, and when wo learn how 
 small was the body of Christians which, a decade later, took refuge at Pella 
 from the impending ruin of Jerusalem P If we are to take tho expression 
 literally if there were even as many as two myriads of Christiana who wevo 
 kll zealous for the Law, it only shows how fatal was the risk that the Church 
 \vould be absorbed into a mere slightly-differentiated synagogue. At any rate. 
 the remark emphasised the extreme danger of tho Apostle's position in that 
 hotbed of raging fanaticism, especially when they added, "And they" all 
 these myriads who have embraced the faith and are zealots of the Law ! " have 
 been studiously indoctrinated 4 with the belief about you, that you teach 
 APOSTASY JTEOH MOSES, telling all THE JEWS of the dispersion not to cir- 
 cumcise their children, and not to walk iu obedience to tho customs. What 
 then is the state of affairs? That a crowd will assemble is quite certain; for 
 
 1 Horn. IT. 81. 
 
 2 Witness the treatment in recent days of Sir M. Sfontefiore and Dr. Frank!, after 
 conferring on them the largest pecuniary benefits. 
 
 * xxL 19, naff iv cKturrcf. 
 
 < Ver. 21, K<xnjx>j0)}<w. Very much stronger than the E. V., " they are informed."
 
 524 THE LI1TE AND WORK OF ST. PAtJL. 
 
 they will hear that you have come. At once then do what we tell you. Wfi 
 have four men who have a vow upon them. Take them, be purified with 
 them, and pay their expenses that they may get their heads shaved. All will 
 then recognise that there is nothing in all which has been so carefully incul- 
 cated into them about you, but that you yourself also walk in observance of 
 the Law. But as regards the Gentiles that have embraced the faith, we 
 enjoined their exemption from everything of this kind, deciding only that 
 they should keep themselves from meat offered to idols, and blood, and 
 strangled, and fornication." 
 
 What did this proposal mean P It meant that the emancipation from the 
 vow of the Nazarite could only take place at Jerusalem, and in the Temple, 
 and that it was accompanied by offerings so costly that they were for a poor 
 man impossible. A custom had therefore sprung up by which rich men 
 undertook to defray the necessary expenses, and this was regarded as an act 
 of charity and piety. The Jews, indeed, looked so favourably on a species of 
 liberality which rendered it possible for the poor no less than the rich to make 
 vows at moments of trial and danger, that when Agrippa I. paid his first visit 
 to Jerusalem, he had paid the expenses which enabled a large number of 
 Nazarites to shave their heads, 1 not only because he wished to give an ostenta- 
 tious proof of his respect for the Levitical law, but also because he knew that 
 this would be a sure method of acquiring popularity with the Pharisaic party. 
 The person who thus defrayed the expenses was supposed so far to share the 
 vow, that he was required to stay with the Nazarites during the entire week, 
 which, as we gather from St. Luke, was the period which must elapse between 
 the announcement to the priest of the termination of the vow, and his formal 
 declaration that it had been legally completed. 8 For a week then, St. Paul, if 
 he accepted the advice of James and the presbyters, would have to live with 
 four paupers in the chamber of the Temple which was set apart for this pur- 
 pose ; and then to pay for certain sacrificial animals and the accompanying 
 meat offerings ; and to stand among these Nazarites while the priest offered 
 four he-lambs of the first year without blemish for burnt offerings, and four 
 ewe-lambs of the first year without blemish for sin offerings, and four rams 
 without blemish for peace offerings ; and then, to look on while the men's 
 heads were being shaved and while they took their hair to burn it under the 
 boiling cauldron of the peace offerings, and while the priest took four sodden 
 shoulders of rams and four unleavened cakes out of the four baskets, and four 
 unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and put them on the hands of the Naza- 
 rites, and waved them for a wave-offering before the Lord which, with the 
 wave-breads and the heave- shoulders, the priest afterwards took as his own 
 perquisites. And he was to do all this, not only to disprove what was 
 
 * Jos. Antt. XIX. 6, 1, cU 'It potrdAv^a cAfiuv X"P ; c " T7 )P' ol 'S < iirkyfKofft &v<rta.t ovStv Tvv JtaTJk 
 v6ft,ov airoAirrwr. Jib icai Naipaiwy vpa<T0at JieTafe fiaAa crv\vov<;. 
 
 2 Neither the Talmud nor the Pentateuch mentions this circumstance. Numb. vi. 9, 
 10 refers only to the cases of accidental pollution during the period of the vow. It may 
 have been on the analogy of this rule that a week was fixed as the period of purification.
 
 THE LAST JOTTBNEY TO JEBUSALEM. 525 
 
 undoubtedly a calumny if taken strictly namely, that he had taught the Jews 
 apostasy from Moses (as though his whole Gospel was this mere negation !) 
 but also to prove that there was no truth in the reports about him, but that he 
 also was a regular observer of the Law. 
 
 That it was an expensive business was nothing. Paul, poor as he had now 
 become, could not, of course, pay unless he had the money wherewith to pay 
 it ; and if there were any difficulty on this score, its removal rested with those 
 who made the proposal. But was the charge against him false in spirit as 
 well as in letter ? Was it true that he valued, and at any rate, with anything 
 approaching to scrupulosity still observed the Law ? Would there not be in 
 such conduct on his part something which might be dangerously misrepresented 
 as an abandonment of principle p If those Judaisers on whom he did not 
 spare to heap such titles as " false apostles," " false brethren," " deceitful 
 workers," "dogs," "emissaries of Satan," "the concision," 1 had shaken the 
 allegiance of his converts by charging him with inconsistency before, would 
 they not have far more ground to do so now ? It is true that at the close of 
 his second journey he had spontaneously taken on himself the vow of the 
 Nazarite. But since that time circumstances had widely altered. At that 
 time the animosity of those false brethren was in abeyance ; they had not 
 dogged his footsteps with slander ; they had not beguiled his converts into 
 legalism ; they had not sent their adherents to undo his teaching and persuade 
 his own churches to defy his authority. And if all these circumstances were 
 changed, he too was changed since then. His faith had never been the 
 stereotype of a shibboleth, or the benumbing repetition of a phrase. His life, 
 like the life of every good and wise man, was a continual education. His views 
 during the years in which he lired exclusively among Gentile churches 
 and in great cities had been rendered clearer and more decided. Not to speak 
 of the lucid principles which he had sketched in the Epistles to the Corinthians, 
 he had written the Epistle to the Galatians, and had developed the arguments 
 there enunciated in the Epistle to the Romans. It had been the very object of 
 those Epistles to establish the nullity of the Law for all purposes of justification. 
 The man who had written that the teaching of the Judaisers was a quite 
 different gospel to his, and that any one who preached it was accursed ' who 
 had openly charged Peter with tergiversation for living Judaically after having 
 lived in Gentile fashion 3 who had laid it down as his very thesis that " from 
 works of Law no flesh shall be justified "* who had said that to build again 
 what he destroyed was to prove himself a positive transgressor 6 who had 
 talked of the Law as "a curse" from which Christ redeemed us, and declared 
 that the Law could never bring righteousness 9 who had even characterised 
 that Law as a slavery to " weak and beggarly elements " comparable to the 
 rituals of Cybele worship and Moon worship, and spoken of circumcision as 
 being in itself no better than a contemptible mutilation 7 who had talked 
 
 2 Cor. xi. 13 ; Gal. il. 4 ; Plul. iii. 2 ; 2 Cor. il. 13. * Gal. i. 6-9. 
 
 Id. ii. 14 ; supra, p. 250. /& ii 16. * Id. ii. 18. 
 
 . iii. 2Q; Gl. U. IS. T phJL Ui. 2] CM). T. 1
 
 528 THE LIFE AND WOER OF ST. 
 
 again and again of being dead to the Law, and openly claimed fellowship 
 rather -with the Gentiles, who were the spiritual, than with the rejected and 
 penally blinded Jews, who were bnt the physical descendants of Abraham , 
 was this the man who could without creating false impressions avoid danger 
 of death, which ho had braved so often, by doing something to show how 
 perfectly orthodox he was in the impugned respects ? A modern writer has 
 said that he could not do this without untruth; and that to suppose the 
 author of the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians standing seven days, oil- 
 cakes in hand, in the Temple vestibule, and submitting himself to all the 
 manipulations with which Rabbinic pettiness had multiplied the Mosais 
 ceremonials which accompanied the completion of the Nazaritic vow to suppose 
 that, in the midst of unbelieving Priests and Lovites, he should have patiently 
 tolerated all the ritual nullities of the Temple service of that period, and 
 BO have brought the business to its tedious conclusion in the elaborate manner 
 above described, "is just as credible as that Luther in his old age should 
 have performed a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln with peas in his shoes, or that 
 Calvin on his deathbed should have vowed a gold-embroidered gown to tha 
 Holy Mother of God." 1 
 
 But the comparison is illusory. It may be true that the natural tempera- 
 ment of St. Paul something also, it may bo, in his Oriental character- 
 inclined him to go much farther in the way of concession than either Luther 
 or Calvin would have done; but apart from this his circumstances wore 
 widely different from theirs in almost every respect. We may well imagine 
 that this unexpected proposal was distasteful to him in many ways; it is 
 hardly possible that he should regard without a touch of impatience tha 
 todious eereinonialisnis of a system which he now knew to be in its last 
 decadence, and doomed to speedy extinction. Still there wore two great 
 principles which he had thoroughly grasped, and on which he had consistently 
 acted. One was acquiescence in things indifferent for the sake of charity, so 
 that he gladly became as a Jew to Jews that he might save Jews ; the other 
 that, during the short time which remained, and under the stress of the 
 present necessity, it was each man's duty to abide in the condition wherein he 
 had been called. He was a Jew, and therefore to him the Jewish ceremonial 
 was a part of national custom and established ordinance. For him it had, at 
 the very lowest, a civil if not a religious validity. If the Jews misinterpreted 
 his conduct into more than was meant, it would only be a misrepresentation 
 like those which they gratuitously invented, and to which he was incessantly 
 liable. Undoubtedly during bis missionary journey he must again and again 
 have broken the strict provisions of that Law to the honour and furtherance 
 of which he had devoted his youth. But though he did not hold himself 
 
 1 Hausrath (p. 453), who, however, erroneously Imagines that Paul had himself on 
 thia occasion the vow of a Nazarite upon him. The person who paid the expense of the 
 Nazarito had not, I imagine, to make offering* for himself at least it is nowhere BO 
 stated though we infer that he lived with the Nararites during the period of their , 
 seclusion, and in some undefined way shared in their purification.
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JEEUSALEM. 527 
 
 bound to do all that the Law and the Rabbis required, yet neither did ho feel 
 himself precluded from any observance which was not wrong. His objection 
 to Levitiain was not an objection to external conformity, but only to that 
 substitution of externalism for faith to which conformity might lead. He did 
 not so much object to ceremonies as to placing any reliance on them. Ho 
 might have wished that things were otherwise, and that the course suggested 
 to him involved a less painful sacrifice. He might have boon gladder if the 
 Eiders had said to him, " Brother, you are detested here ; at any moment the 
 shout of a mob may rise against you, or the dagger of a Siearius be plunged 
 into your heart. "We cannot under such circumstances be responsible for 
 your life. You have given us this splendid proof of your own loyalty and of 
 the Christian love of your converts. The feast is over. 1 Retire at once with 
 safety, and with our prayers and our blessings continue your glorious work." 
 Alas ! such advice was only a " might have been." He accepted the suggestion 
 they offered, and the very next day entered the Temple with these four 
 Nazarites, went through whatever preliminary purification was deemed neces- 
 sary by the Oral Law, and gave notice to the priests that from this time they 
 must begin to count the eeven days which must pass before the final offerings 
 woro brought and the vow concluded. 2 
 
 If the Elders overrated the conciliatory effect of this act of conformity, 
 they had certainly underrated the peril to which it would expose tho great 
 missionary who, more than they all, had done his utmost to fulfil that Last 
 command of Christ that they ehould go into all the world and preach the 
 Gospel to every creature. The city was full of strangers from every region of 
 tho world, and the place where of all others they would delight to congregate 
 would be tho courts of tho Temple. Even, therefore, if St. Paul, now that 
 the storms of years had scarred his countenance and bent his frame, was so 
 fortunate as to remain unrecognised by any hostile priest who had known him 
 in former days, it was hardly possible that every one of the thousands whom 
 he had met in scores of foreign cities should fail to identify that well-known 
 face and figure. It would have been far safer, if anything compelled him to 
 linger in the Holy City, to live unnoticed in tho lowly house of Mnason. He 
 might keep as quiet as he possibly could in that chamber of the Nazarites ; 
 
 i The Pentecost only lasted one day. 
 
 3 In some such way I understand the obscure and disputed expressions of ver. 26; but 
 even with the Talmudic treatise Nazir beside us, we know too little of the details to be 
 sure of the exact process gone through, or of the exact meaning of the expressions used. 
 Some take ayi/nrfVi? and ayvurub? to mean that St. Paul took on him the Nazaiite vow 
 with them (cf. Narab. vi. 3, 5, LXX.)- This seems to be impossible, because thirty days 
 is tho shortest period mentioned by the Mishna for a temporary vow. Mr. Lewin and 
 others have conjectured that he was himself a Nazarite, having taken the vow after his 
 peril at Epheaus, as on tha previous occasion after his peril at Corinth ; and that this 
 was the reason why he was BO anxious to get to Jerusalem. But if so, why did not St. 
 Luke mention the circumstance as he had done before ? And if so, why was it necessary 
 to pay the expenses of these four Nazarites when the fulfilment of his own personal vow 
 would have been a sufficient and more striking proof of willingness to conform to Mosaism 
 in his personal conduct ? Moreover, the proposal of the EHers evidently came to St. Paul 
 gnexpcctedly,
 
 528 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 but even if, during those seven days of enforced idleness, he confined himself 
 there to the utmost extent, and even if the other Nazarites abstained from 
 divulging the secret of a name so famous, it was impossible that he should 
 escape the eyes of the myriads who daily wandered through the Temple court* 
 and took part in its multitudinous ceremonies. 
 
 For the Jews at that period were in a most inflammable state of mind, and 
 the tremors of the earthquake were already felt which was soon to rend the 
 earth under their feet, and shake their Temple and city into irretrievable ruin. 
 On the death of Herod Agrippa I., 1 Claudius, thinking that his son was too 
 young to succeed to the government of so turbulent a people, kept him under 
 his own eye at Rome, and appointed Cuspius Fadus to the Procuratorship of 
 Judaea. To secure an additional hold upon the Jews, he ordered that the 
 crown of Agrippa, and, what was of infinitely greater importance, the "golden 
 robes " of the High Priest, should be locked up under the care of the Romans 
 in the Tower of Antonia. So deep was the fury of the Jews at the thought 
 that those holy vestments should be under the impure care of Gentiles, that 
 the order could only be enforced by securing the presence at Jerusalem of 
 C. Cassius Longinus, the Prsefect of Syria, with an immense force. Claudius 
 almost immediately afterwards cancelled the order, at the entreaty of a 
 deputation from Jerusalem, supported by the influence of the young Agrippa. 
 Claudius had owed to Agrippa's father his very empire, and since the youth 
 inherited all the beauty, talent, and versatility of his family, he was a great 
 favourite at the Imperial Court. Fadus had been succeeded by Tiberius 
 Alexander, a nephew of Philo, 2 who was peculiarly hateful to the Jews 
 because he was a renegade from their religion. He was superseded by 
 Cumanus, and about the same time Agrippa II. was invested with the little 
 kingdom of Chalcis, vacant by the death of his uncle Herod, and also with 
 the functions of guarding the Temple and the Corban, and nominating to the 
 High Priesthood. 3 The Procuratorship of Cumanus marked the commence- 
 ment of terrible disturbances. At the very first Passover at which he was 
 . present an event occurred which was a terrible omen of the future. Just as 
 at this day the Turkish soldiers are always prepared to pour down from the 
 house of the Turkish Governor on the first occurrence of any discord between 
 the Greek and Latin Churches, so it was the custom of the Roman com- 
 mandant of the Tower of Antonia to post detachments of soldiers along the 
 roof of the cloister which connected the fortress with the Temple area ready 
 at any moment to rush down the stairs and plunge into the very midst of 
 the crowded worshippers. What occurred on this occasion was singularly 
 characteristic. While standing there at guard, one of the Roman soldiers, 
 weary of having nothing to do, and disgusted with watching what he despised 
 as the mummeries of these hateful Jews, expressed his contempt for them by 
 a gesture of the most insulting indecency.* Instantly the Jews were plunged 
 into a paroxysm of fury. They cursed the new Procurator, and began to pelt 
 
 1 A.D. 44. * Josephus calls him Oavnturuararot (e. Ap. L 2). 
 
 4.P. 49. JOB. ft. / U. 12, 1; 4ntt. xx. 5, 3.
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JEBUSALEM. 529 
 
 the soldiers with stones, which seem to have been always ready to hand 
 among this excitable race. Fearing that the Antonia detachment would be 
 too weak to cope with so savage an onslaught, Cumanus marched his entire 
 forces ronnd from the Pnetorium. At the clash of their footsteps, and the 
 gleam of their swords, the wretched unarmed mass of pilgrims was struck 
 with panic, and made a rush to escape. The gates of the Temple were choked 
 up, and a multitude, variously stated at ten and at twenty thousand, was 
 trampled and crushed to death. 
 
 This frightful disaster was followed by another tragedy. An imperial 
 messenger was robbed by bandits at Bethhoron, not far from Jerusalem. 
 Furious at such an insult, Cumanus made the neighbouring villages re- 
 sponsible, and in sacking one of them a Roman soldier got hold of a copy of 
 the Scriptures, and burnt it before the villagers with open blasphemies. 
 The horror of the insult consisted in the fact that the sacred roll contained 
 in many places the awful and incommunicable Name. As they had done 
 when Pilate put up the gilt votive shields in Jerusalem, and when Caligula 
 had issued the order that his image should be placed in the Temple, the 
 Jews poured in myriads to Csesarea, and prostrated themselves before the 
 tribunal of the Procurator. In this instance Cumanus thought it best to 
 avert dangerous consequences by the cheap sacrifice of a common soldier, and 
 the Jews were for the time appeased by the execution of the offender. 
 
 Then had followed a still more serious outbreak. The Samaritans, 
 actuated by the old hatred to the Jews, had assassinated some Galilaean 
 pilgrims to the Passover at En Gannim, the frontier village of Samaria which 
 had repulsed our Lord. 1 Unable to obtain from Cumanus whom the Sama- 
 ritans had bribed the punishment of the guilty village, the Jews, secretly 
 countenanced by the High Priest Ananias, and his son Ananus, flew to arms, 
 and, under the leadership of the bandit Eleazar, inflicted on the Samaritans a 
 terrible vengeance. Cumanus, on hearing this, marched against them and 
 routed them. A renewal of the contest was prevented by the entreaties of 
 the chief men at Jerusalem, who, aware of the tremendous results at issue, 
 hurried to the battle-field in sackcloth and ashes. Meanwhile the Prsefect of 
 Syria, Titus Ummidius Quadratus, appeared on the scene, and, after hearing 
 both sides, found Cumanus and his tribune Celer guilty of having accepted a 
 bribe, and sent them to Borne with Ananias and Ananus to be tried by the 
 Emperor, 1 Jonathan, one of the very able ex-High Priests of the astute 
 house of Annas, was sent to plead the cause of the Jews. At that time 
 Agrippina was all-powerful with the Emperor, and the freedman Pallas all- 
 powerful both with him and with Agrippina, who owed her elevation to his 
 friendly offices. The supple Agrippa introduced Jonathan to Pallas, and 
 it seems as if a little compact was struck between them, that Pallas should 
 
 l Luke ii. 53 ; Jos. Antt. xx. 6, L 
 
 1 The discrepancies in this story as told by Josephus in B. J. ii. 12, 5, and Antt. 
 TO., 6, 2, are glaring, yet no one doubts either the honesty of Josephus or the general 
 truth of the story. How scornfully would it have been rejected as A myth or an Inven- 
 tion if it had occurred in the Gospels I 
 18*
 
 530 THE LIFE AND WOSK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 induce the Emperor to decide in favour of the Jews, and that Jonathan should 
 petition him on behalf of the Jews to appoint to the lucrative Procuratorship 
 his brother Felix. The plot succeeded. The Samaritans were condemned; 
 their leaders executed; Cumanus banished; Celer sent to Jerusalem to be 
 beheaded; Ananias and Ananus triumphantly acquitted; and A.D. 52, six 
 years before St. Paul's last visit to Jerusalem, Felix like his brother, an 
 Arcadian slave who had taken the name of Antonius in honour of his 
 first mistress, and the name of Claudius in honour of his patron became 
 Procurator of Judaea. 1 
 
 At first the new Procurator behaved with a little decent reserve, but it 
 was not long before he began to show himself in his true colours, and with 
 every sort of cruelty and licentiousness " to wield the power of a king with 
 the temperament of a slave." After his emancipation he had been entrusted 
 with a command in ft troop of auxiliaries, and acting with the skill and promp- 
 titude of a soldier, he had performed a really useful task in extirpating the 
 bandits. Yet even the Jews murmured at the shameless indifference with 
 which this Borgia of the first century entrapped the chief bandit Eleazar into 
 a friendly visit, on pretence of admiring his skill and valour, and instantly: 
 threw him into chains, and sent him as a prisoner to Rome. They were still 
 more deeply scandalised by his intimacy with Simon Magus, who lived with 
 him at Csesarea as a guest, and by whose base devices this "husband or 
 adulterer of three queens" succeeded in seducing Drusilla, the beautiful 
 sister of Agrippa II. who had now come as a king to Judaea from her 
 husband Aziz, King of Emesa. A crime of yet deeper and darker dye had 
 taken place the very year before Paul's arrival. Jonathan, who was often 
 bitterly reminded of his share in bringing upon his nation the affliction of 
 a Procurator, who daily grew more infamous from his exactions and his 
 savagery, thought that his high position and eminent services to Felix himself 
 entitled him to expostulate. So far from taking warning, Felix so fiercely 
 resented the interference that he bribed Doras, a friend of Jonathan's, to get 
 rid of him. Doras hired the services of some bandits, who, armed with sicae, 
 or short daggers, stabbed the priestly statesman at one of the yearly feasts. 
 The success and the absolute impunity of the crime put a premium upon 
 murder; assassinations became as frequent in Jerusalem as they were at Pcome 
 during the Papacy of Alexander VI. The very Temple was stained with 
 blood. Any one who wanted to get rid of a public or private enemy found it 
 a cheap and easy process to hire a murderer. It is now that the Ominous 
 term stearins occurs for the firs't time in Jewish histo'ry. 
 
 This had happened in A.D. 37, and it wfcs probably at the Passover of 
 A.D. 58 only seven weeks before the time at which we hare now arrived 
 that the Egyptian Pseudo-Messiah had succeeded in raising 30,000 followers, 
 with no better pretensions than the promise that he would lead them to the 
 Mount of Olives, and that the walls of Jerusalem should fall fiat before him. 
 
 1 JLD. 52.
 
 THE LAST JOTmWEY TO JERUSALEM. 531 
 
 Four thossand of these poor deluded wretches seem actually to have accom- 
 panied him to the Mount of Olives. There Felix fell upon them, routed them 
 at the first onslaught, killed four hundred, took a multitude of prisoners, and 
 brought the whole movement to an impotent conclusion. The Egyptian, how- 
 ever, had by some means or other made good his escape was at this moment- 
 uncaptnred and, in fact, was never hoard of any more. But the way in 
 which followers had flocked in thousands to so poor an impostor showed the 
 tension of men's minds. 
 
 Such was the condition of events in so excited a state were the leaders 
 and the multitude at the very time that St. Paul was keeping himself as 
 quiet as possible in the chambers of the Nazarites. Four days had already 
 passed, and there seemed to be a hope that, as the number of pilgrims began 
 to thin, he might be safe for three more days, after which there would be 
 nothing to prevent him from carrying out his long-cherished wish to visit 
 Rome, and from thence to preach the Gospel even as far as Spain. Alas ! he 
 was to visit Rome, but not as a free man. 
 
 For on the fifth day there were some Jews from Ephesus and other cities 
 of Asia perhaps Alexander the coppersmith was one of thorn in the Court 
 of the Women, and the glare of hatred suddenly shot into the eyes of one of 
 these observers as he recognised the marked features of the hated Shaul. He 
 instantly attracted towards him the attention of some of the compatriots to 
 whom Paul's teaching was so well known. The news ran in a moment through 
 the passionate, restless, fanatical crowd. In one minute there arose one of 
 those deadly cries which are the first beginnings of a sedition. These Asiatics 
 sprang on Paul, and stirred up the vast throng of worshippers with the cry, 
 " Israelites ! help ! This is the wretch who teaches all men everywhere against 
 the people, and the Thorah, and the Temple. Ay, and besides that, he brought 
 Greeks into the Temple, and hath polluted this holy place." Whether they 
 really thought so or not we cannot tell, but they had no grounds for this mad 
 charge beyond the fact that they had seen the Ephesian Trophimus walking 
 about with Paul in the streets of Jerusalem, and supposed that Paul had 
 taken him even into the holy precincts. To defile the Temple was what every 
 enemy of the Jews tried to do. Antiochus, Heliodorus, Pompey, had pro. 
 f aned it ; and very recently the Samaritans had been charged with deliberately 
 polluting it by scattering dead men's bones over its precincts. Instantly the 
 rumour flew from lip to lip that this was Shanl, of whom they had heard? 
 Paul, the mesttTi Paul, one of the Galilaean Minim one of the believers ia 
 "{he Hung %-Paul, the renegade Rabbi, who taught and wrote that Gfeutiles 
 were as good as Je'ws -the maa who blasphemed the ThoTai the man whom 
 the synagogues had scourged in vainthe man who went from place to plaea 
 getting them into trouble with the Romans ; and that he had been caught 
 taking with him into the Temple a Gentile dog, an uneircumcised ger. 1 The 
 
 1 Had he done thia he would have incurred the censure in Ezek. xlir. 7; cf. Eph. ii. 
 14. The following remarkabletpasBage of the Talmud is a self-condemnation by the Jewish 
 teachers .'"What," it is asked, "was the cause of the destruction of the first Temple"
 
 632 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATH* 
 
 punishment for that crime was death death by the full permission of the 
 Romans themselves ; death even against a Roman who should dare to set foot 
 beyond the Chel. They were now in the Court of the Women, but they only 
 had to go through the Corinthian gate, and down the fifteen steps outside of 
 it, to come to the CMl the " middle-wall of partition," that low stone bains- 
 trade with obelisks, on each of which was engraved on stone tablets the 
 inscription in Greek and Latin that " No alien must set foot within that 
 enclosure on pain of certain death." 1 Here, then, was a splendid opportunity 
 for most just vengeance on the apostate who taught apostasy. A rush was 
 made upon him, and the cry " To the rescue ! " echoed on all sides through the 
 streets. 2 To defend himself was impossible. What voice conld be heard 
 amid the wild roar of that momentarily increasing hubbub ? Was this to be 
 the end ? Was he to be torn to pieces then and there in the very Temple 
 precincts? If he had been in the court below, that would have been his 
 inevitable fate, but the sacredness of the spot saved him. They began drag- 
 ging him, vainly trying to resist, vainly trying to speak a word, through the 
 great " Beautiful " gate of Corinthian brass, and down the fifteen steps, while 
 the Levites and the Captain of the Temple, anxious to save the sacred en- 
 closure from one more stain of blood, exerted all their strength to shut the 
 ponderous gate behind the throng which surged after their victim. 3 But 
 meanwhile the Roman centurion stationed under arms with his soldiers on the 
 roof of the western cloisters, was aware that a wild commotion had suddenly 
 sprung up. The outburst of fury in these Oriental mobs is like the scream of 
 mingled sounds in a forest which sometimes suddenly startles the deep still- 
 ness of a tropic night. The rumour had spread in a moment from the Temple 
 to the city, and streams of men were thronging from every direction into the 
 vast area of the Court of the Gentiles. In another moment it was certain 
 that those white pillars and that tessellated floor would be stained with blood. 
 Without a moment's delay the centurion sent a message to Lysias, the com- 
 mandant of Antonia, that the Jews had seized somebody in the Temple, and 
 were trying to kill him. The Romans were accustomed to rapid movements, 
 taught them by thousands of exigencies of their career in hostile countries, 
 
 The prevalence of idolatry, adultery, and murder. . . . But what was the cause of 
 the destruction of the second Temple, seeing that the age vxu characterised by study of the 
 Law, observance of its precepts, and the practice of benevolence ? It was groundless 
 hatred ; and it shows that groundless hatred equal in heinousness to idolatry, adultery, 
 and murder combined " (Jama, f. 9, 2). As specimens of the groundless and boundless 
 'hatred of the Talmudists to Christians, see Abhoda Zarah, f. 26, 1, 2 (Amsterdam 
 edition) ; Maimonides, Hilch. Accum, 9. 
 
 i The V n - (Jos- JB. f. v. 5, 2 ; vi. 2, 4 ; Antt. xv. 11, 5.) The discovery of one 
 of these inscriptions by M. Clermont Ganneau an inscription on wkich the eyes of our 
 Lord Himself and of all Has disciples must have often fallen is very interesting. Ho 
 found it built into the walls of a small mosque in the Via Dolorosa (Palestine Exploration 
 Fund Report, 1871, p. 132). Paul had not indeed actually brought any Gentile inside the 
 Chtl ; but to do so ideally and spiritually had been the vary purpose of bis life, V. infra, 
 ad Eph. ii. 14. 
 
 3 Xxi. 30, cKti/qfh) rj Tro\i? oAij, (tai iftvtro <rvi-JpO(ij[. 
 
 Jo. B. J. vi. 5, 3 ; c. Ap, ii. 9. . .; ,; .Jiul"."?
 
 THE LAST JOU&ttSfr TO JKIi'JSALEM. 533 
 
 but nowhere more essential than in a city which Prefect after Praefoct and 
 Procurator after Procurator had learnt to detest as the head-quarters of 
 burning, senseless, and incomprehensible fanaticism. A single word was 
 enough to surround Lysias with a well- disciplined contingent of centurions 
 and soldiers, and he instantly dashed along the cloister roof and down the 
 stairs into the Court of the Gentiles. The well-known clang of Roman arms 
 arrested the attention of the mob. They had had some terrible warnings very 
 lately. The memory of that awful day, when they trampled each other to 
 death by thousands to escape the cohort of Cumanus, was still fresh in their 
 memory. They did not dare to resist the mailed soldiery of their conquerors. 
 Lysias and his soldiers forced their way straight through the throng to the 
 place where Paul was standing, and rescued him from his enraged opponents. 
 When he had seized him, and had his arms bound to two soldiers by two chaiiia, 
 he asked the question, " Who the man might be, and what he had done ? " l 
 Nothing was to be learnt from the confused cries that rose in answer, and, in 
 despair of arriving at anything definite in such a scene, Lysias ordered him 
 to be marched into the barracks. 1 But no sooner had he got on the stairs which 
 led up to the top of the cloister, and so into the fortress, 3 than the mob, afraid 
 that they were going to be baulked of their vengeance, made another rush at 
 him, with yells of " Kill him ! kill him ! " * and Paul, unable in his fettered 
 condition to steady himself, was carried off his legs, and hurried along in the 
 arms of the surrounding soldiers. He was saved from being torn to pieces 
 chiefly by the fact that Lysias kept close by him ; and, as the rescue-party 
 was about to disappear into the barracks, Paul said to him in Greek, " May 
 I speak a word to you P " " Can you speak Greek ? " asked the commandant 
 in surprise. " Are you not then really that Egyptian 5 who a little while ago 
 made a disturbance, 6 and led out into the wilderness those 4,000 sicarii ? " J 
 " No," said Paul ; " I am a Jew, a native of Tarsus, in Cilicia, a citizen of 
 
 1 XXI. 33, rt? iv f IT), KOI ri ccrnv weTroiTJKoit. * Tra.pf[j.{io\rj. < 
 
 * Fort Antonia was a four-square tower, at the N.W. angle of the Temple area, with 
 a smaller tower fifty cubits high at each corner except the southern, where the tower was 
 seventy cubits high, with the express object of overlooking everything that went on in 
 the Temple courts. Stairs from these towera communicated with the roofs of two por- 
 ticoes, on which at intervals (juOTajievoi) stood armed Human soldiers at the times of the 
 great festivals, to prevent all seditious movements (Jos. JJ. /". v. 5, 8 ; Antt. xx. 5, 3). 
 
 4 Of. Luke xxiii. 18, and the cry of Pagan mobs, a!peroi>$ adcW . 
 
 5 Ver. 38, OVK apa (TV tl o Aivvirrios .... . j One hardly sees why Lysias should have 
 inferred that the Egyptian could not speak Greek, but he may have known that this was 
 the fact. Since the Egyptian had only escaped a few months before, and the mass of the 
 people never favourable to him would be exasperated at the detection of hia impos- 
 ture, the conjecture of Lysias was not surprising. 
 
 avcurraTwra?. Cf. XVli. 6. 
 
 7 Ver. 38, roi/s TerpajcwrxtXiovt appa; Ttav triKopiiav. Josephus (Antt. XX. 8, 6) says that ; 
 Felix, when he routed them, killed 400 and took 200 prisoners. In B. J. ii. 13, 5, he 
 says that he collected 30,000 followers, and led them to the Mount of Olives from the 
 wilderness, and that the majority of them were massacred or taken prisoners. Most 
 critics only attach importance to such discrepancies when they find or imagine them in 
 the sacred writere. For the sicarii, see Jos. B. J. ii. 13, 3. He says that they mur- 
 dered people in broad day, and in the open streets, especially during the great feasts, and 
 that they carried their daggers concealed under their robes,
 
 534 THE LIffE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 no undistinguished city, 1 and, I entreat you, allow me to speak to the 
 people." 
 
 It was an undaunted request to come from one whose life had just been 
 rescued, and barely rescued, from that raging mob, and who was at that 
 moment suffering from their rough treatment. Most men would have been 
 in a state of such wild alarm as to desire nothing so much as to bo hurried out 
 of sight of the crowd. Not so with St. Paul. Snatched from his persecutors 
 after imminent risk barely delivered from that most terrifying of all forms 
 of danger, the murderous fury of masses of his fellow-men he asks leave 
 not only to face, but oven to turn round and address, the densely. thronging 
 thousands, who wore only kept from him by a little belt of Roman swords. 2 
 
 Lysias gave him leave to speak, and apparently ordered one of his hands 
 to bo unfettered ; and taking his stand on the stairs, Paul, with uplifted arm, 
 made signals to the people that he wished to address them. s The mob 
 became quiet, for in the East crowds are much more instantly swayed by 
 their emotions than they are among us ; and Paul, speaking in Syriac, the 
 vernacular of Palestine, and noticing priests and Sanhedrists among the 
 crowd, began 
 
 "Brethren and Fathers,* listen to the defence I have now to make to 
 you!" 
 
 The sound of their own language, showing that the speaker was at any rate 
 no mere Hellenist, charmed their rage for the moment, and produced a still 
 deeper silence. In that breathless hush Paul continued his speech. It was 
 adapted to its object with that consummate skill which, even at the most 
 exciting moments, seems never to have failed him. While he told them the 
 truth, he yet omitted all facts which would be likely to irritate them, and 
 which did not bear on his immediate object. That object was to show that 
 he could entirely sympathise with them in this outburst of zeal, because 
 he had once shared their state of mind, and that nothing short of divino 
 revelations had altered the course of his religion and hia life. He was, 
 he told them, a Jew, 6 born indeed in Tarsus, yet trained from his earliest 
 youth in Jerusalem, at the feet of no less a teacher than their great living 
 ilabban Gamaliel ; that he was not merely a Jew, but a Pharisee who had 
 studied the inmost intricacy of the Halacha ; 6 and was so like themselves in 
 being a zealot for God, that he had persecuted " this way " to the very death, 
 
 1 o< d<r>}fiov *4Aei*f (Eur. Ion. 8). It 'wut a-jro'vo^o?, &nd & p^rpoiroXi?, and had a famcua 
 university. 
 
 2 Knox, who thought that Paul did wrong to take the TOW, says, "He was brought 
 into the most desperate danger, God designing to show thereby that we must not do 
 evil that good may come." 
 
 8 Ver. 40, MweVeicre T$ x pu Cf. xii. 17 ; xix. 33 ; xxi. 40. Of. Pers, iv. 5, "Calidm 
 fecisse silentia turbae Maj estate mantis." 
 
 4 See St. Stephen's exordium (yii. 2). 
 
 6 xxii. 3, into 'lov&uot. To Lysias he had used the general expression &v6p*s*ot 'lav-S. 
 (xxl. 39). 
 
 *-xxii. 3, KO.TO. oicpt/3etav rov warpifov vfiov. Cf. xxvi. 5; Jos. B. J. it 8, 14; Th3e 
 "accuracy" corresponds to the Hebrew tsedakaJt, End the Talmudic dikdukty ('pnpi),
 
 THE LA.3T JOUKSKY TO JKBUaALEtt. 535 
 
 haling to prison not only men, but even women ; in proof of which he appealed 
 to tho testimony of the ex-High Priest Theophilus, 1 and many still surviving 
 members of the Sanhedrin who had given him letters to Damascus. What, 
 then, had changed the whole spirit of his life P Nothing less than a Divine 
 vision of Jesus of JNazarath, which had stricken him blind to earth, and bidden 
 him confer with Ananias. 8 He does not tell them that Ananias was a Chris- 
 tian, but which was no less true that he was an orthodox observer of the 
 Law, for whom all the Jews of Damascus felt respect. Ananias had healed 
 his blindness, and told him that it was " the God of our fathers," who fore- 
 ordained him, to know His will and see " the Just One," 3 and hear the 
 message from His lips, that he might be for Him " a witness to all men " of 
 what he had heard and seen. He then mentions his baptism and return to 
 Jerusalem, and, hurrying over all needless details, comes to the point that, 
 while he was worshipping now twenty years ago in that very Temple, he 
 had fallen into a trance, and again seen the risen Jesus, who bado him 
 hurry with all speed out of Jerusalem, because there they would not receive 
 bis testimony. But so far from wishing to go, he had even pleaded with 
 the heavenly vision that surely the utter chaiigo from Saul the raging per- 
 secutor Saul who had imprisoned and beaten the believers throughout the 
 synagogues Saul at whose feet had been laid the clothes of them that 
 slew His witness* Stephen the change from such a man to Saul the 
 Christian and the preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ could not fail 
 to win credence to his testimony. Bui He who spake to him would not 
 suffer him to plead for a longer opportunity of appealing to his fellow- 
 countrymen. Briefly but decisively came the answer which had been the 
 turning-point for all his subsequent career" Go, for I will send thee far away 
 TO THE GENTILES 1 " 
 
 That fatal word, which hitherto he had carefully avoided, but which it 
 was impossible for him to avoid any longer, was enough. Up to this point 
 they had continued listening to him with the deepest attention. Many of 
 them were not wholly unacquainted with the facts to which he appealed. His 
 intense earnestness and mastery over the language which they loved charmed 
 them all the more, because the soldiers who stood by could not understand a 
 word of what he was saying, so that his speech bore the air of a confidential 
 communication to Jews alone, to which the alien tyrants could only listen 
 with vain curiosity and impatient suspicion. Who could tell but what some 
 Messianic announcement might be hovering on his lips ? Might not he who 
 was thrilling them with the narrative of these visions and revelations have 
 some new ecstasy to tell of, which should be the signal that now the supreme 
 hour had come, and which should pour into their hearts a stream of fire so 
 
 > See p. 100. 
 
 ' The narratives of St. Paul's conversion in lx., xxii., rzvi. are sufficiently considered 
 and "harmonised" not that they really need any harmonising in pp. 107 112 
 
 * " The Just One." See the gpeech of Stephen (vii. 52). 
 
 4 jiajm*. not yet "martyr," as in Rev. xvii. 6. (Clem. Ep, 1 Cor. v.) But St. Paul 
 would here have used the word edh, " witness."
 
 538 THE LIFE AND WOfcK Otf S!t. PAUL. 
 
 intense, so kindling, that in the heat of it the iron chains of the Romans 
 should be as tow ? But was this to be the climax ? Was a trance to be 
 pleaded in defence of the apostasy of the renegade ? Was this evil soul to be 
 allowed to produce holy witness for his most flagrant offences P Were they 
 to bo told, forsooth, that a vision from heaven had bidden him preach to 
 " sinners of the Gentiles," and fling open, as he had been doing, the hallowed 
 privileges of the Jews to those dogs of the uncircuineision ? All that strange 
 multitude was as one ; the same hatred shot at the same instant through all 
 their hearts. That word " GENTILES," confirming all their worst suspicions, 
 fell like a spark on the inflammable mass of their fanaticism. No sooner was 
 it uttered x than they raised a simultaneous yell of " Away with such a wretch 
 from the earth ; he ought never to have lived ! " a 
 
 Then began one of the most odious and despicable spectacles which tho 
 world can witness, the spectacle of an Oriental mob, hideous with impotent 
 rage, howling, yelling, cursing, gnashing their teeth, flinging about their arms, 
 waving and tossing their blue and red robes, casting dust into the air by hand- 
 fuls, with all the furious gesticulations of an uncontrolled fanaticism. 3 
 
 Happily Paul was out of the reach of their personal fury.* It might goad 
 them to a courage sufficient to make them rend the air with their cries of 
 frenzy, and make the court of the Temple look like the refuge for a throng of 
 demoniacs ; but it hardly prompted them to meet the points of those Roman 
 broadswords. In great excitement, the commandant ordered the prisoner to 
 be led into the barracks, and examined by scourging; for, being entirely 
 ignorant of what Paul had been saying, he wanted to know what further he 
 could have done to excite those furious yells. The soldiers at once tied his 
 hands together, stripped his back bare, and bent him forward into the position 
 for that horrid and often fatal examination by torture which, not far from that 
 very spot, his Lord had undergone. 5 Thrice before, on that scarred back, had 
 Paul felt the fasces of Roman lictors ; five times the nine-and-thirty strokes of 
 Jewish thongs ; here was a new form of agony, the whip the horribile flagellum 
 which tho Romans employed to force by torture the confession of the truth. 6 
 But at this stage of the proceedings, Paul, self-possessed even in extremes, 
 interposed with a quiet question. It had been useless before, it might be 
 useless now, but it was worth trying, since both the soldiers and their officers 
 seem already to have been prepossessed by his noble calm and self-control in 
 
 1 xxii. 22, TIKOVOV i avrov a\pi TOVTOV rov Xoyov, xal tinjpav Ti)i> faovrjv avruv Aryoxrtf , c.r.A. 
 1 Ver. 22, ou KOJ^MV. , A, B, C, D, E, G. 
 
 8 xxii. 23. On the sudden excitability of Eastern mobs, and the sudden calm which 
 often follows it, see Palest. Explor. Fund for April, 1879, p. 77. 
 
 4 St. James had spoken of the "many myriads " (Acts ixi. 20) of Jews who, though 
 zealots for the Law, had embraced the faith. How came it that not one of these "many 
 myriads " lifted an arm or raised a voice to liberate St. Paul from the perils into which 
 he had been brought by religious hatred greedily adopting a lying accusation ? 
 
 5 xxii. 25, irpoereifev avrov rot? i/iao-iv "stretched him forward with the thongs" to 
 prepare him for examination by being scourged with fumy. The word ijxT seems 
 never to mean a scourge. 
 
 See Life of Christ, I 187 ; IL 380.
 
 SHE LAST JOURNEY 10 JERUSALEM. 53? 
 
 the midst of dangers BO awful and so sudden. He therefore asked in a quiet 
 voice, " Is it lawful for you to scourge a Roman who has not been tried P" 
 The question was addressed to the centurion who was standing by to see that 
 the torture was duly administered, and he was startled by the appeal. This 
 was evidently no idle boaster ; no man who would invent a privilege to escape 
 pain or peril. Few under any circumstances would ever venture to invent the 
 proud right of saying Civis ROMANUS SUM, 1 for the penalty of imposture 
 was death; 2 and the centurion had seen enough to be quite sure that this 
 prisoner, at any rate, was not the man to do so. He made the soldiers stop, 
 went off to the commandant, and said to him, with something of Roman blunt- 
 ness, " What are you about ? 3 This man is a Roman." This was important. 
 If he was a Roman, the Chiliarch had already twice broken the law which 
 entitled him to protection ; for he had both bound him and, in contravention 
 of an express decree of Augustus, had given orders to begin his examination 
 by putting him to the torture. Moreover, as being one who himself placed 
 the highest possible value on the/ws civitatis, he respected the claim. Hurry- 
 ing to him, he said 
 
 " Tell me, are you a Roman P " 
 
 " Yes/' 
 
 But Lysias, as he looked at him, could not help having his doubts. He 
 was himself a Greek or Syrian, who had bought the franchise, and thereupon 
 assumed the prsenomen Claudius, at a time when the privilege was very 
 expensive. 4 Whether Paul was a Roman or not, he was clearly a Jew, and no 
 less clearly a very poor one : how could he have got the franchise ? 
 
 " I know how much it cost me 5 to get this citizenship," he remarked, in a 
 dubious tone of voice. 
 
 " But I have been a citizen from my birth," was the calm answer to his 
 unexpressed suspicion. 
 
 The claim could not be resisted. Paul was untied, and the soldiers dropped 
 their scourges. But Lysias was not by any means free from anxiety as to the 
 consequences of his illegal conduct. 6 Anxious to rid his hands of this 
 awkward business in a city where the merest trifles were constantly leading to 
 
 1 Cic. in Verr. v. 63. * At any rate in certain cages. Suet. Claud. 25. 
 
 * Ver. 26, T i /xe'AAeis iroietc; The Spa is omitted in N, A, B, 0, E. 
 
 * Some ten years before this time it had, however, become much cheaper. Messalina, 
 the infamous wife of Claudius, who was put to death A.D. 48, openly sold it, first, at 
 very high terms, but subsequently so cheap that Dion Cassius (is.. 17) says it could be 
 bought for one or two broken glasses. 
 
 4 Ver. 28, 'Eyw o'Sa iroerov, D. Though unsupported by evidence, the colloquialism 
 sounds very genuine. Perhaps Lysias had bribed one of Claudius's freedmen, who made 
 money in this way. 
 
 6 Ver. 29. There is a little uncertainty as to what is meant by i<J>o/3ij0)) . . art Jj oJror 
 <<cKw?. If it means the chaining him with two chains (xxi. 33), Lysias did not at any 
 rate think it necessary to undo what he had once done, for it is clear that Paul remained 
 chained (xxii. 30, i\vvev av-rbv). I therefore refer it to the binding with the thongs 
 (ver. 25), by which Lysias seems to have broken two laws : (1) The Lex Porcia (Cic. pro 
 Habirw, 3 ; in Verr. v. 66) ; (2) " Non esse a torment ia incipiendum Div. Augustus 
 oonstituit" (Digest. Leg. 48, tit. 18, c. 1).
 
 538 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PATH* 
 
 most terrible consequences, he told the chief priests to summon next d&y a 
 meeting of the Sanhodrin in order to try the prisoner. 
 
 The Sanhedrin met in full numbers. They no longer sat in the Liahcath 
 Haggazzith, the famous hall, "with its tessellated pavement, which stood at the 
 south side of the Court of the Priests. 1 Had they still been accustomed to 
 meet there, Lysias and his soldiers would never have been suffered to obtrude 
 their profane feet into a chamber which lay within the middle wall of partition 
 beyond which even a Procurator dare not even have set a step on pain of 
 death. But at this period the Sanhedrin had probably begun their meetings 
 in the Chanujoth, or " booths," the very existence of which was a proof of the 
 power and prosperity of "the Serpent House of Hanan."* To this place 
 "Lysias led his prisoner, and placed him before them. The Nasi, or President, 
 was, as usual, the High Priest. 8 The preliminary questions were asked, and 
 then Paul, fixing on the assembly his earnest gaze, 4 began his defence with the 
 words, "Brethren, my public life has been spent in all good conscience 
 towards God till this day."* Something in these words jarred particularly on 
 tho mind of the High Priest. He may have disliked the use of the term 
 " brethren," an address which implied a certain amount of equality, instead of 
 one of those numerous expressions of servility which it was only fitting that a 
 man like this should use to the great assembly of the wise. But Paul was no 
 Am-ha-arets, on the contrary, he was as much a Rabbi, as much a Chakart., as 
 the best " remover of mountains " among them all, and it may have been that 
 he designedly used the term " brethren " instead of " fathers " because he too 
 had been once a Sanhedrist. The bold assertion of perfect innocence further 
 irritated the presiding Nasi, and he may have felt, somewhat painfully, that 
 his own public life had not by any means boon in all good conscience either 
 towards God or towards man. This High Priest, Ananias, the son of 
 Nebedoeus, 9 who had been appointed by Herod of Chalcis, was one of the 
 worst, if not the very worst specimen of the worldly Sadducees of an age ia 
 which the leading hiorarchs resembled tho loosest of the Avignon cardinals, or 
 of the preferment-hunting bishops in the dullest and deadest period of 
 Charles the Second or George the First, 7 History records the revengeful un- 
 
 See Lightfoot. ffor. Heir. i. 1,105. 
 
 a r. lupn, pp. 87, 94. Life of Ckrui, i. 77; a 337. Jost, Gesch, i. 145; 
 Hwzfeld, Qesch. i. 394. By thia time, A.D. 58, the change had undoubtedly taken 
 place. 
 
 3 Endless mistakes have apparently arisen from confusing the President of tha 
 Shnhedrin with the President of the Schools. The subject ia very obseuro ; but whilo 
 undoubtedly the title of Nasi, or President of the Sanhedrin, was borne by great Rabbis 
 like Hillelj Simeon, and Gamaliel, no less undoubtedly the High Priest unless most 
 flagrantly incompetent presided as Nasi at the judicial meetings of the Sanhedrin, 
 regarded as a governing body. 
 
 * xxiii. 1, aTtyiVa?. Cf. Luke iv. 20 ; Acts x. 4 ; ziii. 9. 
 
 8 -!roA.TVMai (PhiL L 27 ; Jos. Vit. 49 ; 2 Mace. vi. 1). Besides the general assertion 
 of his innocence, he may mean that, -whatever he had taught to the Gentiles, he had 
 Ih-ed as a loyal Jew. 
 
 On this man see Jos. Antt. xx. 5, 2; 6, 2, 3; 8, 8; 9, 2; S. J. U. 17, 9. 
 
 " No wonder that in these dayi there lay upon the Jews an abiding sense of the 
 wrath of God against their race. No wonder that the Talmud records the legends how
 
 THE LAST JOUSXEY TO JERUSALEM. 539 
 
 wisdom of his conduct towards the Samaritans, and tbe far from noble means 
 which he took to escape the consequences of his complicity in their massacre. 
 The Talmud adds to our picture of him that he was a rapacious tyrant who, in 
 his gluttony and greed, reduced the inferior priests almost to starvation by 
 defrauding them of their tithes; 1 and that he was one of those who sent his 
 creatures with bludgeons to the threshing-floors to seize tho tithes by force. 3 
 He held the highpricsthood for a period which, in these bad days, was 
 unusually long, 3 a term of office which had, iowever, been interrupted by hia 
 absence as a prisoner to answer for his misconduct at Rome. On this occasion, 
 thanks to an actor and a concubine, he eeems to have gained his cause, 4 but he 
 was subsequently deposed to make room for Ishmael Ben Phabi, and few 
 pitied him when he was dragged out of his hiding-place iu a sewer to perish 
 miserably by the daggers of the Sicarii, whom, in the days of his prosperity, 
 he had not scrupled to sanction and employ. 5 
 
 His conduct towards St. Paul gives us a specimen of his character. 
 Scarcely had the Apostle uttered the first sentence of his defence when, with 
 disgraceful illegality, Ananias ordered the officers of the court to smite him on 
 the mouth. 8 Stung by an insult so flagrant, an outrage so undeserved, the 
 naturally choleric temperament of Paul flamed into that sudden sense of anger 
 which ought to be controlled, but which can hardly bo wanting in a truly noble 
 character. No character can be perfect which does not cherish in itself a 
 deeply-seated, though perfectly generous and forbearing, indignation against 
 intolerable wrong. Smarting from the blow, " God shall smite thee," he 
 exclaimed, " thou white-washed wall! 7 What! Dost thou sit there judging 
 me according to the Law, and in violation of law biddest me to be smitten ?" 3 
 
 at this time the sacred light, -which was to burn all night on the candlestick (/? 
 ma'oraii), was often quenched before the daybreak ; how the red tongue of cloth round 
 the neck of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement was no longer miraculously turned 
 to white ; how the huge brazen Nikanor-gate of the Temple, v/liich required twenty 
 Levites to shut it every evening, opened of its own accord ; and how Johauan Bea 
 Zacchai exclaimed, on hearing the portent, " Why wilt thou terrify us, O Temple ? "We 
 know that thou art doomed to ruin." 
 
 1 The Talmud tella us that when this person was High Priest the sacrifices were 
 always eaten up, so that no fragments of them were left for the poorer priests (Pesachim, 
 57,1). (Gratz, iii. 279.) 
 
 2 Pesachtm, vJbi supra. St. Paul might well have asked him, o iSSeAvo- c^evM ri U&aHat, 
 ;*po<n>Xfi? (Rom. ii. 22 ; v. supra). 
 
 3 From A. D. 48 to A.D. 59. The voyage as a prisoner to Rome was in A.D. 52. 
 
 * Wieseler Chrvn. d. Ap. Zeit, 76. 6 Jcs. Antt, xx. 9, 2; B. J. ii. 17, 9. 
 
 8 To this style of argument the Jews seem to have been singularly prone (cf. Luke 
 vi. 29 ; John xviii. 22 ; 2 Cor. 33. 20 ; 1 Tim. iii. 3 ; Tit. i. 7). This brutality illustrates 
 the remark in Jonia, 23, 1, Sota, 47, 2, that at that period no one cared for anything but 
 externalism, and that Jews thought more of a pollution of the Temple than they did 
 of assassination (Gratz, iii. 322). 
 
 7 xxiii. 3, roix Ktxovia.iJ.ti-t. Cf. Matt, xxiii. 27, T<OI Kexoyiapcvoi. Dr. Plumptre 
 compares Jeffreys' treatment of Baiter. 
 
 8 For a Jew to order a Jew to be struck on the cheek was peculiarly offensive. " He 
 that strikes the cheek of an Israelite strikes, as it were, the cheek of the Shechinah," for 
 it is said (Prov. xx. 25), " He that strikes a man " (i.e., an Israelite who alone deserves 
 the name ; Rashi quotes JSalha Mctsia, f. 114, col. 2), strikes the Holy One. Sanhtdr. 
 f. 58, coL 2, sV = cheekbone, and op3, "to strike," in Syriac (collidere, cf. Dan, v. 6; 
 Buxtorf, Lex Chald, s, v.), as well as to snare,
 
 5-iO *HE LIFB AND WORK OlT ST. 
 
 Tlie language has been censured as unbecoming in its violence, and has been 
 unfavourably compared with the meekness of Christ before the tribunal of his 
 enemies. " Where," asks St. Jerome, " is that patience of the Saviour, who 
 as a lamb led to the slaughter opens not his mouth so gently asks the smiter, 
 ' If I have spoken evil, bear witness to the evil ; but if well, why smitest thou 
 mo P ' We are not detracting from the Apostle, but declaring the glory of 
 God, who, suffering in the flesh, reigns above the wrong and frailty of the 
 flesh." 1 Yet we need not remind the reader that not once or twice only did 
 Christ give the rein to righteous anger, and blight hypocrisy and insolence 
 with a flash of holy wrath. The bystanders seem to have been startled by the 
 boldness of St. Paul's rebuke, for they said to him, " Dost thou revile the 
 High Priest of God ? " The Apostle's anger had expended itself in that one 
 outburst, and he instantly apologised with exquisite urbanity and self-control. 
 " I did not know," he said, " brethren, that he is the High Priest ; " adding 
 that, had he known this, he would not have addressed to him the opprobrious 
 name of "whited wall," because he reverenced and acted upon the rule of 
 Scripture, " Thou shalt not speak ill of a ruler of thy people." 2 
 
 It has been thought very astonishing that St. Paul should not know that 
 Ananias was the High Priest, and all sorts of explanations have consequently 
 been foisted into his very simple words. These words cannot, however, mean 
 that he was unable to recognise the validity of Ananias's title ; 8 or that he had 
 spoken for the moment without considering his office ; * or that he could not 
 be supposed to acknowledge a high priest in one who behaved with such 
 illegal insolence. 6 Considering the disrepute and insignificance into which 
 the high-priesthood had fallen during the dominance of men who would only, 
 as a rule, take it for a short time in order to " pass the chair; " 6 considering 
 that one of these worldly intruders took to wearing silk gloves that he might 
 not soil his hands with the sacrifices ; considering, too, that the Romans and 
 the Herods were constantly sotting up one and putting down another at their 
 own caprice, and that the people often regarded some one as the real high priest, 
 who was no longer invested with the actual office ; considering, too, that in 
 such ways the pontificate of these truckling Sadducees had sunk into a mere 
 simulacrum of what once it was, and that the real allegiance of the people had 
 been completely transferred to the more illustrious Rabbis it is perfectly 
 conceivable that St. Paul, after his long absence from Jerusalem, 7 had not, 
 
 1 Adv. Pelag. iii. 1. 
 
 2 Ex. xxii. 28, LXX. (cf. 2 Pet. ii. 10). Under the good breeding of the answer we 
 notice the admirable skill which enabled Paul thus to show at once his knowledge of and 
 his obedience to the Law, for the supposed apostasy from which he was impugned. 
 
 * Lightfoot, Schoettgen, Kuinoel, Baumgarten. 
 
 4 Bengel (non veniebat mihi in mentem), Wetstein, Bp. Sanderson (non uoveram, non 
 satis attente consideravi), Bp. Wordsworth, &c. 
 
 * Calvin. 
 
 * The Jews themselves take this view of them. Qratz (iii. 322) refers to PesacMm^ 
 57, 1, Joma, 23, 1, which speaks of their narrowness, envy, violence, love of precedence^ 
 &c. ; Josephus (Antt. xx. 8, 8, 9, 4) speaks of their impudence and turbulence (see Life 
 of Christ, ii. 329342). 
 
 7 This is the view of Chryaostom.
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 541 
 
 during the few and much occupied days which had elapsed since his return, 
 given himself the trouble to inquire whether a Kamhit, or a Boethusian, or a 
 Canthera was at that particular moment adorned with the empty title which 
 he probably disgraced. He must, of course, have been aware that the high 
 priest was the Nasi of the Sanhedrin, but in a crowded assembly he had not 
 noticed who the speaker was. Owing to his weakened sight, all that ho saw 
 before him was a blurred white figure issuing a brutal order, and to this 
 person, who in his external whiteness and inward worthlessnoss thus reminded 
 him of the plastered wall of a sepulchre, he had addressed his indignant 
 denunciation. That he should retract it on learning the hallowed position of 
 the delinquent, was in accordance with that high breeding of the perfect 
 gentleman which in all his demeanour ho habitually displayed. 
 
 But while we can easily excuse any passing touch of human infirmity, if 
 such there were, in his sudden vehemence, we cannot defend his subsequent 
 conduct at that meeting. Surely it was more than pardonable if on that day 
 he was a little unhinged, both morally and spiritually, by the wild and awful 
 trials of the day before. In the discussion which was going on about his 
 case, his knowledge of the Sanhadrin, of which he had been a member, enabled 
 him easily to recognise that his judges were still mainly divided into two 
 parties the Sadducean priests and the Pharisaic elders and scribes. The 
 latter were the more popular and numerous, the former were the more wealthy 
 and powerful. Now St. Paul well knew that these two parties were separated 
 from each other by an internecine enmity, which was only reconciled in the 
 presence of common hatreds. He knew, too, that one main point of conten- 
 tion between them arose from questions about the Unseen "World, and the lifo 
 beyond the grave. 1 Seeing, therefore, that he would meet with neither justice 
 nor mercy from that tribunal, he decided to throw among them the apple of 
 discord, and cried out amid the Babel of tongues, " Brethren, I am a 
 Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. I am being judged about the hope and 
 resurrection of the dead." The plan showed great knowledge of character, 
 and the diversion thus caused was for the time eminently successful ; but was 
 it worthy of St. Paul ? Undoubtedly there were points in common between 
 him and the Pharisees. "They taught a resurrection of the dead: so did he. 
 They taught the coming of the Kingdom of God : so did he. They taught 
 the Advent of the Messiah : so did he. They taught an intercourse of God 
 with men by the medium of angels, dreams, and visions : so did he. He 
 shared with the Pharisees exactly those doctrines, on account of which he was 
 regarded by the Sadducees as a seducer of the people." This is true ; but, on 
 the other hand, his belief in the risen Messiah was not the point on which he 
 was mainly being called in question. 2 That belief, had it stood alone, would 
 
 Matt. xxii. 23 ; Jos. B. J. ii. 8, 14 ; Antt. xviii. 1, 4. 
 
 2 Reuss, whose Actes des Ap6tres I had not read till these pages were written, takes a 
 very similar view, p. 218. Yet it is, of course, possible that St. Paul's exclamation may 
 have been justified by some circumstances of the discussion which have not been pre- 
 er^ed in the narrative.
 
 542 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 have been passed over by the Sanhedrin as, at the worst, a harmless delusion. 
 Nay, some of the Pharisaic Sanhedrists may even have been nominally 
 Christians. 1 But the fury against St. Paul was kindled by the far more 
 burning questions which arose out of his doctrine of the nullity of the Law, 
 and the admission of the Gentiles to equal privileges with the seed of Abraham. 
 Did not, then, the words of the Apostle suggest a false issue P And had he 
 any right to inflame an existing animosity P * And could he worthily say, 
 "I am a Pharisee ? " Was ho not in reality at variance with the Pharisees 
 in every fundamental particular of their system P Is not the Pharisaic spirit 
 in its very essence the antithesis of the Christian ? s Did not the two greatest 
 Epistles which he had written prove their whole theology, as such, to be false 
 in every line ? Was it not the very work of his life to pull down the legal 
 prescriptions around which it was their one object to rear a hedge ? Had not 
 they been occupied as none knew better than himself in riveting the iron 
 fetters of that yoke of bondage, which he was striving to shatter link by link P 
 Was there not the least little touch of & suggestio falsi in what he said ? Let 
 us make every possible deduction and allowance for a venial infirmity ; for a 
 sudden and momentary " economy," far less serious than that into which his 
 great brother- Apostle had swerved at Antioch ; and let us further admit that 
 there is a certain nationality in the chivalry of rigidly minute and scrupulously 
 inflexible straightforwardness, which is, among Northern nations, and among 
 the English in particular, the hereditary result of centuries of training. Let 
 us also acknowledge, not without a blush of shame, that certain slight 
 managements and accommodations of truth have in later ages been reckoned 
 among Christian virtues. Tet, after all these qualifications, we cannot in 
 this matter wholly see how St. Paul could say without qualification, in 
 such an assembly, " I am a Pharisee." If we think him very little to 
 blame for his stern rebuke of the High Priest; if, referring his conduct 
 to that final court of appeal, which consists in comparing it with the 
 precepts and example of his Lord, we can quite conceive that He who called 
 Herod rt a fox" would also have called Ananias "a whited wall;" on the 
 other hand, we cannot but think that this creating of a division among 
 common enemies on the grounds of a very partial and limited agreement with 
 certain other tenets held by some of them, was hardly worthy of St. Paul ; 
 and knowing, as we do know, what the Pharisees were, we cannot imagine his 
 Divine Master ever saying, under any circumstances, "I am a Pharisee." 
 Moreover, the device, besides being questionable, was riot ev&i jk&itic. It 
 
 1 Acts xv. 5. 
 
 3 Those who, in the teeth of all Scripture, will not believe that an Apostle can make 
 a mistake, have built disastrous conclusions on this action of St. Paul's, quoting it to 
 sanction the Machiavellian policy of the Komans, " Divide et impera." Corn. 4 Lapide, 
 on this passage, says, " Bellum haereticorum est pax ecclesiae," a maxim on which the 
 Romish Church has sometimes acted (see "Wordsworth, ad loc.). On the other hand, 
 Luther says, with hia robust good sense, "Non mihi placet studium illud sanctos nimii 
 efferendi et excusandi si sacra) scripture vim negat." 
 
 Matt, jnriii. 35, 27 ; John xii. 43 ; Rom. ii.
 
 THE LAST JOT7ENEY TO JERUSALEM. 543 
 
 added violence to a yet more infuriated reaction in men who felt that they 
 had been the victims of a successful stratagem, and in the remark of St. Paul 
 before the tribunal of Felix l I seem to seo though none have noticed it a 
 certain sense of compunction for the method in which he had extricated him. 
 self from a pressing danger. 
 
 But, as we have said, the stratagem was for the time almost magically 
 successful. Paul's enemies wore instantly at each other's throats. The High 
 Priest, Ananias, was so singularly detested by the Pharisaic party that 
 centuries afterwards the tradition still lingered of his violence and greed. 8 
 There rose a sudden uproar of angry voices, and. the scribes, who sided with 
 the Pharisees, started up in a body to declare that Paul was innocent. " We 
 
 find the defendant not guilty ; but if a spirit or angel spoke to him P " * 
 
 Again the Jews, even these distinguished Hierarchs and Rabbis, showed their 
 utter incapacity for self-control. Even in the august precincts of the 
 Sanhcdrin the clamour was succeeded by a tumult so violent that Paul was 
 once more in danger of being actually torn to pieces, this time by learned and 
 venerable hands. Claudius Lysias, more and more amazed at the imprac- 
 ticability of these Jews, who first unanimously set upon Paul in the Temple, 
 and half of whom in the Sanhedrin appeared to be now fighting in his defence, 
 determined that his fellow-citizen should not at any rate suffer so ignoble 
 a fate, and once more ordered the detachment of soldiers to go down to snatch 
 him from the midst of them, and lead him to the one spot in Jerusalem where 
 the greatest living Jew could alone find security the barracks of foreign 
 conquerors. 
 
 St. Paul might well be exhausted and depressed by the recurrence, on two 
 consecutive days, of such exciting scenes, and even a courage so dauntless as his 
 could not face unshaken this continual risk of sudden death. The next day 
 was again to bring a fresh peril ; but before it came, God in His mercy, who 
 had ever encouraged His faithful servant at the worst and darkest crises, sent 
 him a vision which saved him from all alarm as to his actual life for many a 
 long and trying day. As at Jerusalem on his first visit, and as at Corinth, and 
 as afterwards on the stormy sea, the Lord stood by him and said, " Cheer 
 thee, Paul ; for as thou didst bear witness respecting me at Jerusalem, so must 
 thou also bear witness at Rome." 
 
 The dawn of the next day sufficed to prove that his manceuvre in the 
 Sanhedrin had only won a temporary success at the cost of a deeper 
 exasperation. So unquenchable was the fury against him, and so inflamed 
 was the feeling of disappointment tliat Lysias sho'uld have snatched him a\Vay 
 from their revenge, that in the mtfrning no less than fc.ty Jews bound 
 
 1 Acts xxiv. 21, which I take to be a confession of his error on this occasion. 
 
 8 Derenbourg, Palest. 31. 
 
 1 The expression is an aposiopesis, or suppression of the apodosis, not uncommon 
 after el, as suggesting an alternative. See lay Brief Greek Syntax, % 309. The 
 t>n ecofiax&pcv of the Received Text (omitted in N, A, B, C, E, the 2Ethiopic, the Coptic, 
 &c.) is a glass from chap. v. 89. Chrysostom fills up the sentence with ircto 
 " What sort of charge i* that?"
 
 544 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 themselves with a terrible cherem not to eat or drink till they had killed him. 1 
 The Jews, like some Christians in the worst days of Christendom, believed in 
 the divine right of assassination as the means of getting rid of a tyrant or an 
 apostate. 3 Their penal blindness had deceived them into the sanctification of 
 religious murder. How dark a picture does it present to us of the state 
 of Jewish thought at this period that, just as Judas had bargained with the 
 chief priests for the blood-money of his Lord, so these forty sicarii went, not 
 only without a blush, but with an evident sense of merit, to the hostile section 
 of the Sanhedrin, to suggest to them the concoction of a lie for the facilitation 
 of a murder. " We are bound under a curse not to touch food till we slay 
 Paul. Do you then, and the Sanhedrin, give notice to the commandant to 
 bring him down to you, under pretext of a more accurate inquiry into his case. 
 We, before he gets near you, are prepared to slay him." So far from rejecting 
 the suggestion with execration, as many a heathen would have done, these 
 degenerate Jews and worldly priests agreed to it with avidity. But a secret 
 known to forty conspirators, and requiring the complicity of an indefinite 
 number more, is no secret at all. There were sure to be dark hints, ominous 
 gestures, words of ill-concealed triumph, and, indeed, so unanimous among 
 the orthodox Jews, and even, we fear, among some nominal Jewish 
 Christians, was the detestation of the man who taught "apostasy from 
 Moses," that in most circles there was no need for any pretence of 
 concealment. When St. Peter had been in prison, and in peril of 
 execution, the Christian community of Jerusalem had been in a ferment 
 of alarm and sorrow, and prayer had been made day and night without ceasing 
 to God for him ; but St. Peter, and especially the St. Peter of that early period, 
 was regarded with feelings very different from those with which the Judaic 
 believers looked on the bold genius whose dangerous independence treated 
 Mosaism and its essential covenant as a thing of the past for converted 
 Gentiles. We hear of no prayer from any one of the Elders or the " many 
 myriads" on behalf of St. Paul. He owed to a relative, and not to the 
 Church, the watchful sympathy which alone rescued him from murder. He 
 had a married sister living in Jerusalem, who, whether she agreed or not with 
 the views of her brother and the fact that neither she nor her family are 
 elsewhere mentioned, and that St. Paul never seems to have put up at her 
 house, makes it at least very doubtful had yet enough natural affection to 
 try to defeat a plot for his assassination. Most gladly would we have known 
 something further about the details. All that we are told is, that the son of 
 this lady, apparently a mere boy, on hearing of the intended ambuscade, went 
 at once to the barracks of Fort Antonia, and gaining ready access to his uncle, 
 who, as an untried Roman citizen, was only kept in custodia militaris, 
 revealed to him the plot. The Apostle acted with his usual good sense and 
 promptitude. Sending for one of the ten centurions of the garrison, he said 
 
 1 For instances of a similar cherem, see 1 Sam. xiv. 24; Jos. Antt. 8, 3, &o. 
 * Sanhedf. 9 ; Jos. Antt. xii. 6, 2 ; Philo, De Sacrif. p. 855.
 
 THE LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM. 545 
 
 to him, "Lead this youth to the commandant, for he has something to tell 
 him. " l The centurion went immediately to Lysias, and said, " The prisoner 
 Paul called me to him, and asked me to lead this youth to you, as he has some- 
 thing to say to you." There is a touch of very natural kindness in the way in 
 which the Roman officer received the Jewish boy. Seeing, perhaps, that he 
 was nervous and flustered, both from the peril to which he was subjecting 
 himself by revealing this secret since suspicion would naturally fall on him 
 and also by finding himself in the presence of the most powerful person in 
 Jerusalem, the military delegate of the dreaded Procurator Lysias took him 
 by the hand, and walking with him to a place where they were out of earshot, 
 began to ask him what his message was. The youth told him that he would 
 immediately receive a request from the Sanhedrin to summon a meeting next 
 day, and bring Paul once more before them to arrive at some more definite 
 result ; and that more than forty sicarii had agreed on time and place to 
 murder his prisoner, so that the only way to defeat the plot was to refuse the 
 request of the Sanhedrin. Lysias saw the importance of the secret, and 
 instantly formed his plans. He told the youth not to mention to any one that 
 he had given him information of the conspiracy, and, summoning two cen- 
 turions, ordered them to equip two hundred legionaries, seventy cavalry 
 soldiers, two hundred lancers, 2 with two spare horses, to be ready to escort Paul 
 safely to Csesarea that very evening at nine o'clock. He was extremely glad 
 to get rid of a prisoner who created such excitement, and who was the object 
 of an animosity so keen that it might at any moment lead to a riot. At that 
 day, too, charges of bribery flew about in the most dangerous manner. Celer, 
 a Roman knight of far higher rank than himself, had actually been dragged 
 by Jews round the walls of Jerusalem, and finally beheaded, for receiving a bribe 
 from the Samaritans. 3 Agrippa I. had been dismissed from Antioch ; and no 
 less a person than the Procurator Cumanus had been imprisoned and dis- 
 graced. So corrupt was the Roman administration in the hands of even the 
 highest officials, that if Paul were murdered Lysias might easily have been 
 charged with having accepted a bribe to induce him to connive at this 
 nefarious conspiracy. 1 There was now sufficient pretext to send Paul away 
 swiftly and secretly, and so get rid of an embarrassing responsibility. At 
 nine that evening, when it was dark and when the streets would be deserted, 
 the largo escort of four hundred and seventy soldiers an escort the necessity 
 of which shows the dangerous condition of the country, and the extent of 
 Lysias's alarm stood ready at the gate of the barracks ; and before the tramp 
 of horse and foot began to startle the silent city, the commandant handed to 
 
 1 The minuteness of the narrative, perhaps, indicates that St. Luke, who sought for 
 information from all sources, had received the story from the youth himself. 
 
 2 itfi'oAafloi, Vulg. lancearii. The only passage to throw light on the word is one 
 adduced by Meyer from Constantino the Porphyrogenete, which proves nothing. A reads 
 5*f idfioXoi. One explanation is gens du train men who held a second horse by the right 
 hand. 
 
 3 Jos. Antt. xx. 6, 3 ; B. J. ii. 12, 7. 
 
 4 One of the cursives (137) actually adds <4>o/3ij0>j yip fuprgrt opiriaflrrtj ivrcx w TovJotot 
 rt <a&t U T tTav fiita t nT. iAi(s.
 
 PAUL AND FELIX, 547 
 
 The centurion and bis prisoner were at once introduced into the presence 
 of Felix. Felix read tlie letter of Lysias, and after briefly inquiring to what 
 province Paul belonged, and being told ho was a Cilician, ho said, " I will hear 
 out your case when your accusers have arrived." 1 Ho then handed Pan! over 
 to a soldier to bo kept in one of the guard-rooms attached to the old Herodian 
 palace which now formed the splendid residence of the Procurators of Judsea. 
 
 CHAPTER XLL 
 
 PAUL AND FELIX. 
 
 "Antoaius Felix, per oroac-rn saevitiain et libidinem, jus regium servill ingeuio 
 exercuit." TAO. Hut. v. 9. 
 
 " Jam pridem Judaeae impositot , . , et cuiicta malofacta sibiunpune ratua." 
 Ann. xji. 54. 
 
 A R05IAN judge to whom a prisoner had been sent, with an elogium was 
 bound, if possible, to try him within three days. Felix, however, had to send 
 a message to Jerusalem, and fix a time for the case to come on, hi order that 
 the accusers might be present; and as the journey took nearly two days, 
 it was the fifth day after St. Paul's arrival at Cssarea that he was brought 
 to trial. The momentary diversion in his favour, of which by this time the 
 Pharisees were probably ashamed, had settled into an unanimous hatred, and 
 the ciders, probably of both parties, hurried down to accuse their adversary. 
 AiifJiias in person accompanied them, eager for revongo against the man 
 who had compared him to a plastered sepulchre. It must have been intensely 
 disagreeable to these dignified personages to be forced to hurry on a fatiguing 
 journey of some seventy miles from the religious to the political capital of 
 Judaea, in order to induce a Gentile dog to give up an apostate mesith to 
 their jurisdiction ; but the Sanhedrists, smarting under defeat, would not be 
 likely to leave any stone unturned which should bring the offender within 
 reach of vengeance. 
 
 They wished to make sure of the extradition of their victim, and being 
 little able to plead either in Greek or Latin, and more or less ignorant 
 of the procedure in Roman courts, they gave their brief to a provincial 
 barrister named Tertullus. Everything was done with due formality. They 
 first lodged their complaint, and then the prisoner was confronted with them 
 that he might hear, and if possible refute, their accusations. Tertullus was 
 evidently a practised speaker, and St. Luke has faithfully preserved an outline 
 of his voluble plausibility. Speaking with politic complaisance as though ha 
 were himself a Jew, he began by a fulsome compliment to Felix, which served 
 as the usual captatio benevolentiae. Alluding to the early exertions of Felix 
 against the banditti and the recent suppression of the Egyptian false Messiah, 
 
 1 " Qtd cum elogSo mltttmtnr ex Integra audiendi mat,"
 
 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 he began to assure his Excellency, with truly legal rotundity of verbiage, of 
 the quite universal and uninterrupted gratitude of the Jews for the peace 
 which he had secured to them, and for the many reforms l which had been 
 initiated by his prudential wisdom. The real fact was that Felix was most 
 peculiarly detested, and that though he had certainly suppressed some 
 brigands, yet he had from the earliest times of his administration distinctly 
 encouraged more, 2 and was even accused of having shared their spoils with 
 Ventidius Cumanus when he had the separate charge of Samaria.* He then 
 apologised for intruding ever so briefly on his Excellency's indulgent forbear- 
 ance, but it was necessary to trouble him with three counts of indictment 
 against the defendant namely, that first, ho was a public pest, who lived by 
 exciting factions among all the Jews all over the world ; secondly, that he 
 was a ringleader of the Nazarenes ; and thirdly, that he had attempted to 
 profane the Temple. They had accordingly seized him, and wanted to judge 
 him in accordance with their own law ; but Lysias had intervened with much 
 violence and taken him from their hands, ordering his accusers to come before 
 the Procurator. By reference to Lysias * his Excellency might further 
 ascertain the substantial truth of these charges. When the oration was over, 
 since there were no regular witnesses, the Jews one after another " made a 
 dead set" against Paul, 6 asseverating the truth of all that Tertullus had 
 stated. 
 
 Then the Procurator, already impatient with the conviction that this was, 
 as Lysias had informed him, some Jewish squabble about Mosaic minutiaa, 
 flung a haughty nod to the prisoner, in intimation that he might speak. 
 St. Paul's captatio benevolentiae was very different from that of Tertullus. 
 It consisted simply in the perfectly true remark that he could defend himself 
 all the more cheerfully before Felix from the knowledge that he had now been 
 Procurator for an unusual time, 6 and could therefore, from his familiarity with 
 Jewish affairs, easily ascertain that it was but twelve days 7 since the Pentecost, 
 to which feast he had come, not only with no seditious purpose, but actually 
 to worship in Jerusalem; and that during that time he had discoursed with no 
 one, and had on no occasion attracted any crowd, or caused any disturbance, 
 either in the Temple or in the Synagogues, or in any part of the city. He, 
 
 1 xxiv. 2, iiopSiaiiartav, , A, B, E. The other reading Karopdu^arwv is a more general 
 expression. 
 
 2 Jos. Anti, xx. 8, 5 5; B. J. ii. 13, 2; Euseb. H. E. ii. 2022. 
 
 8 Jos. Antt. xx. 8, 9 ; Tac. Ann. xii. 64, "quies provinciae reddita." 
 
 4 This entire clause (Acts xxiv. 6 S) is omitted from xal KOTO. down to tVi ai in 
 A, B, G, H, and in the Coptic, Sahidic, Latin, and other versions. If it be an inter- 
 polation, the trap' 08 must refer to Paul, but there are great difficulties either way, 
 and verse 22 is in favour of their genuineness. On the other hand, if genuine, why 
 should the passage have been omitted? D, which has so many additions, ia here 
 deficient. 
 
 s Ver. 9, wvtntBtrro. K, A, B, E, G, H. 
 
 6 xxiv. 10, TroJUiv irS>v. since A.D. 52, i.e. six years. "Noii ignoravit Paulus artem 
 rhetorum movere laudcuido. (Grot.) 
 
 ' 1. Arrival. 2. Interview with James, &c. 3 7. Vow and arrest. 8. 
 9, Conspiracy. 10. Arrival at Csesarea. 11, 12. In custody. 13. Trial.
 
 AND FBLIl. 549 
 
 therefore, met the first and third counts of the indictment with a positive 
 contradiction, and challenged the Jews to produce any witnesses in confirma- 
 tion of them. As to the second count, he was quite ready to admit that he 
 belonged to what they called a sect ; but it was no more an illegal sect than 
 those to which they themselves belonged, since he worshipped the God whom, 
 as a Jew, he had been always taught to worship frankly accepted their entire 
 Scriptures and believed, exactly as the majority of themselves did, in a resur- 
 rection of the just and unjust. In this faith it had always been his aim to 
 have a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man. He had 
 now been five years absent from Jerusalem, and on returning with alms for 
 the poor of his people, and offerings for the Temple, they found him in the 
 Temple, a quiet and legally purified worshipper. For the riot which had 
 ensued he was not responsible. It had been stirred up by certain Asiatic 
 Jews, who ought to have been present as witnesses, and whose absence was 
 a proof .of the weakness of the case against him. But if their attendance 
 could not be secured, ho called upon his accusers themselves to state the 
 result of their trial of him before the Sanhedrin, and whether they had a 
 single fact against him, unless it were his exclamation as he stood before 
 them, that he was being tried about a question of the resurrection of the 
 dead. 
 
 The case had evidently broken down. St. Paul's statement of facts 
 directly contradicted the only charge brought against him. The differences 
 of doctrine between the Jews and himself were not in any way to the point, 
 since they affected questions which had not been touched upon at all, and of 
 which the Roman law could take no cognisance. It was no part of his duty 
 to prove the doctrine of the Nazarenes, or justify himself for having embraced 
 it, since at that time it had not been declared to be a religio illicita. Of this 
 fact Felix was perfectly aware. He had a more accurate knowledge of " that 
 way " than the Jews and their advocate supposed. 1 He was not going, there- 
 fore, to hand Paul over to the Sanhedrin, which might be dangerous, and would 
 certainly be unjust ; but at the same time he did not wish to offend these 
 important personages. He therefore postponed the trial rem ampliavit 
 on the ground of the absence of Lysias, who was a material witness, promising, 
 however, to give a final decision whenever he came down to Csesarea. Paul 
 was remanded to the guard-room, but Felix gave particular instructions to the 
 centurion 2 that his custody was not to be a severe one, and that his friends 
 were to be permitted free access to his prison. St. Luke and Aristarchus 
 certainly availed themselves of this permission, and doubtless the heavy hours 
 were lightened by the visits of Philip the Evangelist, and other Christians 
 of the little Czesarean community to whom Paul was dear.* 
 
 1 xxiv. 22, i/cpi0c<mpoi. 
 
 * Ver. 23, T<J> iKOLrovra.px'n th e centurion who was present at the trial ; not at all necea- 
 Barily, or even probably, the centurion who had escorted him from Antipatris to Caesarea. 
 
 3 It seems to have been about this time that Felix used the machinations of Simon 
 Magus to induce Drusilla, the younger sister of Agrippa II., to elope from her husband
 
 550 THE LIFE AND WOBK OS ST. PAUL. 
 
 On Lig rfcium to Cassarea with his wife Brasilia, and apparently in order 
 to gratify her curiosity to see and hear a person whose strange history and 
 marvellous powers were so widely known, Felix once more summoned Paul 
 into his presence, and bade him discourse to them about his beliefs. Right 
 nobly did Paul use his opportunity. Felix was a Gentile, and was moreover 
 his judge, and it was no part of St. Paul's duty to judge those that are 
 without. Had he assumed such A function, his life must have become one 
 incessant and useless protest. And yet, with perfect urbanity and respect 
 for the powers that be, he spoke of the faith in Christ which he was bidden 
 to explain, in a way that enabled him to touch on those virtues which were 
 most needed by the guilty pair who listened to his words. The licentious 
 princess must have blushed as he discoursed of continence ; tho rapacious and 
 unjust governor as ho spoke of righteousness both of them as he reasoned of 
 the judgment to come. "Whatever may have been the thoughts of Brasilia, 
 ehe locked them np in her own bosom; but Felix, less accustomed to such 
 truths, was deeply agitated by them. As he glanced back over the stained 
 and guilty past, he was afraid. He had been a slave, in the vilest of all 
 positions, at the vilest of all epochs, in tho vilest of all cities. He had crept 
 with his brother Pallas into the position of a courtier at the most morally 
 degraded of all courts. He had been an officer of those auxiliaries who were 
 tlio worst of all troops. "Wnat secrets of lust and blood lay hidden in his 
 earlier life we do not know ; but ample and indisputable testimony, Jewish 
 and Pagan, sacred and secular, reveals to us what he had been how greedy, 
 how savage, how treacherous, how unjust, how steeped with tho blood of 
 private murder and public massacre during tho eight years which he had 
 now spent in the government, first of Samaria, then of Palestine. There were 
 footsteps behind him ; he began to feel as though " the earth wore made of 
 glass." He could not bear the novel sensation of terror which crept over him, 
 or the reproaches of the blushing, shamefaced spirit which began to mutiny 
 even in such a breast as his. He cut short tho interview. " Go," he said, 
 " for tho present ; I will take some future opportunity to summon you to a 
 hearing." Even his remorse was not purely disinterested. Paul had indeed 
 acquired over him some of that ascendency which could hardly fail to be won 
 by eo lofty a personality ; and Felix, struck by his bearing, his genius, hia 
 
 Aziz, and to become his wife. It was a strange thing, and one which must have required 
 all the arts of Simon to effect, that thia young and beautiful princess, who was at this 
 time only twenty years old, should have abandoned all her Jewish prejudices, and risked 
 the deadliest abhorrence of her race, by leaving a prince who loved her, and had even 
 been induced to accept circumcision to gratify her national scruples, in order to form an 
 adulterous connexion with a cruel and elderly profligate, who had been nothing better 
 than a slave. Felix would never have dreamt for one moment of making for her sake 
 the immense sacrifice which Ariz had accepted, and which her previous lover, the Prince 
 of Commagsne, had refused. Such, however, were the subtle arts of the Cyprian sorcerer, 
 and such the Greek-like fascinations of the seducer, that he had gained his end, and how 
 thus still further obliterated the memories of his servile origin by marrying a third princess. 
 "Trium roginarum maritum aut adulienun" (Suet. Claud. 28). Another of his wives 
 was also a Drusilia, daughter of Juba, King of MauretarJa. an -I granddaughter of Antony 
 mid Cleopatra, The third is unknown.
 
 PJLTTL AffB TSLIX. 551 
 
 moral forco. seat for hiia not unfrequeutiy to converse with Mm respecting 
 his beliefs. But this apparent interest in religious Dtibjeets was. in reality, 
 akin to that vein of superstition which made him the ready clnpe of Simon 
 Magus, - aad it did not exclude a certain hankering after a bribe, which he 
 felt sure that Paul, who had brought considerable sums of money to Jeru- 
 salem, could either procure or give. He took care to drop hints which should 
 leave n0 doubt as to his intentions. But Paul was innocent, and neither 
 would he adopt any illicit method to secure his liberty, nor in any ease would 
 he burden the affection of his converts to contribute the ransom which he was 
 too poor to offer. He did not wish by dubious human methods to intorfove 
 with God's plan respecting him, nor to set a questionable example to the 
 future libellatici. He therefore declined to take the hints of Felk, and two 
 years glided away, and he was still in prison. 
 
 Towards the end of that time he must have been startled by a terrible 
 clamour in the streets of Csesarea. Disputes, indeed, were constantly occur- 
 ring in a city composed half of Jews and half of Greeks, or Syrians, between 
 whom there was a perpetual feud for precedence. All the splendour of the 
 place its amphitheatre, its temples, its palace was due to the passion for 
 building which animated the first Herod, lha Jewish population was largo 
 and wealthy, and since their king had done so much for the town, they claimed 
 it as their own. It was quite true that, but for Herod, Caesarea would never 
 have been heard of in history. Its sole utility consisted in the harbour which 
 he had constructed for it at enormous cost of money and labour, and which 
 was extremely needed on that inhospitable coast. But the Greeks maintained 
 that it was their town, seeing that it had been founded by Strato, and called 
 Strato's Tower until Herod had altered the name in his usual spirit of flattery 
 towards the Imperial House. Towards the close of Paul's imprisonment, the 
 Greeks and Jews came to an open quarrel in the market-place, and the 
 Greeks were being worsted in the combat by their enraged adversaries, when 
 Felix appeared with his cohorts and ordered the Jews to disperse. As his 
 command was not instantly obeyed by the victorious party, Felix, who like all ths 
 Romans sided with the Gentile faction, let loose his soldiers upon them. The 
 soldiers were probably not Romans, but provincials. 1 They were therefore 
 delighted to fall on the Jews, many of whom were instantly put to the sword. 
 Not content with this, Felix, whose dislike to the whole race only deepened 
 every year, allowed them to plunder the houses of the wealthier Jews. 2 This 
 crowning act of injustice could not pass unnoticed. Felix, indeed, as Tacitus 
 tells us, had so long learnt to rely on the overwhelming influence of Pallas 
 over Claudius, that he began to think that he might commit any crime he 
 liked without being called to question. But Claudius had now been dismissed 
 
 1 There were no Jews among them, becauso no Jew could servo in the army without 
 a constant necessity of breaking the rules of his religion, so that on this ground they 
 were exempted froia the liability to conscription. 
 
 3 The scenes which took place on this occasion ware analogous to those which hap- 
 pened at Alexandria under Flaccus.
 
 552 TSB LlffB AND WOBK O* 1 ST. 
 
 to his apotlieoiis by the poisoned mushrooms of Agrippina, and the influence 
 both of Pallas and Agrippina was on the wane. The Jews laid a formal 
 impeachment against Felix for his conduct at Caasarea, and he was recalled to 
 answer their complaints. Accompanied by Drusilla and Simon Magus, who 
 had by this time assumed the position of his domestic sorcerer, he sailed to 
 Italy, and his very last act was one of flagrant injustice. He had already 
 abused the power of a provincial governor by delaying the trial of Paul for 
 two years. It was a defect in Roman law that, though it ordered the imme- 
 diate trial of a prisoner sent to a superior court with an elogium, it laid down 
 no rule as to the necessary termination of his trial, and thus put into the 
 hands of an unjust Prsefect a formidable instrument of torture. Paul had 
 now languished for two full years in the Herodian palace, and Felix had not 
 decided his case. Philo mentions a similar instance in which Flaccus kept 
 Lampo for two years in prison at Alexandria * on a charge of laesa majestas, 
 in hopes of breaking his heart by a punishment worse than death. Felix had 
 no such object, for he seems to have felt for Paul a sincere respect ; but since 
 Paul would not offer a bribe, Felix would not set him free, and more the 
 slave of self-interest than he had ever been the slave of Antonia he finally 
 left him bound in order to gratify the malice of the Jews whom he thus 
 strove, but quite vainly, to propitiate. He thought that he could, perhaps, 
 settle some awkward items of their account against him by sacrificing to their 
 religious hatreds a small scruple on the score of justice. Perhaps this was 
 the last drop in the overflowing cup of his iniquity. How he closed his bad 
 career we do not know. It required the utmost stretch of the waning 
 influence of his brother Pallas to save him from the punishment which his 
 crimes had deserved ; and, although he was not put to death or banished, he 
 had to disgorge the greater portion of his ill-gotten wealth. Drusilla had one 
 son by her marriage with him, and this son, whose name was Agrippa, 
 perished in the eruption of Vesuvius nineteen years after these events. 8 
 Felix himself vanishes henceforth into obscurity and disgrace. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 ST. PAUL BEFORE AGRIPPA II. 
 
 " When I consider tliis Apostle as appearing either before the witty Athenians, or 
 before a Roman Court of Judicature, in the presence of their great men and ladies, I see 
 how handsomely he accommodateth himself to the apprehension and temper of these 
 politer people." SHAFTESBUBT, Characteristics, i. 30. 
 
 THE successor of Felix was Porcius Festus (A.D. 60), 3 who, though he too 
 was probably of no higher rank than that of a f roedman, was a far worthier 
 and more honourable ruler. His Procuratorship was of very brief duration, 
 
 i Philo in Place, rvi s A.D. 79. Jos. Antt. p. 7, 2. 
 
 * This furnishes one of the few certain points de repttre for the precise chronology of 
 the Acts. He died the next year.
 
 iT. PAUL BEFORE AGRIPPA. II. 553 
 
 and he inherited the government of a country in which the wildest anarchy 
 was triumphant, and internecine quarrels were carried on in the bloodiest 
 spirit of revenge. Had he been Procurator for a longer time, difficult as was 
 the task to hold in the leash the furious hatreds of Jews and Gentiles, he 
 might have accomplished more memorable results. The sacred narrative dis- 
 plays him in a not unfavourable light, and he at any rate contrasts most 
 favourably with his immediate predecessor and successor, in the fact that he 
 tried to administer real justice, and did not stain his hands with bribes. 1 
 
 Hia first movements show an active and energetic spirit. He arrived in 
 Palestine about the month of August, and three days after his arrival at 
 Caesarea went direct to Jerusalem. One of the first questions which he had 
 to face was the mode of dealing with St. Paul. Two years of deferred hope, 
 and obstructed purposes, and dreary imprisonment had not quenched the 
 deadly antipathy of the Jews to the man whose free offer of the Gospel to 
 the Gentiles seemed to them one of the most fatal omens of their impending 
 ruin. The terrible fight in the market-place between Jews and Syrian 
 Greeks, which had caused the disgrace of Felix, had left behind it an uu- 
 'appeased exasperation, and the Jews of Csesarea were unanimous J in demand- 
 ing the immediate punishment of Paul. When Festus reached Jerusalem 
 the same cry 3 met him, and the death of Paul was demanded, not only by 
 the mob, but by deputations of all the chief personages in Jerusalem, headed 
 by Ishmael Ben Phabi, the new High Priest. 4 We have seen already that 
 the Jews, with great insight into human nature, eagerly seized the first op- 
 portunity of playing upon the inexperience of a newly-arrived official, and 
 moulding, him if possible, while he was likely to be most plastic in his 
 desire to create a favourable impression. But Festus was not one of the base 
 and feeble Procurators who would commit a crime to win popularity. The 
 i Palestinian Jews soon found that they had to do with one who more resem- 
 bled a Gallio than a Felix. The people and their priests begged him as an 
 'initial favour not to exempt Paul's case from their cognisance, but to bring 
 him to Jerusalem, that he might once more be tried by the Sanhedrin, when 
 ^they would take care that he should cause no second fiasco by turning their 
 theologic jealousies against each other. Indeed, these sacerdotalists, who 
 thought far less of murder than of a ceremonial pollution,* had taken care 
 that if Festus once granted their petition, their hired assassins should get rid 
 !of Paul on the road " or ever he came near." Festus saw through them 
 'sufficiently to thwart their design under the guise of a courteous offer that, 
 as Paul was now at Caesarea, he would return thither almost immediately, 
 and give a full and fair audience to their- complaints. On their continued 
 insistence Festus gave them the haughty and genuinely Roman reply that, 
 
 1 Joe. Antt. IT. 8, 9 ; 9, 1 ; B. J. ii. 14, 1. 
 
 2 Acts TXV. 24, airav TO 7rA.rj0os rav 'lovSaiuv . . . i-Mie. */(., ~i|3ouiTt. 
 
 4 He had been appointed by Agrippa II., A.D. 59. 
 
 5 See Sota. f . 47, 2 ; Totifta Sota, c. 14 ; Joma, f . 23, 1 ; Jos. B. J, pcusim. (GrStz. 
 iii. 321, teqq,)
 
 554 THE LIFE AND WGBS OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 whatever their Oriental notions of justice might ba, it was not the custom of 
 the Romans to grant any person's life to his accusers by way of doing a favour, 
 but to place the accused and the accusers face to face, and to give the accused 
 a full opportunity for self-defence. The High Priest and his fellow-conspi- 
 rators, finding that they could not play either on the timidity of Festus or his 
 complaisance, had to content themselves once more with organising a powerful 
 deputation to carry out the accusation. Eight or ten days afterwards Festus 
 returned to the palace at Csesarea, and the very next day took his seat on the 
 tribunal to hear the case. The Jews had not again hired a practised barrister 
 to help them, and the trial degenerated into a scene of passionate clamour, in 
 which St. Paul simply met the many accusations against him by calm denials. 
 The Jews, tuinultuously surrounding the tribunal, reiterated their accusa- 
 tions of heresy, sacrilege, and treason ; but as not a single witness was forth- 
 coming, Paul had no need to do more than to recount the facts. This time the 
 Jews seem to have defined the old vague charge that Paul was a stirrer-up of 
 sedition throughout the Diaspora, by trying to frighten Festus, as they had 
 frightened Pilate, with the name of Caesar ; l but Festus had too thorough a 
 knowledge of the Roman law not to see, through all this murky storm of rage, 
 the two plain facts, that he was trying a false issue, since the inquiry really 
 turned on matters which affected the arcana of Jewish theology ; and that 
 even if there was a grain of truth in the Jewish accusations, Paul had not 
 been guilty of anything approaching to a capital crime. Wishing to put an 
 end to the scene for nothing was more odious to the dignity of a well-trained 
 Homan than the scowling faces, and gleaming eyes, and screaming interpel- 
 lations of despised Orientals Festus asked Paul whether he was willing to 
 go up to Jerusalem, and be tried before the Sanhedrin under his protection. 8 
 This was practically a proposal to transfer the question back from the Roman 
 to the Jewish jurisdiction. But Paul knew very well that he had far more 
 chance of justice at the hands of the Romans than at the hands of Jews, 
 whose crimes were now dragging Jerusalem to her destruction. Jewish 
 tribunals had invariably and even savagely condemned him ; Gentile tribunals 
 Gallic, the Politarchs, the Asiarchs, Lysias, Felix, Festus, even the 
 "Praetors," at Philippi, and at last even the monster Nero always saw and 
 proclaimed his innocence. But he was sick of these delays ; sick of the fierce 
 reiteration of calumnies which he had ten times refuted ; sick of being made 
 the bone of contention for mutual hatreds ; sick of the arbitrary caprice of 
 provincial governors. Terrible as the black dungeon of Machaerus to the free 
 soul of the Baptist, must have been the dreary barracks of Caesarea to the 
 ardent zeal of Paul. How he must have hated that palace, dripping with the 
 blood 6f murdered Herods, and haunted by the worst memories of their 
 crimes ! How tired he must|have been of the idleness and the ribaldries of 
 
 1 Acte xxv. 8. 
 
 2 This must be the meaning of eir' e^ov, xxv. 9. There could be no conceivable object 
 In taking Paul to Jerusalem, unless it were to have him once more tried by the Sanhedrin ; 
 but of course Festus could not preside at a meeting of the Sanhedrin, though he might 
 be present (somewhat aa Lysias was), and se that the accused received fair treatmeaii
 
 S. PAUL BEFOBE AORIPPA II. 555 
 
 'provincial soldiers, and the tumultuous noises of collision between Jews and 
 Gentiles which were constantly resounding in those ill-managed streets ! 
 Doubtless his imprisonment had been a period of deep inward calm and 
 growth. Ho knew that his course was not yot over. He was awaiting the ful- 
 filment of God's will. He saw that he had nothing more to hope for from 
 High Priests or Procurators, and seized his opportunity. As a Roman citizen 
 ho had one special privilege that right of appeal to Caesar, which was still 
 left as the venerable trophy of popular triumph in the struggles of centuries. 
 He had only to pronounce the one word Appello, and every enemy would, for 
 a time, be defeated, who was now thirsting for his blood. 1 He determined to 
 exorcise his privilege. The Procurator was but a shadow of the Cassar. His 
 offer sounded plausibly fair, but perhaps Paul saw through it. " I am stand- 
 ing," he said, " at Caesar's tribunal There, and not before the Sanhedrin, I 
 ought to be judged. Even you, O Festus ! know full well that I never 
 in any respect wronged the Jews. If I am an offender, and have committed 
 any capital crime, it is not against them, but against the Empire ; and if 
 I am found guilty, I do not refuse to die. But if all the accusations which 
 these bring against me are nothing, no one can sacrifice me to them as a 
 favour." And then he suddenly exclaimed, " Caesarem appello ! " 
 
 The appeal was a surprise ; even Festua, who meant well and kindly, 
 though perhaps with a touch of natural complaisance towards his new sub- 
 ject's, was a little offended by it. It was not agreeable to have his jurisdiction 
 superseded by an " appeal " to a superior on the very first occasion that he took 
 his seat on the tribunal. Paul had not yet had time to learn his character, 
 He might doubtless have trusted him more, if he had known him better ; but 
 matters had fallen into a hopeless imbroglio, and perhaps Paul had some in- 
 ward intimation that this, at last, was God's appointed way in which he was 
 to visit Italy, and to bear witness at Rome. 
 
 The appeal at once put an end to all the proceedings of the court. Festus 
 held a very brief consultation with his consiliarii or council of his assessors 
 as to whether the appeal was legally admissible or not. The case was too 
 clear to admit of much doubt under this head, and, after a moment's delay, 
 Festus exclaimed, in words which, however brusquely spoken, must have 
 thrilled the heart of more than one person in that assembly, and most of all 
 the heart of the Apostle himself, " Caesarem appellasti ; ad Caesarem ibis." 
 Perhaps Festus avenged his momentarily wounded vanity by the thought, 
 tc Tou little know what an appeal to CsEsar means ! " 
 
 Of course some days must elapse before an opportunity would occur to 
 send Paul fi'om Cssarea to Italy. A ship had to be provided, and other 
 prisoners had to ba tried whom it might be necessary to remand to the 
 Emperor's decision. The delay was a providential one. It furnished Paul 
 with a happy opportunity of proclaiming the truths and the arguments of 
 Christianity in the presence of all the Jewish and Gentile magnates of the 
 
 1 By the Lex Jalis De Appcllatwnt. Of. Plin. Epp. x. 97.
 
 556 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 capital and of the last scions of that Idumean house of brilliant adventurers 
 who had allied themselves with the Asmonaean princes, and worn the title of 
 Jewish kings. 
 
 For only a day or two had elapsed after the appeal, when Agrippa II., the 
 last of the Herods, and his sister Berenice came down to Osesarea to pay their 
 respects to the new Procurator. It was a compliment which they could never 
 safely omit, and we find that they paid similar visits to each Procurator in 
 succession. The regal power of Agrippa, such as it was, depended on no 
 popular support, but simply and solely on the will of the Emperor. As a 
 breath had made him first king of Chalcis (A.D. 48), then of the tetrarchy of 
 Philip (AJD. 52), and finally of various other cities (A.D. 55), so on any day 
 a breath might unmake him. He was not, like his father, " the king of tho 
 Jews," and therefore St. Luke, with his usual accuracy in these details, only 
 calls him " the king ; " but as he had succeeded his uncle Herod of Chalcis in 
 the guardianship of the Temple, with its sacred robes, and the right of nomi- 
 nations to the High-priesthood, he practically became a mere gilded instrument 
 to keep order for the Romans, and it was essential for him to remain on good 
 terms with them. 1 They in their turn found it desirable to flatter the harm- 
 less vanities of a phantom royalty. 
 
 During tho visit of Agrippa and Berenice to Festus, he took the oppor- 
 tunity of referring to the perplexing case of the prisoner Paul. He told 
 Agrippa of the fury which seemed to inspire the whole Jewish people at the 
 mention of his name, and of the futile results of the trial just concluded. 
 However much the Jews might try to misrepresent the real questions at issue, 
 it was clear that they turned on Mosaic technicalities, 2 and " on one Jesus who 
 was dead, whom Paul alleged to be alive " 3 matters about which Festus had 
 no jurisdiction, and could not be supposed to know anything. The prisoner, 
 however, had refused to be tried again by the Sanhedrin, and had appealed to 
 the decision of the Augustus. 
 
 "I shoiild have liked myself also to hear this person," said Agrippa.* 
 Festus eagerly closed with the wish, and fixed the next day for the gratifica- 
 tion of the king's fancy. 
 
 It was not, as is commonly represented, a new trial. That would have 
 been, on all grounds, impossible. Agrippa was without judicial functions, 
 and the authority of the Procurator had been cut short by the appeal. It was 
 more of the nature of a private or drawing-room audience a sort of show 
 occasion designed for the amusement of these princely guests, and the idle 
 
 1 The Romans would have resented any neglect towards their representative, as much 
 as we should resent the conduct of Scindiah or Holkar if they entered the district of one 
 of our Indian Residents without paying their respects. 
 
 2 xxv. 19. The use of the phrase, wepi r>; ZSi'as fenm&Hfurta, "about their own religious 
 matters " (cf. xvii. 22), shows sufficiently that among Gentiles Agrippa was accustomed 
 to speak of his religion quite in the tone of a man of tho world. 
 
 * St. Luke and the early Christians were far too much in earnest in their belief to 
 make them shrink in the least from recording the scorn with which it was spoken of. 
 
 4 xxv. 22, 'E/3ovx6/xr)v KO.I nvTot ; cf. GaL iv. 20. It might, however, mean, "I, too, 
 was feeling a personal desire."
 
 'St. P.A.U1 BEFO&E l(JRlPiA 11. 657 
 
 aristocracy of Caesarea, both Jewish and Gentile. Festtts ordered the 
 auditorium to be prepared for the occasion, and invited all the chief officers 
 of the army, and the principal inhabitants of the town. The Herods were 
 fond of show, and Festus gratified their humour by a grand processional 
 display. He would doubtless appear in his scarlet paludament, with his full 
 attendance of lictors and body-guard, who would stand at arms behind the 
 gilded chairs which were placed for himself and his distingiiished visitors. 
 We are expressly told that Agrippa and Berenice went in state to the 
 Prsetorium, eho, doubtless, blazing with all her jewels, and he in his purple 
 robes, and both with the golden circlets of royalty around then* foreheads, and 
 attended by a suite of followers in the most gorgeous apparel of Eastern 
 pomp. It was a compliment to the new governor to visit him with as much 
 splendour as possible, and both he and his guests were not sorry to furnish a 
 spectacle which would at once illustrate their importance and their mutual 
 cordiality. Did Agrippa think of his great-grandfather Herod, and the 
 massacre of the innocents ? of his great-uncle Antipas, and the murder of 
 John the Baptist P of his father Agrippa I., and the execution of James the 
 Elder ? Did he recall the fact that they had each died or been disgraced, 
 soon after, or in direct consequence of, those inflictions of martyrdom ? Did 
 he realise how closely, but unwittingly, the faith in that " one Jesus " had 
 been linked with the destinies of his house? Did the pomp of to-day remind 
 him of the pomp sixteen years earlier, when his much more powerful father 
 had stood in the theatre, with the sunlight blazing on the tissued silver of his 
 robe, and the people shouting that he was a god ? l Did none of the dark 
 memories of the place overshadow him as he entered that former palace of his 
 race ? It is very unlikely. Extreme vanity, gratified self-importance, far 
 more probably absorbed the mind of this titular king, as, in all the pomp of 
 phantom sovereignty, he swept along the large open hall, seated himself with 
 his beautiful sister by the Procurator's side, and glanced with cold curiosity 
 on the poor, worn, shackled prisoner pale with sickness and long imprison- 
 ment who was led in at his command. 
 
 Festus opened the proceedings in a short, complimentary speech, in which 
 he found an excuse for the gathering, by saying that on the one hand the Jews 
 were extremely infuriated against this man, and that on the other he was 
 entirely innocent, so far as he could see, of any capital crime. Since, however, 
 he was a Roman citizen, and had appealed to Caesar, it was necessary to send 
 to " the Lord " a some minute of the case, by way of elogium, and he was 
 completely perplexed as to what he ought to say. He was, therefore, glad of 
 the opportunity to bring the prisoner before this distinguished assembly, that 
 they, and especially King Agrippa, might hear what he had to say for himself, 
 and so, by forming some sort of preliminary judgment, relieve Festus from 
 the ridiculous position of sending a prisoner without being able to state any 
 definite crime with which he had been charged. 
 
 A.D. 44. It was now A.D. 60. xxr. 26,
 
 558 THE LIPS AND WOEX OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 As no accusers were present, and this was not in any respect a judiei&l 
 assembly, Agrippa, as the person for whom the whole scene was got np, told 
 Paul that he was allowed to speak about himself. Had the Apostle been of 
 a morose disposition he might have despised the hollowness of these mock 
 proceedings. Had he been actuated by any motives lower than the highest, 
 ha might have seized the opportunity to flatter himself into favour in the 
 absence of bis enemies. But the predominant feature in his, as in the very 
 greatest characters, was a continual seriousness and earnestness, and his only 
 desire was to plead not his own cause, but that of his Master. Featus, with 
 the Roman adulation, which in that ago outran even the appetite of absolutism, 
 had used that title of "the Lord," which the later Emperors seized with 
 avidity, but which the earliest and ablest of them had contemptuously refused.* 
 But Paul was neither imposed upon by these colossal titles of reverence, nor 
 daunted by these pompous inanities o reflected power. 
 
 There is not a word of his address which does not prove how completely 
 he was at his ease. The scarlet eagum of the Procurator, the fasces of the 
 lictors, the swords of the legionaries, the gleaming armour of the ChiliarcLs, 
 did not for one moment daunt him, they were a terror, not to good works, 
 bat to the evil ; and he felt that his was a service which was above all sway. 
 
 Stretching out his hand in the manner familiar to the orators whom he had 
 often heard in Tarsus or in Antioch, 2 he began by the sincere remark that 
 he was particularly happy to make his defence before King Agrippa, not- 
 which would have been false for any special worth of his, but because the 
 prince had received from his father whose anxiety to conform to the Law, 
 both written and oral, was well known an elaborate training in all matters 
 of Jewish religion and casuistry, which could not fail to interest him in a 
 question of which he was so competent to judge. He begged, therefore, for 
 a patient audience, and narrated once more the familiar story of his conversion 
 from the standpoint of a rigid and bigoted Pharisee to a belief that the Mes- 
 sianic hopes of his nation had now been actually fulfilled in that Jesus of 
 Nazareth, whose followers he had at first furiously persecuted, but who had 
 won him, by a personal revelation of His glory, to the knowledge that He had 
 risen from the dead. Why should that belief appear incredible to his hearers? 
 It once bad been so to himself ; but how could he resist the eye-witness of a 
 noonday vision P and how could he disobey the heavenly voice which sent 
 him forth to open tho eyes both of Jews and Gentiles, that they might turn 
 from darkness to light, and tho power of Satan unto God, that, by faith in 
 Jesus, they might receive remission of sins and a lot among the sanctified P 
 He had not been disobedient to it. In Damascus, in Jerusalem, throughout 
 all Judaea, and subsequently among the Gentiles, he had been a preacher of 
 repentance and conversion towards God, and a life consistent therewith. 
 This was why the Jews had seized him in tho Temple and tried to tear him 
 
 1 Suet. Oct. 59 ; Tiber. 27 ; Domit. 13. 
 
 2 Plut. Caa., p. 729; Appul. Mttam. 11., "porrigit dsxtrain ct td inatar oratoruas 
 eonformat articulum."
 
 ST. PAUL BEFORE AGRIPPA IX. 559 
 
 to pieces; but in this and every danger God had helped him, and the testimony 
 which he bore to small and great was no blasphemy, no apostasy, but simply 
 a truth in direct accordance with the teachings of Moses and the Prophets, 
 that the Messiah should be liable to suffering, and that from His resurrection 
 from the dead a light should dawn to lighten both the Gentiles and His 
 people. 
 
 Paul was now launched cu the full tide of that sacred and impassioned 
 oratory which was so powerful an agent in his mission work. He was deliver- 
 ing to tings and governors and chief captains that testimony which was the 
 very object of his life. Whether on other topics his speech was as con- 
 temptible as his enemies chose to represent, we cannot say ; but on this topic, 
 at any rate, he spoke with the force of long familiarity, and the fire of intense 
 conviction. He would probably have proceeded to develop the great thesis 
 which he had just sketched in outline but at this point he was stopped short. 
 These facts and revelations were new to Festus. Though sufficiently familiar 
 with true culture to recognise it even through these Oriental surroundings, 
 he could only listen open-mouthed to this impassioned tale of visions, and 
 revelations, and ancient prophecies, and of a Jewish Prophet who had been 
 crucified, and yet had risen from the dead and was Divine, and who could 
 forgive sins and lighten the darkness of Jews as well as of Gentiles. He 
 had been getting more and more astonished, and the last remark was too 
 much for him. He suddenly burst out with the loud and excited interruption, 
 "You are mad, Paul; 1 thoso many writings are turning your brain." His 
 startling ejaculation checked the majestic stream of the Apostle's eloquence, 
 but did not otherwise ruffle his exquisite courtesy. " I am not mad," ho 
 exclaimed with calm modesty, giving to Festus his recognised title of " your 
 Excellency ; " " but I am uttering words of reality and soberness." But Festus 
 was not the person whom he was mainly addressing, nor were these tLo 
 reasonings which he would be likely to understand. It was different with 
 Agrippa. He had read Moses and the Prophets, and had heard, from multi- 
 tudes of witnesses, some at least of the facts to which Paul referred. To him, 
 therefore, the Apostle appealed in proof of his perfect sanity. " The king," 
 he said, " knows about these things, to whom it is even with confidence that 
 I am addressing my remarks. I am sure that he is by no means unaware of 
 any of these circumstances, for all that I say has not been done in a corner." 
 And then, wishing to resume the thread of his argument at the point where 
 it had been broken, and where it would be most striking to a Jew, he asked 
 
 "King Agrippa, dost thou believe the Prophets? I know that thou 
 beliovest." 
 
 But Agrippa did not choose to be entrapped into a discussion, still less 
 into an assent. Not old in years, but accustomed from his boyhood to an 
 atmosphere of cynicism and unbelief, he could only smile with the good- 
 natured contempt of a man of the world at the enthusiastic earnestness which 
 
 i Wisd. T. 4 ; 2 Cor. T. 13. There is an Iambic rhythm In Festua's interpellation which 
 toakes it sound like a quotation.
 
 560 *HE LIFE AKD WOBZ O* ST. PAUL. 
 
 could even for a moment fancy that he would bo converted to the heresy oi 
 the Nazarenes with their crucified Messiah! Yet he did not wish to be 
 uncourteous. It was impossible not to admire the burning zeal which neitheu 
 stripes nor prisons could quench the clear-sighted faith which not even such 
 a surrounding could for a moment dim. 
 
 " You are trying to persuade me offhand to be 'a Christian ! '" l he said, 
 with a half-suppressed smile ; and this finished specimen of courtly eutrapelia 
 was his bantering vnswer to St. Paul's appeal. Doubtless his polished remark 
 on this compendious style of making converts sounded very witty to that 
 distinguished company, and they would with difficulty suppress their laughter 
 at the notion that Agrippa, favourite of Claudius, friend of Nero, King ot 
 Chalcis, Itursea, Trachonitis, nominator of the High Priest, and supreme 
 guardian of the Temple treasures, should succumb to the potency of thig 
 " short method with a Jew." That a Paul should make the kintf a Chi-istian (!)j 
 would sound too ludicrous. But the laugh would be instantly suppressed ii 
 pity and admiration of the poor but noble prisoner, as with perfect dignity 
 he took advantage of Agrippa's ambiguous expression, and Said, with all the 
 fervent sincerity of a loving heart, " I could pray to God that whether ' in 
 little ' or ' in much/ * not thou only, but even all who are listening to ma 
 to-day might become even such as I am except," he added, as he raised hia 
 fettered hand "except these bonds." They saw that this was indeed na 
 common prisoner ; one who could argue as he had argued, and speak as ha 
 had spoken; one who was so filled with the exaltation of an inspiring idea, so 
 enriched with the happiness of a firm faith and a peaceful conscience, that 
 he could tell them how he prayed that they all all these princely and dis- 
 tinguished people could be even such as he and who yet in the spirit of 
 entire forgiveness desired that the sharing in his faith might involve no share 
 in his sorrows or misfortunes must be such a one as they never yet had seen 
 or known, either in the worlds of Jewry or of heathendom. But it was useless 
 to prolong the scene. Curiosity was now sufficiently gratified, and it had 
 become clearer than ever that though they might regard Paul the prisoner 
 as an amiable enthusiast or an inspired fanatic, he was in no sense a legal 
 criminal. The king, by rising from his seat, gave the signal for breaking up 
 the meeting ; Berenice and Festus, and their respective retinues, rose up at 
 the same time, and as the distinguished assembly dispersed they were heard 
 
 1 iviXivft "in brief," "in few words "(of. irpo^ypo^a V oAiyR Eph. iii. 3), "tout d'un, 
 coup." It cannot mean |" almost," which would be trap faiyov, or oAfyou Sel. On the 
 conatut involved in the present iri'e?, see my Brief Greek Syntax, 136. But it is very 
 doubtful whether we have got Agrippa's real remark. A reads wdOn (Lachm.), and 
 perhaps irt/fltis may have come from an original ircfl, "you are persuading yourself 
 (cf. ov n-i.'9oM<u, ver. 26); for instead of ycvtVftu, the reading of H. A, is wolr><rai, which, 
 with irti0 is unintelligible. From the confusion of readings we might almost con- 
 jecture that Agrippa ironically said, ^ ^firrMvov mufvcif "you'll soon be making me a 
 Clvrittian I " 
 
 2 St. Ohrysostom thinks that St. Paul mistook Agrippa's meaning, and, from ignor- 
 ance of colloquial Greek (?), supposed him to mean "almost." But Eph. iii. 3 is enough 
 to disprove tkU >
 
 THE VOtAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 561 
 
 remarking oft all sides that Paul was undeserving of death, or even of imprison- 
 ment. Ho had made, in fact, a deeply favourable impression. Agrippa's 
 decision was given entirely for his acquittal. "This person," he said to 
 Festus, " might have been permanently set at liberty, if he had not appealed 
 to Csesar." Agrippa was far too little of a Pharisee, and far too much of a 
 man of the world, not to see that mere freedom of thought could not be, and 
 ought not to be, suppressed by external violence. The proceedings of that 
 day probably saved St. Paul's life full two years afterwards. Festus, since 
 his own opinion, on grounds of Roman justice, were so entirely confirmed 
 from the Jewish point of view by the Protector of the Temple, could hardly 
 fail to scud to Nero an elogium which freely exonerated the prisoner from 
 every legal charge ; and even if Jewish intrigues were put in play against 
 him, Nero could not condemn to death a man whom Felix, and Lysias, and 
 Festus, and Agrippa, and even the Jewish Sanhedrin, in the only trial of the 
 case which they had hold, had united in pronouncing innocent of any capital 
 dime. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 THE VOYAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 
 
 " Non vultus instantis tyranni 
 Mente quatit solida, nee Auster 
 Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae." Hon. Od. iii. 3, 5. 
 " The flattering wind that late with promised aid 
 From Candia's bay the unwilling ship betrayed, 
 No longer fawns, beneath the fair disguise, 
 But like a ruffian on his quarry flies." 
 
 FALCONER, Shipwreck, canto ii. 
 
 AT the earliest opportunity which offered, St. Paul, and such otker prisoners 1 
 as were waiting the result of an appeal, were despatched to Italy under the 
 charge of Julius, a centurion of an Augustan cohort. This Augustan cohort 
 may either be some local troop of soldiers of that name stationed at Csesarea, 
 since the name " Augustan " was as common as " Royal " among us ; or they 
 may have belonged to the body of Augustani veterans originally enrolled 
 by Augustus as a body-guard ; 2 or they may have been the Praetorian guards 
 themselves, who occasionally, though not frequently, were sent out of Italy 
 on imperial missions. 3 It is not, however, said that Julius was accompanied 
 by his cohort, and it is not at all impossible that he may have been sent with 
 a few of those chosen soldiers of the most distinguished Roman regiment* 
 
 1 xxv ii. 1. ffcpout is not necessarily used with classical accuracy to denote "prisoner* 
 of a different class " (Luke viii. 3; Mark xv. 41). 
 
 2 It certainly was not a cohort of "Sebasteni, "i.e., natives of Sebaste, the nara 
 which Hierod had given to Samaria (Jos. B. J. ii. 12, 5). 
 
 * Pliny, H. N. vi. 35. (Lewin, ii 183.) 
 19
 
 562 THE LIFE AJSD WOBX OF ST. 
 
 to give ecZaf to the arrival of Festus in one of the Avealthiesi but raost dis- 
 affected of imperial provinces. 1 If this wore the case, Julius may very well 
 have been that Julius Priecns who afterwards rose to the splendid position 
 of one of the two Praefects of the Praetorians, and committed suicide on the 
 disgraceful overthrow of his patron.* We see enough of him daring this 
 voyage to lead us to believe that he was a sensible, honourable, and kindly man. 
 
 Roman soldiers were responsible with their own lives for the security of 
 their prisoners, and this had originated the custom so painful to the prisoners, 
 and all the more painful because so necessarily irritating to the legionaries 
 of keeping the prisoners safe by chaining them with a long light chain by 
 the right wrist to the left wrist of soldiers, who relieved each other in turn. 
 It may be imagined how frightfully trying it must have been to have no 
 moment and no movement free, and to be fettered in such liorriblfl proximity 
 to a man who would certainly have been an uneducated specimen of the lowest 
 classes, and who, surrounded from boyhood upwards by rough and demoralis- 
 ing companionships, might be a coarse and loose provincial, or a morose and 
 brutal peasant from the dregs of the Italian population. It is tolerably certain 
 that ashore prisoners were not allowed to go anywhere without tills galling 
 protection, but we may hope that they were not always subject to it in the 
 narrow fetid cribs and hatchways of the huge, rolling, unwieldy merchantmen 
 in which their compulsory voyages had to bo performed. 
 
 Since Festus had arrived in Palestine towards the end of June, it must 
 now have been late in August, and the time was rapidly drawing on in which 
 ancient navigation was closed for the year. Every day made the weather 
 more uncertain and the voyage more perilous, and since time was pressing, 
 Julius, to whom the commission was entrusted, embarked his prisoners on 
 board a coasting merchantman of the Mysian town of Adramyttium. As tha 
 vessel would touch at the chief ports on the west of Asia, thoro was every 
 possibility of their finding a ship at Ephosus, or at some nearer port, ii> -which 
 they could perform the rest of their voyage j but if not. Julius might, as a 
 last resource, march his soldiers and their prisoners from Adramyttiam to 
 Troaa, and thence sail to Neapolis, whence he could proceed along the great 
 Egnatian Road, already so familiar to St. Paul, through Philippi and Thes- 
 salonica to Dyrrhachium. Dyrrhachium and Brundusium were to the Romans 
 what Calais and Dover are to the English; and after crossing the ^Egean, 
 Julius would march along the Appian Road in a reverse order through the 
 scenes described with such lively humour by Horace in his Her ad Brundusium. 
 till his journey ended at Rome. This was the route traversed by St. Ignatius 
 and his "ten leopards" who conducted him to his martyrdom, and in his dis- 
 agreeable connexion with whom he says that ho fought with wild beasts all 
 the way. It is, however, most unlikely that a hind journey entered into the 
 immediate plans of Julius. As he had several prisoners under his charge, 
 each of whom would require ten soldiers to relieve guard, such a journey 
 
 1 More strictly Procuratorships. St. Luke, however, uses the general word 
 ' Tao. Hist. ii. 92 ; iv. 11. " Pudoro magis quam necessitate."
 
 THE VOYAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 563 
 
 would be inexpressibly tedious and extremely expensive; and Julius might 
 rely with tolerable certainty on finding some vessel which was bound from 
 one of tho great emporiums of Asia for the capital of the world. 
 
 St. Paul was spared one at least of the circumstances which would hare 
 weighed most heavily on his spirits he was not alone. Luke and Aristarchns 
 accompanied him, and, whether such had bsen their original intention or not, 
 both were at any rate driven by stress of circumstances to remain with him 
 during great part of his Roman imprisonment. They, no doubt, were pas- 
 sengers, not prisoners, and they must either have paid their own expenses, 1 
 or have been provided with money for that purpose by Christians, who knew 
 how necessary was some attendance for one so stricken with personal infirmities 
 as their illustrious Apostle. 
 
 The voyage began happily and prosperously. The leading westerly wind 
 was so far favourable that the day after they started they had accomplished 
 the sixty-seven miles which lay between them and the harbour of Sidon. 
 There they touched, and Julius, who can hardly have been absent from the 
 brilliant throng who had listened to Paul's address before Agrippa, was so 
 indulgently disposed towards him that he gave him leave perhaps merely 
 on parole to hind and see h's friends who formed the little Christian com- 
 munity of that place. This kindness was invaluable to St. Paul. The two 
 years' imprisonment must have told unfavourably upon his health, and he 
 must have been but scantily provided with the requisites for a long voyage. 
 The expression used by St. Luke that Julius allowed him to go to his friend 
 and " be cared for," 2 seems to imply that even during that one day's voyage 
 ho had suffered either from sea-sickness or from general infirmity. The day 
 at Sidon was the one happy interlude which was to prepare him for many 
 anxious, miserable, and storm-tossed weeks. 
 
 For from that day forward the entire voyage became a succession of delays 
 and accidents, which, after two months of storm and danger, culminated in 
 hopeless shipwreck. No sooner had they left tho harbour of Sidon than they 
 encountered the baffling Etesian winds, which blow steadily from the north- 
 west. This was an unlooked-for hindrance, because the Etesians usually cease 
 to blow towards the end of August, and are succeeded by south winds, on 
 which the captain of the merchantman had doubtless relied to waft him back 
 to his port of Adramyttium. His natural course would have been to sail 
 straight across from Sidon to Patara, leaving Cyprus on the starboard; but 
 the very winds which sped St. Paul so blithely along this course to his 
 Csesarean imprisonment more than two years before, were now against his 
 return, and the vessel had to sail towards Capo Pedalium, the south-eastern 
 promontory of Cyprus, hugging the shore under the lee of the island as far 
 as Cape Dinaretnm. 3 On rounding this cape they could beat to windward 
 
 1 Luke, as a physician, might easily have procured a free passage. 
 
 * Xivii. 3, arji<Aurs rvXely. 
 
 vvnrAcWafin', " we sailed under the lee of," i.e., in this instance, "we left Cyprus on 
 the left." Observe that in this narrative alone there are no less than thirteen different 
 expressions for " sailing."
 
 564 THE LIFE AND WOBK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 by the aid of land-breezes and westward currents right across the sea which 
 washes the coasts of Cilicia and Pamphylia, until they dropped anchor in the 
 mouth of the river Andriacus, opposite to a hill crowned with the magnificent 
 buildings of Myra, the former capital of Lycia. 1 
 
 Here they were fortunate or, as it turned out, unfortunate enough to 
 find a large Alexandrian wheat-ship, 2 which had undergone the common fate 
 of being driven out of the direct course by the same winds which had baffled 
 the Adramyttian vessel, and which now intended to follow the usual alter- 
 native of creeping across the JEgean from island to island, northward of 
 Crete, and so to the south of Cythera, and across to Syracuse. 3 This 
 vessel, built for the purposes of the trade which supplied to all Italy the staff 
 of life, could easily provide room for the centurion with his soldiers and 
 prisoners, and such passengers as chose to accompany them. They were, 
 therefore, shifted into this vessel, and sailed for Cnidus, the last point at 
 which they could hope for any help from the protection of the shore with its 
 breezes and currents. The distance between the two spots is only one hundred 
 and thirty miles, and under favourable circumstances they might have got 
 to their destination in twenty-four hours. But the baffling Etesians still 
 continued with unseasonable steadiness, and to reach oven to Cnidus occupied 
 many weary and uncomfortable days. And when they got off the beautiful 
 and commodious harbour they were destined to a fresh and bitter disappoint* 
 ment, for they could not enter it. Had they been able to do so the season 
 was by this time so far advanced, and the wind was so steadily adverse, that 
 we can hardly doubt that, unless they continued their journey by land, they 
 would either have waited there for a more favourable breeze, or decided to 
 winter in a port where there was every pleasant requisite at hand for the 
 convenience of so large a vessel, and its numerous crew. Since, however, 
 the wind would neither suffer them to put in at Cnidus,* nor to continue 
 their direct voyage, which would have passed north of Crete, the only alter- 
 native left them was to make for Cape Salmone, at the eastern end of the 
 island, and there sail under its lee. To get to Salmone was comparatively 
 easy ; but when they had rounded it they had the utmost difficulty in creeping 
 along the weather shore until they came to a place called Fair Havens, a little 
 to the east of Cape Matala, and not far from an obscure town of the name 
 of Lasaea. While the wind remained in its present quarter it was useless to 
 continue their voyage, for beyond Cape Matala the shore trends sharply to 
 the north, and they would have been exposed to the whole force of the Etesians, 
 
 i Cf. Thuo. viii. 35. 
 
 3 The Emperor Titus (Suet. Vit. 5) did the same on his return from Palestine (cf. Jos. 
 ]'.. J. vii. 2, 1 ; Tac. U. iv. 81). At this period that part of the Mediterranean is almost 
 always stormy (Falconer, Dissert., p. 16). 
 
 3 It will, of course, be borne in mind that (1) they had no compass ; and (2) could not 
 work to windward. The Cilician land breeze, which had helped the Adramyttian vessel 
 to Myra, was quite local. Compare Socr. IT. E. ii. 24 ; Sozomen, vi. 25 (speaking of the 
 voyage of Athanasius from Alexandria to Home). Wetst. 
 
 4 xxvii. 7, pi) flvxxrewi/n* TOV oi-e/iov. It is not said that they got to Cnidus, but only thai 
 they got "opposite to " or " off " it, and that with difficulty.
 
 THE VOYAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 565 
 
 with ft lee shore on which they would inevitably have been dashed to pieces. 
 At Fair Havens, therefore, they were obliged to put in, and wait for a change 
 of wind. Time passed, and found them still windbound. It was now getting 
 towards the close of September. At Fair Havens St. Paul and any Jewish 
 Christians on board would probably keep the Kippor, or great day of Atone- 
 ment, 1 the one fast in the Jewish calendar, which this year fell on September 
 24 The autumnal equinox passed. The Feast of Tabernacles passed, and 
 perhaps some of the sailors regarded with superstitious terror the partial 
 eclipse which occurred on that evening. The Jewish season for navigation 
 was now over, 3 but the Gentiles did not regard the sea as closed until 
 November 11.* Discussions took place as to whether they should winter 
 where they were or choose the first favourable chance of pushing on round 
 Cape Matala to Port Phoenix, which lay only thirty-four miles beyond it. 
 St. Paul, whose remarkable ascendency had already displayed itself, was 
 allowed to give his opinion, and he gave it emphatically in favour of staying 
 where they were. "Sirs," 4 he said, "I perceive that this voyage will certainly 
 result in violent weather, and much loss not only of the cargo and of the ship, 
 but even of our lives." His opinion was entitled to great weight, because his many 
 voyages had made him thoroughly familiar with the winds and dangers of a 
 sea in which he had thrice been shipwrecked, and had once floated for a night 
 and a day. The captain, however, and the owner of the vessel gave their 
 opinion the other way ; and it must be admitted that they had much to urge. 
 Fair Havens afforded a shelter from the norwester which had so long been 
 prevalent, but it was entirely unprotected against east winds, and indeed 
 lay open to most points of the compass. It would, therefore, be a dangerous 
 haven in which to pass the winter, and it was further unsuitable because the 
 place itself was a poor one, not quite close even to the town of Laesea, and 
 offering no means of employment or amusement for the soldiers and sailors. 
 It would have been a serious matter to spend three or four months in a place 
 so dreary and desolate, and it seemed worth while, if possible, to get to Port 
 Phoenix. That town, the modern Lutro, which they could reach in a few 
 hours' sail, enjoyed the advantage of the only harbour on the south of Crete 
 which is safe in all weathers, and which was therefore a familiar resort of 
 Alexandrian corn-ships. Its harbour was closed and protected by a little 
 island, and was described by those who advocated its claims as "looking 
 towards Libs and towards Canrus," or, as we should say, towards the south- 
 west and the north-west. It has greatly puzzled commentators to account 
 for this expression, seeing that the entrance to the harbour of Lutro (which 
 is undoubtedly the ancient Phoenix) looks towards the east, and its two 
 openings at the extremities of its sheltering island look precisely in the 
 
 1 It was observed on the tenth of Tisri, which in this year (A.D. 60) fell at tho 
 autumnal equinox. 
 
 Sept. 28. See Lewin, Fasti Sacri, 1899; and UArt de verifier lea Dates, iv., p. 51. 
 ' See Schoettgen, Hor, Hebr. ad loc.; Plin. H, Jf. ii. 47; Veget. De Be Milit. v. 9. 
 < "&vSptt, " gentlemen," as in ^iv. 1J5, xix. 25 ; not nvpioi, as jn Acts wi. 39,
 
 566 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 opposite directions, namely, north-east and south-east. The explanation of 
 this singular anomaly is not to be sought in grammatical illustrations, but in 
 the subjectivity of the sailors, who simply regard the bearings of the harbour 
 from the directions in which they sail into it, and might say, for instance, that 
 a harbour " looked towards " the north, if they could only sail into it by 
 turning their prow northward; just as farther on in the chapter they speak 
 of " some land approaching them," when in reality they are approaching some 
 land. 1 But besides the security of Port Phoenix, it was evidently a far more 
 desirable place for nearly three hundred people to winter in than the com- 
 paratively obscure and lonely Fair Havens, and on both these grounds it 
 seemed to be worth a slight risk to reach it. These arguments won the 
 adhesion of the majority, and the centurion, with whom the decision rested, 
 decided that this should be done. St. Paul claimed no inspiration for the 
 solemn advice he gave, 2 and of course there was a fair chance of safely travers- 
 ing so short a distance. Yet results proved that his advice was right. Fair 
 Havens, though not a first-rate harbour, is yet partially protected by reefs 
 and islets, and though it might not be wholly safe to winter there, yet the 
 risk was much smaller than that which must be incurred by doubling Cape 
 Matala, and so getting possibly seized in the grasp of one of the prevalent 
 and sadden northerly gales, which would drive the ship into almost certain 
 destruction. But there is a gambling element in human nature, and the 
 centurion, at any rate, could hardly avoid following the opinion of the 
 experts, whoso interests were BO deeply concerned, in preference to that of 
 a prisoner, whose knowledge was not professional and who had BO much less 
 at stake. 
 
 It was not long before the wished-f or opportunity occurred. 8 A soft south 
 wind sprang up, and gladly weighing anchor, they hoisted the great mainsail, 
 took their boat in tow, sailed close along the shore to the point of Cape Matala, 
 and then gaily prepared for a delightful run of a few hours to the beautiful 
 and hospitable harbour for which they were abandoning the dull, dreary Lasses. 
 Now at last a little gleam of prosperity seemed to have shone on their tedious 
 and unfortunate voyage. Perhaps they had a good-natured laugh against Paul 
 the prisoner for advice which would have made them throw away a golden 
 chance. But, alas ! the gentle breathing of the south wind in the sails and 
 cordage was but a siren song which had lured them to their destruction. They 
 had not long passed the cape, when & tempestuous typhoon 4 such as often iu 
 those latitudes succeeds a brief spell of the south wind burst down from the 
 Cretan Ida, and smote with terrible fury on the hapless vessel. The ancient 
 name of this "Levanter," as it is now called, was probably Euroaquilo, a name 
 
 1 See further, Smith, p. 49. Ver. 10, feupa. 
 
 3 Ver. 13, apavrej ivffov wapA*yowo nj Kp^nji*. The E.V. misses the exact force of the 
 
 a Grist viroirvfi'ffavTos. 
 
 4 Hie word Tv4>vcfc describes the circular whirling of the clouds caused by the meet- 
 ing of the S. and the E.N.E. winds. See Plin. H. N. ii. 48, "praecipua navigantum 
 pestis ; " A. GelL xix. 1. This change of wind is exactly what might have baen expected 
 CPurdy, Hailing IHrectori/, ii. 61 ; Smith, Voy. and Shipwreck, p. 412).
 
 THS VOYAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 567 
 
 which exactly describes ila direction, since we see from St. Luke's subsequent 
 remarks that it must have been an east-north-easter, which, indeed, continued 
 to blow during the remainder of their voyage. 1 From the first moment that 
 this fatal blast rushed down from the hills and seized the wheat-ship in its grasp,* 
 the condition of the vessel was practically hopeless. It was utterly impossible 
 for her it would have been impossible for tb finest made vessel to " look th 
 wind in the face." 3 The suddenness and fury of the blow loft the sailors not 
 one moment to furl the mainsail, or to do anything but leave the ship to ba 
 driven madly forward before the gale, 4 until after a fearful run of twenty- three 
 miles they neared the little island of Clauda,* and ran in under its lee. Happily 
 the direction of the wind, and the fact in which we see the clear hand of 
 Providence that the storm had burst on them soon after they had rounded 
 Cape Matala, and not a little later on in their course, had saved them from being 
 dashed upon the rocks and reefs, which lie more to the north-west between both 
 Candia and Clauda; but their condition was, in other respects, already 
 dangerous, if not quite desperate. The ships of the ancients had one main- 
 mast and one mainsail ; any other masts or rigging were comparatively small 
 and insignificant. Hence the strain upon the vessel from the leverage of the 
 mast was terrific, and it was impossible that the Alexandrian ship, however 
 etoutly built, should have scudded with her huge sail set in the grasp of a 
 typhoon, without her timbers starting. It is evident that she had already 
 eprung a serious leak. There was no available harbour in the little island, and 
 therefore the captain, who seems to have shown the best seamanship which was 
 possible in his age, took advantage of the brief and partial lull which was 
 afforded them by the shelter of the island to do the two things which were 
 most immediately necessary namely, first to secure the means of escape, for 
 some at any rate of the crew, in case the vessel foundered, and next to put off 
 that catastrophe &s long as possible. He therefore gave orders at once to hoist 
 the boat on board, and so secure it from being staved in. But this was a task 
 
 1 EipaxvXui-, A, B, Sahid., Copt., Smith, p. 69. It was thus a "point wind." If 
 anything is to be said for the very ill-supported Ei>fKK\v5uv of the Syriac, we can only 
 regard the word as aurfrappi by Greek sailors (see Language and Languages, p. 119). 
 
 J Ver. 14, ipa\ty KO.T aurijs may meaa either "ttruck againtt her," the conception of a 
 Iiip being in all languages feminine, and vavt being 
 the prevalent substantive in the mind of the writer, 
 though throughout the narrative he. always uses rb 
 V\QIOV, except in verse 41 ; or it may mean, no leu 
 correctly, down from it," namely Crete," which 
 ie the substantive immediately preceding. But that 
 the former is the right translation in this instance 
 is certain, because <p.a.\iv could not be used \vith 
 nothing to follow it. The reader will more easily 
 follow the details of the voyage, if he will compare 
 the map with the directions indicated on thi* 
 compass. 
 
 ** iarro<j>9a}mt"v. Eyes were painted on the prow 
 (Eustath. ad H. riv. 717). 
 
 4 One of the Cursives (137) add* 
 
 . 
 1 Clauda j B, Kcv; Plin. IT, 20; Gaudui, GOZEO.
 
 568 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 by no means easy. The boat, which they had so securely towed astern in what 
 they meant to be a sort of gala trip to Port Phoenix, had now been hurled after 
 them through twenty miles of their swirling wake, and must therefore have 
 been sorely battered, and perhaps half water-logged; and though they were 
 now in slightly smoother water, yet such was the violence of the gale that it 
 was difficult to perform the simplest duty. They managed, however aud 
 Luke was one of those who lent a hand in doing it 1 to heave the boat on board 
 as a last resource in the moment of peril ; and then the sailors proceeded to 
 adopt the rough and clumsy method in use among the ancients to keep a vessel 
 together. This consisted in undergirding, or, to use the modern and technical 
 term for a practice which is now but rarely resorted to, in f '/rapping" it, by 
 passing stout hawsers several times under the prow, and tying them as tightly 
 as possible round the middle of the vessel. 2 They had thus met the two most 
 pressing dangers, but a third remained. There was no place into which they 
 eould run for shelter, nor could they long avail themselves of the partial pro- 
 tection which they derived from the weather-shore of the little island, and they 
 knew too well that the wind was driving them straight towards the Goodwin 
 Sands of the Mediterranean the dreaded bay of the Greater Syrtis. 3 There 
 was only one way to save themselves, which was not, as the English Version 
 most erroneously expresses it, to "strike sail and so be driven" since this 
 would be certain destruction but to lie to, by rounding the prow of the vessel 
 on the starboard tack as near to the wind as possible, to send down the topsail 
 and cordage, lower the ponderous yard to such a height as would leave enough 
 of the huge mainsail to steady the vessel,* set the artemo, or storm-sail, and 
 so having made all as snug as their circumstances permitted let her drift 
 on, broadside to leeward, at the mercy of wind and wave. This they did, and 
 so ended the miserable day, which had begun with such soft breezes and pre- 
 sumptuous hopes. 6 
 
 All night long the storm blew, and, in spite of the undergirding, the vessel 
 still leaked. Next day, therefore, they kept throwing over from time to time 
 everything that could possibly be spared to lighten the ship ; ' but even this 
 was insufficient. The next night brought no relief; the vessel still leaked 
 and leaked, and all labour at the pumps was in vain. The fate which most 
 
 1 The narrative of St. Luke is admirably brief and pregnant, and yet we can at once 
 trace in it the tasks in which he and St. Paul and other passengers or prisoners were able 
 to take their share. They helped, for instance, in getting hold of the boat (ver. 16), and 
 in lightening the vessel (ver. 19, leg. tpptyanw) ; but they could not help in such technical 
 tasks as f rapping the vessel, heaving the lead, dropping the anchors, &c. 
 
 1 vvofrnara, mitrae, Vitruv. x. 15, 6 ; Thuc. i. 29 ; Plato, Rep. x. 616 ; Hor. Od. i. 14, 
 8. "They [a Spanish man-of-war in a storm] were obliged to throw overboard all their 
 upper-deck guns, and take six turns of the cable round the ship to prevent her opening" 
 (Anson, Voyage Round the World). The Albion was frapped with iron chains after the 
 battle of Navarino. 
 
 1 Ver. 17, jrVw<ri, not "fall into," but "be driven ashore on" (Hdt. viil. 13). 
 
 4 xoAoo'wTef rJ> <ncevo?, here "lowering the great yard " (Smith). 
 
 * Ver. 13, iofare9 Tijf irpoW<rW9 Kejcpan)K<i'cu. 
 
 Ver. 18, /3oXijv iiroiovvro, jacturam facitbant, whereas what tfcej- did the day ftftfflT 
 1T3S an instantaneous act,
 
 THE VOYAGE AND SHIPWRECK. 569 
 
 commonly befell ancient vessels that of foundering at sea was obviously 
 imminent. On the third day, therefore, it became necessary to take some still 
 more decisive step. This, in a modern vessel, would have been to cut down 
 the masts by the board ; in ancient vessels, of which the masts were of a less 
 towering height, it consisted in heaving overboard the huge mainyard, which, 
 as we see, was an act requiring the united assistance of all the active hands. 1 
 It fell over with a great splash, and the ship was indefinitely lightened. But 
 now her violent rolling all the more sensible from the loose nature of her 
 cargo was only counteracted by a trivial storm-sail. The typhoon, indeed, 
 had become an ordinary gale, but the ship had now been reduced to the con- 
 dition of a leaky and dismantled hulk, swept from stem to stern by the dashing 
 spray, and drifting, no one knew whither, under leaden and moonless heavens. 
 A gloomy apathy began to settle more and more upon those helpless three 
 hundred souls. There were no means of cooking ; no fire could be lighted ; 
 the caboose and utensils must long ago have been washed overboard ; the pro 
 visions had probably been spoiled and sodden by the waves that broke over the 
 ship ; indeed, with death staring them in the face, no one cared to eat. They 
 were famishing wretches in a fast-sinking ship, drifting, with hopes that 
 diminished day by day, to what they regarded as an awful and a certain 
 death. 
 
 But in that desperate crisis one man retained his calm and courage. It 
 was Paul the prisoner, probably in physical health the weakest and the greatest 
 sufferer of them all. But it is in such moments that the courage of the noblest 
 souls shines with the purest lustre, and the soul of Paul was inwardly enlight- 
 ened. As he prayed in all the peacefulness of a blameless conscience, it was 
 revealed to him that God would fulfil the promised destiny which was to lead 
 him to Rome, and that, with the preservation of his own life, God would also 
 grant to him the lives of those unhappy sufferers, for whom, all unworthy as some 
 of them soon proved to be, his human heart yearned with pity. While the rest 
 were abandoning themselves to despair, Paul stood forth on the deck, and after 
 gently reproaching them with having rejected the advice which would have 
 saved them from all that buffeting and loss, he bade them cheer up, for 
 though the ship should be lost, and they should be wrecked on some island, 
 not one of them should lose his life. For they knew that he was a prisoner 
 who had appealed to Caesar; and that night an angel of the God, whose child 
 and servant he was, had stood by him. and not only assured him that he should 
 stand before Caesar, but also that God had, as a sign of His grace, granted him 
 
 1 Yer. 19, iV <rvV tpptyaiJ.iv. (This is the reading of G, H, most of the Cursives, both 
 the Syriac versions, the Coptic, JEthiopic, &c. I agree with De "Wette in thinking that 
 the if>pi\jiav of N. A, B, C, Vulg., is a mistaken alteration, due to the cn-oioCpro of the pre- 
 vious verse.) The meaning of the expression is disputed, but it has been universally 
 overlooked that the aorist requires some tingle act. Hence Alford's notion that ^ <rv^ 
 means beds, furniture, spare rigging, &c., and Wetstein's, that it means the baggage of 
 the passengers, fall to the ground, and Smith's suggestion that the main spar is intended 
 is much strengthened. He observes that the effect would be much the same aa that 
 produced & modern vessels by heaving the guru overboard.
 
 570 THE LIFE AND WORK 0? ST. PAUL. 
 
 the lives of all on board. He bade them, tlioref ore, to cheer up, and to share 
 Lis own conviction that the vision should come true. 
 
 Who shall eay how much those calm undoubting words were designed by 
 God to help in bringing about their own fulfilment ? Much had yet to be 
 done ; many a strong measure to avert destruction had yet to be taken ; and 
 God helps those only who will take the appointed means to help themselves. 
 The proud words " Caeearem vehis " 1 may have inspired the frightened sailor 
 to strenuous effort in the open boat on the coast of Illjria, and certainly it was 
 Paul's undaunted encouragements which re-inspired these starving, fainting, 
 despairing mariners to the exertions which ultimately secured their safety. 
 For after they had drifted fourteen days, tossed up and down on the heaving 
 waves of Adria, 2 a weltering plaything for the gale, suddenly on tho fourteenth 
 night the sailors, amid the sounds of the long-continued storm, fancied that 
 they heard the roar of breakers through the midnight darkness. Suspecting 
 that they were neariug some land, and perhaps even detecting that white 
 phosphorescent gleam of a surf -beat shore which is visible so far through even 
 the blackest night, they dropped the lead and found that they were in twenty 
 fathom water. Sounding again, they found that they were in fifteen fathoms. 8 
 Their suspicions and fears were now turned to certainty, and hero was the 
 fresh danger of having their desolate hulk driven irresistibly upon some iron 
 coast. In the face of this frosh peril the only thing to be done was to drop 
 anchor. Had they anchored the vessel in the usual manner, from the prow/ 
 the ship might have swung round against a reef; nor could they suppose, as 
 they heard the extraordinary loudness of the surf beating upon the shore, that 
 they were at that moment a quarter of a mile from land. So they dropped 
 four anchors* through the hawse-holes in which the two great paddle-rudders 
 ordinarily moved ; since these having long boon useless as they drifted before 
 the galehad been half lifted out of the water, and lashed to the stern.* 
 Having done this, they could only yearn with intense desire for the dawn of 
 day. All through the remaining hours of that long wintry night, they etood 
 face to face with the agony of death. In its present condition, the leak con- 
 stantly gaining on them, the waves constantly deluging them with spray, the 
 vessel might at any moment sink, even if the anchors held. But they did not 
 know, what we know, that those anchors had dropped into clay of extraordinary 
 ,f>;.i./ id^rn terl ' o&'t 
 
 1 Plut. Cats. 38; De Fort. JRom. 6; Florae, IT. 2; Dion Casa. sll. 48. "Et fortunam 
 Caesaris " is a later addition. 
 
 " The Mediterranean between Greece, Italy, and Africa. Strabo, ii. 123. 'IOWOK 
 jre/uyos, 6 vvv'A5pi(Hosych.). 4uuj>tpofievo', " tossed hither and thither." So it would 
 appear to those on board, but probably they drifted in the E.N. Easter. 477 mile* in 
 thirteen days at the natural rate of one mile and a half an hour. (See Smith, p. 101.) 
 
 3 Mr. Smith says that Captain Stewart's soundings "would alone have furnished a 
 conclusive test of tha truth of this narrative" (p. ix.) ; and that we are enabled by these 
 and similar investigations "to identify the locality of a shipwreck which took place 
 eighteen centuries ago" (p. xiii.}. 
 
 4 "Anchor* de prora jacitur" (Virg. Mn. lil. 277). Lord Nelson, reading this 
 chapter just before the battle of Copenhagen, ordered our vessels to be anchored by 
 the stern. 
 
 * Cf. Gaei. Bell, Civ. i 25, * Ax appears from zxr!L 40.
 
 THE VOYAGE AJTD SHIPWRECK. 571 
 
 tenacity, which, indeed, was the solo circumstance between them and hopeless 
 wreck. 
 
 Gradually through the murky atmosphere of rain and tempest, the grim 
 day began to dawn upon the miserable crew. Almost as soon as they could see 
 the dim outlines of their own faces, haggard and ghastly with so much privation 
 and so many fears, they observed that they were anchored off a low point, 
 over which the eea was curling with a huge and most furious eurf . Ignorant 
 that this was Point Koura, on the north-east sido of Malta, 1 and not recog- 
 nising a single landmark on the featureless shore, the only thought of the 
 selfish heathen sailors was to abandon the hulk and crew to their fate, while 
 they saved themselves in the boat which they had with such trouble and 
 danger hoisted on board. Pretending, therefore, that they could steady the 
 pitching of the ship, and therefore make her hold together for a longer time, 
 if they used more anchors, and laid them out at full length of the cables 1 
 instead of merely dropping them from the prow, they began to unlash the boat 
 and lower her into the sea. Had they succeeded in their plot, they would 
 probably have been swamped in the surf upon the point, and all on board 
 would inevitably have perished from inability to handle the sinking vessel. 
 From this danger alike the crew and the sailors were once more saved by the 
 prompt energy and courage of St. Paul. Seeing through the base design, he 
 quietly observed to Julius, who was the person of most authority on board, 
 " If these sailors do not stay in the ship, ye cannot be saved." He says " ye," 
 not " we." Strong in God s promise, he had no shadow of doubt respecting 
 his own preservation, but the promise of safety to all the crew was conditional 
 on their own performance of duty. The soldiers, crowded together in the 
 vessel with their prisoners, heard the remark of Paul, and since he alone at 
 that wild moment of peril had kept calm, and was therefore the virtual captain 
 without the smallest scruple drew their swords and cut through the boat's 
 ropes, letting her fall away in the trough of the sea. It is not likely that the 
 sailors felt much resentment. Their plan was distinctly base, and it offered at 
 the best a very forlorn and dubious hope of safety. But the daylight had now 
 increased, and the hour was approaching in which everything would depend 
 upon their skill and promptitude, and on the presence of mind of all on board. 
 Once more, therefore, the Apostle encouraged them, and nrged them all to 
 take some food. " This is the fourteenth day," he said, " on which you are 
 continuing foodless, in constant anxiety and vigilance, without taking any- 
 thing. I entreat you, then, all to join in a meal, which is indeed essential 
 to that preservation, of which I assure you with confidence, for not a 
 hair of the head of any one of you shall perish." And having given 
 them this encouragement, he himself set the example. Making of the 
 simplest necessity of life a religious and eucharistic act, he took bread, 
 gave thanks to God in the presence of them all, broke it, and began to 
 eat. Catching the contagion of his cheerful trust, the drenched, miserable 
 
 1 Where the English frigate Lively waa wrecked in 1810, 
 8 xsvii. 30, irichttr, not "to cast out." as in E.V.
 
 572 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 throng of 276 souls, who had so long been huddled together in their unspeak- 
 able wretchedness and discomfort, as their shattered vessel lay rolling and 
 tossing under the dismal clouds, took fresh courage, and shared with him in a 
 hearty meal Knowing that this was the last meal they could ever take in the 
 dismasted vessel, and also that it would be impossible to save the cargo, they 
 lightened and righted the vessel by flinging overboard the wheat, which in the 
 long drift of 476 miles from Clauda in the storm must have shifted much to 
 one side and made the vessel heel over in a dangerous manner. When the full 
 daylight enabled them to examine the shore, they saw no recognisable land- 
 mark since the present Yaletta, the harbour of Malta, at which ships often 
 touched, was seven miles E.S.E. of the point where they were wrecked ; but 
 they saw a bay, at one extremity of which the cliffs sank down into a flat 
 beach, and the only thing which they could hope to do was to thrust the 
 ship out of her direct course, and strand her at this spot. To make a tack 
 athwart the wind with a disabled ship was a manoeuvre by no means easy, 
 but it was worth attempting. They therefore cut away the anchors, letting 
 the ropes drop into the sea, 1 unlashed and let down the paddle-rudders, 3 
 hoisted the wrtemo, or foresail 3 which was all that was left them to the 
 wind, and steered straight for the beach. But their manoeuvre, resolutely as it 
 had been undertaken, was a failure. They had unconsciously anchored off Rag 
 el Koura. The opposite point looked like another promontory, but was in 
 reality the island of Salmonetta, separated from the mainland by a deep, 
 narrow, and precipitous channel. Through this channel, about a hundred 
 yards in width, ran a current, and in the stormy race where the waters of this 
 current met the waters of the bay, the vessel* would not answer to the helm, 
 and all they could do was to run her ashore. Happily for them she drove, 
 not upon a rock, but deep into a bank of mud, such as still exists at that very 
 spot. Here the prow stuck immovably fast, while the stern was free. The 
 crew rushed to the prow, while the waves, which broke with fury over the un- 
 supported stern, began instantly to batter it to pieces. Here, even at this 
 extremity, there rose for Paul and the other prisoners a new, unexpected, and 
 yet more terrible danger. It was the duty of the soldiers to be responsible 
 with their own lives for their prisoners. The Roman law was stern, rigid, and 
 unbending, nor did it admit of any extenuating plea. So long as death seemed 
 imminent, and every hand on board might be useful in averting it, the 
 prisoners must have been left unchained ; but in such a crisis as this, what 
 was there to prevent any one of them from taking a dive into the sea, and 
 so escaping P It would have been a horrible thing that blood and butchery 
 should stain the planks of a shipwrecked vessel at the very moment when 
 safety seemed within reach, and that this human sacrifice of lives which God 
 
 1 Ver. 40, iyupa* mpttAovrtc tit** tit iV 0aX<ur<rav, not " when they had taken up the 
 anchors, they committed themtdvet unto the sea," E. V. 
 
 a Eur. Eel. 1536. 
 
 "Levato artemone," Vulg.; "a litil sail," Wycl. ; "Vestibus extensia, et quofl 
 fnperaverat unum Velo prora suo," JUT. xii. 68, Artemone Solo. Sch, 
 
 * So $e?a\awof U used of the Eosphvrut by Strabo, 124.
 
 ST. PAUL'S ARRIVAL AT ROME. 573 
 
 had rescued should be the only thanksgiving of the survivors. It was even 
 more horrible that they who had fraternised with their fellows in the levelling 
 communism of sympathy, as they huddled side by side, with death staring them 
 in the face, should now thrust their swords into hearts with which their own 
 had so long been beating in fearful sympathy. From this peril the prisoners 
 were again indirectly saved by liim whose counsel and encouragement had all 
 along been the direct source of their preservation. If the prisoners were to 
 be killed, equal justice, or injustice, must be dealt to all of them alike, and 
 Julius felt that it would be dastardly ingratitude to butcher the man to whom, 
 under God's providence, they all owed their rescued lives. He therefore 
 forbade the design of the soldiers, and gave orders that every one who could 
 swim should first fling himself overboard, and get to land. 1 The rest seized 
 hold of planks and other fragments of the fast-dissolving wreck. 1 The wind 
 threw them landwards, and at last by the aid of the swimmers all were saved, 
 and at s spot which, owing to the accurate fidelity of the narrative, can still 
 be exactly identified a motley group of nearly three hundred drenched, and 
 shivering, and weather-beaten sailors and soldiers, and prisoners and passen- 
 gers, stood on that chill and stormy November morning upon the desolate and 
 surf -beat shore of the island of Malta. Some, we are sure, there were who 
 joined with Paul in hearty thanks to the God who, though He had not made 
 the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof were still, had yet brought them 
 safe to land, through all the perils of that tempestuous month. 
 
 JSoofe i. 
 
 HOME. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIT. 
 
 ST. PAUL'S AERIVAL AT ROMB. 
 
 ; - <-.-.,-. j.-.,;' v>v: {;>" 'f{ 
 
 ** Paulus Romae, apex Evangelii." "BssofL. 
 
 So ended Si Paul's fourth shipwreck. The sight of the vessel attracted 
 the natives of the island, 3 a simple Punic race, mingled with Greek settlers, 
 aud under Roman dominion. There have been times far more recent, and 
 coasts far nearer to the scenes of civilisation, in which the castaways of s 
 
 1 Probably Paul was among these (2 Cor. xi. 25). 
 
 2 Ver. 41, fAv'ero, " was going to pieces." "Dissolutum navigium' (Cio. Att, 
 iv. 11). 
 
 3 The notion that the island on which they were wrecked was not Malta, but the 
 little Adriatic island of Meleda, off the coast of Dalmatia, was started by Constantino 
 the Porphyrogenite. It was founded on mistakes about Adria (xxvii. 27), barbarians 
 (iiviii. 2), and vipers (id. 3), combined with various nautical considerations ; and was 
 supported by Georgi of Meleda, Jacob Bryant, and Dr. Falconer, and lastly by Dr. J. 
 Mason Neale, in his Notes on Dalmatia, p. 161. All that can be said for it may be found 
 in Falconer's Dissertation (3rd edit., with additional notes, 1872).
 
 574 THE LIITE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 derelict would have been more likely to bo robbed and murdered than received 
 with hospitality and compassion ; but these Maltese Phoenicians, nearly two 
 millenniums ago, welcomed the rescued crew with unusual kindneas. Heavy 
 showers had come on, and the shipwrecked men were half -benumbed with 
 fatigue and cold. Pitying their condition, the natives lit a huge fire of fagots 
 and brushwood, that they might dry their clothes, and gave them in all respects 
 a friendly welcome. Paul, with that indomitable activity and disregard of 
 self which neither danger nor fatigue could check, was busy among the busiest 
 collecting fuel. He had got together a large bundle of furze-roots, 1 and had 
 just put it on the blazing fire, when a viper which had been lying torpid, being 
 suddenly revived and irritated by the hoat, darted out of the bundle and 
 "fastened on Paul's hand." Seeing the creature hanging from hia hand, 
 and observing that he was a prisoner, thd simple natives muttered to one 
 another that he must be some murderer, rescued indeed from the waves, but 
 pursued by just vengeance even on land. Paul, quite undisturbed, shook the 
 creaturo oft into the fire, and was none the worse. 2 The natives expected 
 that he would suddenly drop dead. 3 For a long time they watched him with 
 eager eyes, but when they observed that no unpleasant result of any kind 
 followed, they, like the rude people of Lystra, gradually changed their minds, 
 and said that he was a god. 
 
 For three months, until the beginning of February opened the sea to 
 navigation, the crew lived in Malta ; and during that time, owing once more 
 to the inSuonce of St. Paul, he and his associates received the utmost kindness. 
 Not far from the scene of the shipwreck lay the town now called Alta Yecchia, 
 the residence of Pubiius, the governor of the island, who was probably a legate 
 of the Pi-aster of Sicily. Since Julius was a person of distinction, this Roman 
 official, who bore the title of Protos (" First ") a local designation, the accu- 
 racy of which is supported by inscriptions* offered to the centurion a 
 genial hospitality, in which Paul and his friends wore allowed to share. It- 
 happened that at that time the father of Pubiius was lying prostrated by 
 feverish attacks complicated with dysentery. St. Luke was a physician, but 
 his skill was less effectual than the agency of St. Paul, who went into the 
 side man's chamber, prayed by his beasido, laid his hands on him, and healed 
 him. The rumour of the cure spread through the little island, and caused all 
 the sick inhabitants to come for help and tendance. We may be sure that 
 St. Paul, though we do not hear of his founding any Church, yet lost no 
 opportunity of making known the Gospel. He produced a doop and most 
 
 (see Theophrast. Hist. Plant. 1, 4). Hence the objection that Bo3quetia, 
 tome distance from St. Paul'* Bay, is the only place where there is timber hi Malta, drops 
 to the ground, even if there were ever anything in it. 
 
 J The disappearance of the viper from Malta, if it has disappeared, is no more strange 
 than its disappearance from Arran. There is a curious parallel to ihe incident in tke 
 Greek Anthology. ('E/eTavt) Avypbs ex' rl fianjv jrpb KVJJLOLT' e,a<5x0 TJ;V rl yrji ^ei'ytw ftoipax 
 tysiAJvxtVijK; (Anthol.) 
 
 8 So when Charmian is bitten, " Trembling she stood, and on the sudden dropped," 
 Ant. and Cleop. v. 2 (Humphry). 
 
 IJochart, Phaltg. II. i. 26. npS>?ot M\tr6*y, Corp. Inter. Grac, 5754.
 
 ST. PAUL'S ABRIVAL AT KOME. 575 
 
 favourable impression, and was surrounded on all sides with respectful demon- 
 strations. In the shipwreck the crew must hare lost all, except what little 
 money they could carry on their own persons ; they were therefore in deep 
 aeed of assistance, 1 and this they received abundantly from the love and 
 gratitude of the islanders to whom their stay had caused so many benefits. 
 
 Another Alexandrian corn-ship, the Castor and Pollux more fortun.-ite 
 than her shattered consort had wintered in the harbour of Valetta; and 
 when navigation waa again possible, Julius and his soldiers embarked on 
 board of her with their prisoners, and weighed anchor for Syracuse. It was 
 but eighty miles distant, and during that day's voyage St. Paul would gazo 
 for the first time on the giant cone of Etna, the first active volcano ho had 
 ever soon. At Syracuse they waited three days for a more favourable wind. 
 Since it did not come, they made a circuitous tack, 2 which brought them to 
 Rhegiurn. Hero again they waited for a single day, and as a south wind 
 then sprang up, which was exactly what they most desired, they sped swiftly 
 through tha Straits of Messina, between the chains of snow-clad hills, and 
 after passing on their left tho huge and ever-Sashing cone of Str?*nboli, 
 anchored the next day, after a splendid rnn of 180 miles, in the lovely Bay 
 of Puteoli. The unfurled topsail which marked the Alexandrian corn-ship 
 would give notice of her arrival to the idlers of the gay watering-place, who 
 gathered in hundreds on the mole to welcome with their shouts the vessels 
 which brought the ataS of life to the granaries of Boms. Hero Paul had the 
 unexpected happiness to find a little Christian Church, and the brethren bogged 
 him to stay with them seven days. This enabled them to spend together a 
 Sabbath and a Sunday, and the privilege was granted by the kindly and grateful 
 Julius. Here, then, they rested, in one of the loveliest of earthly scenes, 
 when Vesuvius was still a slumbering volcano, clad to its green summit with 
 vines and gardens. Paul could not have looked unmoved on the luxury and 
 magnificence of the neighbouring towns. There was Baise, where, to the 
 indignation of Horace, the Roman nobles built out their palaces into the sea ; 
 and where the Caesar before whose judgment-seat he was going to stand had 
 enacted tha hideous tragedy of his mother's murder, and had fled, pursued 
 by her Furies, from place to place along the shore. 3 In sight was Pandataria, 
 and the other distant rocky islets, dense with exiles of the noblest rank, whore 
 Agrippa Postumus, the hist of the genuine Csesara, had tried to stop the pangs 
 of famine by gnawing the stuffing of his own mattress, and where the daughter 
 of the great Augustus had ended, in unutterable wretchedness, her life of 
 infamy. Close by was Cumse, with its Sibylline fame, and Pausilypus, with 
 Yirgii's tomb, and Caprese, where twenty-three years before Tiberius had 
 dragged to the grave his miserable old age. And within easy distance were 
 tho little towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, little dreaming as yet, in their 
 
 1 TinaTs. Cf. Ecclus. ixxviii. 1 ; "hones," Cic. ad Diw. rri. 9. 
 
 * xxviii. 13. ir*ptA9ovT<rs, " fetched a compass," 2 Sam. v. S3 j 2 Kings iii. 9. 
 
 J A.D. 59. Atb (tat cAXo<r f* al cimSq Ka.vTa.vQai ri avra oi>T<3 <rwe'/Jcur, c^Ac<r i/j.-MJRrtit 
 . Dion, Ixi. 13, 14; Tac. Ann. xiv. 8; Suet. Nero, 3i
 
 576 THE LItfE AND WOBK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 Greek-like gaiety and many-coloured brilliance, how soon they would be bttried 
 by the neighbouring mountain in their total and sulphurous destruction. 
 
 Here, free and among brethren, Paul passed seven peaceful days. On the 
 eighth they started for Rome, which was only distant a hundred and forty 
 miles. News of their arrival had reached the brethren, and when they had 
 gone about a hundred miles, past Capua, and through the rich vineyards of 
 Italy, and then through the Pomptine Marshes, Paul and Luke and Aris- 
 tarchus, among the bargees and hucksters who thronged Appii Forum, 1 
 caught sight of a body of Christians, who had come no less than forty miles 
 to welcome them. Farther than this they could not have come, since there 
 were two ways of reaching Home from Appii Forum, and the centurion might 
 have preferred the less fatiguing journey by the canal. Ten miles further on, 
 at Tres Tabernse, they found another group of brethren awaiting them. 
 Though there were a few who loved him at Rome, Paul knew the power, the 
 multitude, and the turbulence of the vast assemblage of synagogues in the 
 great city, and on their favour or opposition much of his future destiny must, 
 humanly speaking, depend. It was natural, therefore, that when he saw the 
 little throng of Christians he should thank God, and take courage from this 
 proof of their affection. Nothing cheered and inspired him so much as human 
 sympathy, and the welcome of these brethren must have touched with the 
 brightness of a happy omen his approach to a city which, greatly as he had 
 longed to see it, he was now to enter under circumstances far more painful 
 than he had ever had reason to expect. 
 
 And so through scenes of ever-deepening interest, and along a road more 
 and more crowded with stately memorials, the humble triumph of the Lord's 
 slave and prisoner swept on. St. Paul had seen many magnificent cities, but 
 iiover one which was approached by a road so regular and so costly in construc- 
 tion. As they passed each well-known object, the warm-hearted brethren 
 would point out to him the tombs of the Scipios and Csecilia Metella, and the 
 thousands of other tombs with all their architectural beauty, and striking bas- 
 reliefs and touching inscriptions ; and the low seats for the accommodation of 
 travellers at every forty feet ; and the numberless statues of the Dei Yiales ; 
 and the roadside inns, and the endless streams of carriages for travellers of 
 every rank humble birotae and comfortable rhedae, and stately carpenta 
 and the lecticae or palanquins borne on the necks of slaves, from which the 
 occupants looked luxuriously down on throngs of pedestrians passing to and 
 from the mighty capital of the ancient world. 
 
 " What conflux issuing forth or passing in ; 
 Praetors, Proconsuls to their provinces 
 Hasting, or on return, in robes of state, 
 Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power, 
 Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings ; 
 Or embassies from regions far remote, 
 In various habits, on the Appian road . . 
 Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed." 
 
 i HOT. Sat. L T. 4.
 
 ST. PAUL'S ARRIVAL AT ROMB. 577 
 
 How many a look of contemptuous curiosity would bo darted at the chained 
 prisoner and his Jewish friends as they passed along with their escort of 
 soldiers ! But Paul could bear all this while ho felt that he would not be 
 utterly lonely amid the vast and densely-crowded wilderness of human habita- 
 tions, of which he first caught sight as he mounted the slope of the Alban 
 hills. 
 
 Perhaps as they left the Alban hills on the right, the brethren would tell 
 the Apostle the grim annals of the little temple which had been built 
 beside 
 
 " that dim lake which sleeps 
 
 Beneath Aricia's trees, 
 The trees in whose dim shadow 
 The ghastly priest doth reign, 
 The priest who slew the slayer 
 And shall himself be slain." 
 
 And so through ever-lengthening rows of suburban villas, and ever-thickening 
 throngs of people, they would reach the actual precincts of the city, catch 
 sight of the Capitol and the imperial palace, pass through the grove and by 
 the fountain of Egeria, with its colony of begging Jews, 1 march past the 
 pyramid of 0. Cestius, under the arch of Drusns, through the dripping 
 Capenian gate, 1 leave the Circus Maximus on the left, and pass on amid 
 temples, and statues, and triumphal arches, till they reached the Excubito* 
 rium, or barracks of that section of the Praetorian cohorts whose turn it was 
 to keep immediate guard over the person of the Emperor. It was thus that, 
 the dream of Paul's life was accomplished, and thus that in March, A.D. 61, ; 
 in the seventh year of the reign of Nero, under the consulship of Csesennius 
 Paetus and Petronius Turpilianus, he entered Home. 
 
 Here the charge of the centurion Julius ended, though we can hardly suppose 
 that he would entirely forget and neglect henceforth his noble prisoner, to whom 
 in God's providence he owed his own life and the safety of the other prisoners 
 entrusted to him. Officially, however, his connexion with them was closed 
 when he had handed them over to the charge of the Prefect of the Praetorian 
 guards. From this time forward, and indeed previously, there had always 
 been two Praefecti Praetorio, but during this year a single person held the 
 power of that great office, the honest and soldierly Afranius Burrus. 5 So far, 
 Paul was fortunate, for Burrus, as an upright and humane officer, was not 
 likely to treat with needless severity a prisoner who was accused of no compre- 
 hensible charge of none at any rate which a Roman would consider worth 
 mentioning and who had won golden opinions both from the Procurators of 
 Judsea and from the centurion who had conducted him from Jerusalem. A 
 vulgar and careless tyrant might have jumped to the conclusion that he was 
 some fanatical Sicarius, such as at that time swarmed throughout Judaea, and 
 so have thrust him into a hopeless and intolerable captivity. But the good 
 
 1 Juv. Sat. iii. 12. * Porta di S. Sebastiano. 
 
 8 Acts xxviii. 16, ry <rrpa.TOTrtSd(>xa- Trajan op. Plin. Epp. x. 65, "Vinctrui mitti ad 
 praefectos praetorii mei debet."
 
 578 THE LIFE AND WORE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 word of Julius, and the kindly integrity of Burrus, were invaluable to him, 
 and he was merely subjected to that Mad of cusiod-ia militaris which was 
 known as observatio. For the first three days he was hospitably received by 
 some member of the Christian community, 1 and was afterwards allowed to 
 Lire a lodging of his own, with free leave to communicate with his friends both 
 by letter and by personal intercourse. The trial of having a soldier chained 
 to him indeed continued, but that was inevitable under the Roman system. It 
 was in mitigation of this intolerable concomitant of his imprisonment that tho 
 goodwill of his Roman friends might bs most beneficially exercised. At the 
 best, it was an infliction which it required no little fortitude to endure, and for 
 a Jew it would be far more painful than for a Gentile. Two Goatiles might 
 have much in common j they would be interested in common topics, actuated 
 by common principles j but a Jew and Gentile would bo separated by mutual 
 antipathies, and liable to the incessant, friction of irritating peculiarities. That 
 St. Paul deeply felt this annoyance may be seen from his allusions to his 
 "bonds" or hia "coupling-chain" in every Epistle of the Captivity. When 
 the first Agrippa had been flung into prison by Tiberius, Antonia, out of 
 friendship for his family, had bribed the Praetorian Prefect Macro to place 
 him under the charge of a kind centurion, and to secure as far as possible thai, 
 the soldiers coupled to him should be good-tempered men. Some small measure 
 of similar consideration may have been extended to Paul ; but tho service was 
 irksome, and there must have been some soldiers whose morose and sullen 
 natures caused to their prisoner a terrible torture. Yet even over these coarse, 
 uneducated Gentiles, the courtesy, the gentleness, the " sweet reasonableness " 
 ; of the Apostle, assorted its humanising control. If he was chained to the 
 soldier, the soldier was also chained to him, and during the dull hours until he 
 was relieved, many a guardsman might be glad to hear from such lips, in all 
 their immortal novelty, the high truths of the Christian faith. Out of hia 
 worst trials the Apostle's cheerful faith created the opportunities of his highest 
 usefulness, and from the necessities of his long-continued imprisonment arose 
 a diffusion of Gospel truths throughout tho finest regiment of that army which 
 less than a century later was to number among its contingents a " thundering 
 legion," and in less than three centuries was to supplant the silver eagles of 
 the empire by tho then detested badge of a slave's torture and a murderer's 
 punishment. 
 
 It was one of the earliest cares of the Apostle to summon together the 
 leading members of the Roman Ghetto, and explain to them his position. 
 Addressing them as " brethren," he assured them he had neither opposed his 
 people nor contravened their hereditary institutions. In spite of tliis he had 
 been seized at Jerusalem, and handed over to the Roman power. Yet tho 
 Romans, after examining him, had declared him entirely innocent, and would 
 have been glad to liberate him had not the opposition of the Jews compelled 
 him to appeal to Ccesar. But ho was anxious to inform them that by this 
 
 Kvlii. 23, .Is rijr fw'w. Of. FMleni. 22; Ada sxl 18,
 
 ST. PAtri/B ABKIVAL AT BOM1. 679 
 
 appeal he did not intend in any way to sot the Roman authorities against liis 
 own nation, and that the cause of the chain he wore was his belief in the fulfil- 
 ment of that Messianic hope hi which all Israel shared. 
 
 The reply of the Jews was very diplomatic. Differences within their own 
 pale, connected as we have seen with the name of Christ, had kindled such anger 
 and alarm against them, that less than ten years before this time they had 
 suffered the ruinous indignity of being banished from Borne by an edict of 
 Claudius. That edict had been tacitly permitted to fall into desuetude ; but 
 the Jews were anxious not to be again subjected to so degrading an infliction. 
 They therefore returned a vague answer, declaring whether truthfully or not 
 wo cannot say that neither by letter nor by word of mouth had they received 
 uny charge against the Apostle's character. It was true that, if any Jews had 
 been deputed to carry before Caesar the accusation of the Sanhodrin, they could 
 only have started at the same time as Julius, and would therefore have been 
 delayed by the same storms. The Jews wished, however, to learn from Paul 
 Ids particular opinions, for, as ho was a professed Christian, they could only 
 say that that sect was everywhere spoken against. 1 It is obvious that this 
 answer was meant to say as little as possible. It is inconceivable that the Jews 
 should never have heard anything said against St. Paul; but being keen 
 observers of the political horizon, and seeing that Paul was favourably regarded 
 by people of distinction, they did not choose to embroil themselves in any 
 quarrel with him. Nor does their professed ignorance at all disprove the 
 existence of a Christian community so important as that to which St. Paul had 
 addressed his Epistle to the Romans. 8 The Jews could boast of one or two 
 nol>le proselytes ; and it is possible that Pomponia Graecina, 3 wife of Plautius, 
 one of the conquerors of Britain, may have been a Christian. But if so she 
 had long been driven into the deepest seclusion, 4 and the conversion of the 
 Consular Flavins Clemens, and his wife, Flavia Domitilla, who were martyred 
 by Bomitian, did not take place till some time afterwards. The Christian 
 Church was composed of the humblest elements, and probably its Jewish and 
 Gentile members formed two almost distinct communities under separate 
 presbyters. 5 Now, with uncircuiacised Gentile Christians of tho lowest rank 
 
 1 This they might well say. See Tax:. Ann. xv. 44 ; Suet. Ifer. 1C; and, doubtless, 
 the graffiti or the catacombs are only successors of others Btill earlier, just as are the 
 hideous calumnies against which the Christian apologists appeal (Tert. Apol, 16, &c.). 
 
 3 In Rom. L 8 St. Paul tells the Roman Christians that their faith is proclaimed in 
 the whole world. No one familiar with his style would see more in this than tho favour- 
 able mention of them in the scattered Christian Churches which he visited. To St. Paul, 
 aa to every one else, "the world" meant the world in the raidat of which he lived, i.e., 
 the little Christian communities which he had founded. Kenan remarks, that in reading 
 Benjamin of Tudela, one would imagine that there was no one in the world but Jews ; 
 and in reading Ibn Batoutah that there was no one in the world but Moslira. 
 
 3 On this lady see Tac. Ann. xiii. 32. 
 
 * She was privately tried by her husband, and acquitted, in A.D. 57. 
 
 5 laghtfoot, Philippiann, p. 219. It ia at any rate a moat remarkable fact that, when 
 St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Colossians, two only of the Judaic Christians showed 
 him any countenance namely, Mark and Jesus, whose surname of Justus, if it ba 
 intended as a translation of b <*, shows that he, like " James the Just " was a 
 faithful observer of the Law (Col, IT, 11).
 
 S80 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 the leading Jews would not be likely to hold any intercourse, even if they were 
 aware of their existence. But is it remembered that Rome at this time was s 
 city of more than two million inhabitants? Is there any improbability that 
 among so many myriads, a small and struggling sect might, to outsiders* 
 remain utterly unknown ? The immense weight of the Epistle to the Romans 
 furnishes no proof that the Church to which it was addressed was one which 
 the world would regard as of any importance. The Sandemanians or Glassites 
 are a Christian body in London, and it is quite conceivable that some eminent 
 member of their body, like the late Mr. Faraday, might address to them a 
 letter of deep significance ; would it be any sufficient reason to deny their 
 existence if it was found that the Archdeacons and Rural Deans of London 
 had barely so much as heard of their peculiar tenets ? 
 
 Since, however, the Romish Jews professed a wish for further information, 
 St. Paul begged them to fix their own day to hear what he had to set before 
 them. They came to him in considerable numbers. That only the heads of 
 their community can have been invited is clear. St. Paul's abode could only 
 have accommodated an insignificant fraction of the Jewish residents, who at 
 this time are believed to have amounted to 60,000. It is said that there were 
 seven synagogues in Rome, 1 and the officers of these synagogues would 
 probably be as many as Paul could hope to address at once. All day long, 
 from dawn till evening, he set before them his personal testimony and 
 his scriptural arguments. That they were not wholly unimpressed, appears 
 from the length of the discussion ; but while a few were convinced, others 
 disbelieved. The debate acquired towards its conclusion a somewhat stormy 
 emphasis ; and before it broke up Paul addressed the dissentients with 
 something of his old fiery energy, applying to them the passage of Isaiah 
 once quoted by our Lord Himself, which said that they should not see nor 
 hear because they would not, and that their blindness and deafness were a 
 penal consequence of the grossness of their hearts. And then he sternly 
 warned them that the salvation of God was now sent to the Gentiles, and that 
 the Gentiles would listen to its gracious offer. a 
 
 Henceforth St. Paul took his own line, opening no further communication 
 with his obstinate fellow-countrymen. For two whole years he remained in 
 Rome, a fettered prisoner, but living in his own hired lodging, 3 and cheered 
 by the visits of the fellow-workers who were truest and best beloved. The 
 quiet and holy Timotheus perhaps acted as his amanuensis, and certainly 
 showed him all the tenderness of a son ; * the highly-cultivated Luke was his 
 historiographer and his physician ; 5 Aristarchus attended him so closely as to 
 earn the designation of his " fellow-prisoner; "* Tychicus brought him news 
 from Ephesus ; T Epaphroditus warmed his heart by the contributions which 
 showed the generous affection of Philippi ; 8 Epaphras came to consult him 
 
 1 Friedlander, iii. 510. 8 Ver. 29 is not found in H, A, B, E. 
 
 1 MiVfopa, not "house," as in the E. V., but "lodging" meritorium conductum, 
 
 * Phil. L 1 ; iL 19, teqq. ; Col. i. 1 ; Philem. 1. 
 
 CoL iv. 14 ; Philem. 24. Col. iv. 10 ; Philem. 24, 
 
 1 Eph. vi. 21 ; CoL iv. 7. Phil. ii. 25 ; iv. 18, ,f 4
 
 ST. PAUL'S SOJOURN IN BOMB. 581 
 
 about the heresies which were beginning to creep into the Churches of 
 Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossse ; l Mark, dear to the Apostle as the cousin 
 of Barnabas, more than made up for his former defection by his present 
 constancy ; 2 and Demas had not yet shaken the good opinion which he at first 
 inspired. 3 Now and then some interesting episode of his ministry, like the 
 visit and conversion of Onesimus, came to lighten the tedium of his confine- 
 ment.* Nor was his time spent fruitlessly, as, in some measure, it had been at 
 Csesarea. Throughout the whole period he continued heralding the kingdom 
 of God, and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all openness of speech 
 " unmolestedly." 
 
 With that one weighty word o/caXvron, we lose the help of the Acts of the 
 Apostles. From the Epistles of the imprisonment we learn that, chained 
 though he was in one room, even the oral teaching of the Apostle won many 
 converts, of whom some at least were in positions of influence ; and that as 
 soldier after soldier enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being chained to him 
 not his bonds only, but also his Gospel, became known throughout the 
 whole body of Praotorian guards. But besides this, God overruled these two 
 years of imprisonment in Rome for the benefit of the whole world. Two 
 imprisonments, away from books, away from all public opportunities for 
 preaching, each of two years long, with only a terrible shipwreck interpolated 
 between them how sad an interruption to most minds would these have 
 seemed to be ! Yet in the first of these two imprisonments, if nothing else 
 was achieved, we can perceive that his thoughts were ripening more and more 
 in silent growth ; and in that second imprisonment he wrote the letters which 
 have enabled him to exercise a far wider influence on the Church of Christ 
 throughout the world than though he had been all the while occupied in 
 sermons in every synagogue and missionary journeys in every land. 
 
 CHAPTER XLY. 
 ST. PAUL'S SOJOURN IN ROME. 
 
 TTJJ oiKovfjLeinjs. ATHBN. Deipnoi, 1120. 
 " Fumum et opes strepitumque Ilomae." HOB. Carm. iii. 29, 12. 
 
 ST. PAUL'S arrival at Rome was in many respects the culminating point of 
 his Apostolic career, and as he continued to work there for so long a time, 
 it is both important and interesting to ascertain the state of things with which 
 he came in contact during that long stay. 
 
 Of the city itself it is probable that he saw little or nothing until he was 
 
 i Col. i. 7 ; iv. 12. * Col. iv. 10 ; PMlem. 24 ; 2 Tim. IT. IL 
 
 * Col. iv. 14 ; Philem. 24 ; 2 Tim. iv. 10. * Col. iv. 9 ; Philem. 10.
 
 582 THE LI?E A2TD WORK OF Bit PAUL. 
 
 liberated, except such a glimpse of it as he may have caught on his way to hia 
 place of confinement. Although his friends had free access to him, he was 
 not permitted to visit them, nor could & chained Jewish prisoner walk about 
 with his guarding soldier. Yet on his way to the Praetorian barracks he must 
 have seen something of the narrow and tortuous streets, as well as of the great 
 open spaces of ancient Borne ; something of the splendour of it6 public edifices, 
 and the meanness of its lower purlieus ; something of its appalling contrast 
 between the ostentatious luxury of inexhaustible wealth, and the painful 
 squalor of chronic pauperism. 1 And during his stay ho must have seen or 
 heard much of the dangers which beset those densely-crowded masses of 
 human beings ; 8 of men injured by the clumsy carrucae rumbling along with 
 huge stones or swaying pieces of timber; 8 of the crashing fall of houses 
 raised on weak foundations to storey after storey of dangerous height; 4 of 
 women and children trampled down amid the rush of an idle populace to 
 witness the horrid butcheries of the amphitheatre ; of the violence of nightly 
 marauders ; of the irresistible fury of the many conflagrations. 6 It is obvious 
 that he would not have been allowed to seek a lodging in the Jewish quarter 
 beyond the Tiber, since he would be obliged to consult the convenience of the 
 successions of soldiers whose duty it was to keep guard over him. It is 
 indeed possible that he might have been located near the Excubitorium, but 
 it seems more likely that the Pratorians who were settled there were too 
 much occupied with the duties thrown on them by their attendance at the 
 palace to leave them leisure to guard an indefinite number of prisoners. 
 We infer, therefore, that Paul's "hired apartment" was within close range 
 of the Praetorian camp. Among the prisoners there confined ho might have 
 seen the Jewish priests who had been sent to Borne by Felix, and who won 
 from their nation so much approval by the abstinence which they endured in 
 the determination that they would not be defiled by any form of unclean 
 meat. 6 Here, too, he may have seen Caradoc, the British prince whose heroic 
 resistance and simple dignity extorted praise even from Roman enemies, 7 
 The fact that he was not in the crowded city precincts would enable him at 
 less cost to get a better room than the stifling garrets which Juvenal so 
 feelingly describes as at once ruinously expensive and distressingly incon- 
 venient. Considering that he was a prisoner, his life was not dull. If he had 
 to suSer from deep discouragements, he could also thank God for many a 
 happy alleviation of his lot. He had indeed to bear the sickness of hope 
 deferred, and put up with the bitterness of " the law's delays." His trial was 
 indefinitely postponed perhaps by the loss, during shipwreck, of the elogium 
 of Festus ; by the Hop-appearance of hia accusers ; by their plea for timo to 
 procure the necessary witnesses ; or by the frivoloiis and inhuman carelessness 
 
 Juv. Sat. iii. 128- -189. 
 
 Juv. Sat. iii. 235 ; Tac. Ann. xv. 38. 
 
 Juv. Sat. iii. 254201 : Mart. v. 22. 
 
 Juv. iii. 197, teq. * Id. 239, seq.. 190 - 31. 
 
 Jos. Met. 3. 7 Tac. Ann, xii. 38 ; H. iii, -15.
 
 ST PAUL'S SOJOURN IN HOME. 583 
 
 of the miserable youth who was then the emperor of the world. He was 
 saddened at the rejection of his teaching by his unconverted countrymen, and 
 by the dislike and suspicion of Judaising Christians. He could not but feel 
 disheartened that some should be preaching Christ with the base and conten- 
 tious motive of adding affliction to his bonds. 1 His heart must have been 
 sometimes dismayed by the growth of subtle heresies in the infant Church.' 
 But, on the other hand, he was safe for the present from the incessant perils 
 and tumults of the past twenty years ; and he was deprived of the possibility, 
 and therefore exempt from the hard necessity, of earning by incessant toil his 
 daily bread. And again, if he was neglected by Jews and Jndaisors, he was 
 acceptable to many of the Gentiles ; if his Gospel was mutilated by unworthy 
 preachers, still Christ was preached ; if his bonds were irksome, they inspired 
 others with zeal and courage ; if one form of activity had by God's will been 
 restrained, others were still open to him, and while he was strengthening 
 distant Churches by his letters and emissaries, he was making God's message 
 known more and more widely in imperial Rome. He had preached with but 
 small success in Athens, which had been pre-eminently the homo of intellect ; 
 but he was daily reaping the fruit of his labours in the city of empire the 
 city which had snatched the sceptre from the decrepit hands of her elder 
 sister the capital of that race which represented the law, the order, and the 
 grandeur of the world. 
 
 That many of the great or the noble resorted to his teaching is wholly 
 improbable, nor is there a particle of truth in the tradition which, by the aid 
 of spurious letters, endeavoured to represent the philosopher Seneca as one of 
 his friends and correspondents. We have seen that Gallio prided himself 
 on ignoring his very existence; and it is certain that Seneca would have 
 shared, in this as in all other respects, the sentiments of his brother. In his 
 voluminous writings he never so much as alludes to the Christians, and if he 
 had done so he would have used exactly the same language as that so freely 
 adopted many years later and, therefore, when there was far less excuse 
 for it even by such enlightened spirits as Pliny, Tacitus, Epictetus, and 
 M. Aurelius. Nothing can less resemble the inner spirit of Christianity than 
 the pompous and empty vaunt of that dilettante Stoicism which Seneca 
 professed in every letter and treatise, and which he belied by the whole tenor 
 of his life. There were, indeed, some great moral principles which ho was 
 enabled to see, and to which ha gave eloquent expression, but they belonged 
 to the spirit of an age when Christianity was in the air, and when the loftiest 
 natures, sick with disgust or with satiety of the universal vice, took refuge in 
 the gathered experiences of the wise of every age. It is doubtful whether 
 Seneca ever heard more than the mare name of the Christians ; and of tiia 
 Jews he only speaks with incurable disdain. The ordinary life of the wealthy 
 and noble Roman of St. Paul's day was too much divided between abject 
 terror and unspeakable depravity to be reached by anything short of a 
 yniraculous awakening. 
 
 1 Phil. i. 16. ' Later Epistles,
 
 584 THE LIFE AND WOES OF ST. PATTIi. 
 
 " On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad in furious guise 
 
 Along the Appian Way. 
 ** He made a feast, drank fast and fierce, 
 And crowned his hair with flowers 
 No easier nor no quicker passed 
 The impracticable hours. " 
 
 The condition of the lower classes rendered them more hopeful subjects 
 for the ennobling influences of the faith of Christ. It is true that they also 
 lived in the midst of abominations. But to them vice stood forth in all its 
 bare and revolting hideousness, and there was no wealth to gild its anguishing 
 reactions. Life and its temptations wore a very different aspect to tho 
 master who could lord it over the souls and bodies of a thousand helpless 
 minions, and to the wretched slave who was the victim of his caprice and 
 tyranny. As in every city where the slaves far outnumbered the free 
 population, they had to be kept in subjection by laws of terrible severity. It 
 it is no wonder that in writing to a Church of which so many members were 
 in this sad condition, St. Paul had thought it necessary to warn them of the 
 duty of obedience and honour towards the powers that be. 1 The house of a 
 wealthy Roman contained slaves of every rank, of every nation, and of every 
 accomplishment, who could bo numbered not by scores, but by hundreds. The 
 master might kill or torture his slaves with impunity, but if one of them, 
 goaded to passionate revenge by intolerable wrong, ventured to raise a hand 
 against his owner, the whole familia, with their wives and children, however 
 innocent, were put to death. 2 The Roman lady looked lovely at the banquet, 
 but the slave girl who arranged a curl wrong had been already branded with 
 a hot iron. 3 The triclinia of a banquet might gleam with jewelled and 
 myrrhine cups, but if a slave did but drop by accident one crystal vase he 
 might be flung then and there to feed the lampreys in his master's fishpond. 
 The senator and the knight might loll upon cushions in the amphitheatre, 
 and look on luxuriously at the mad struggles of the gladiators, but to the 
 gladiator this meant the endurance of all the detestable savagery of the 
 lanista, and the taking of a horrible oath that, " like a genuine gladiator," he 
 would allow himself to be bound, burned, beaten, or killed at his owner's will.* 
 
 1 Bom. xiii., xiv. 
 
 2 The necessity for this law had been openly argued in the Senate, and it was put in 
 force during this very year, A.D. 61, when Pedanius Secundus, the prefect of the city, 
 was murdered by one of his slaves (Tac. Ann. xiv. 42). In consequence of that murder 
 itself caused by dreadful depravities no less than four hundred slaves had been executed, 
 and it ia far from impossible that there may have been some Christians among them. On 
 their numbers see Juv. iii. 141 ; viii. 180 ; xiv. 305. Mancipiorum legiones, Plin. H. 2V, 
 xxxiii. 6, 26. 
 
 Juv. xiv. 24 ; Becker, Charides, ii. 53 ; Gallus, ii. 124, 
 4 Fetron. Satyr., p. 117 (Sen.- Ep. 7J.
 
 ST. PAUL'S 80JOTJKN IN ROME. 585 
 
 There were, doubtless, many kind masters at Rome ; but the system of slavery 
 was in itself irredeemably degrading, and we cannot wonder, but can only 
 rejoice, that, from Caesar's household downwards, there were many in this 
 condition who found in Christian teaching a light and peace from heaven. 
 However low their earthly lot, they thus attained to a faith so sure and so 
 consolatory that in the very catacombs they surrounded the grim memorials 
 of death with emblems of peace and beauty, and made the ill-spolt jargon of 
 their quaint illiterate epitaphs the expression of a radiant happiness and an 
 illimitable hope. 
 
 From the Roman aristocracy, then, Paul had little to expect and little to 
 fear; their whole life physical, moral, intellectual moved on a different 
 plane from his. It was among the masses of the populace that he mainly 
 hoped for converts from the Gentiles, and it was from the Jews, on the one 
 hand, and the Emperor, on the other, that he had most to dread. The first 
 terrible blow which was aimed at any Church among the Gentiles was dealt 
 by the Emperor, and the hand of the Emperor was not improbably guided by 
 the secret malice of the Jews. That blow, indeed the outburst of the 
 Neronian persecution St. Paul escaped for a time by the guiding Providence 
 which liberated him from his imprisonment just before the great fire of 
 Rome ; but since he escaped it for a time only, and since it fell on many 
 whom he had taught and loved, we will conclude this chapter by a glance at 
 these two forces of Antichrist in the imperial city. 
 
 1. The importance of the Jews at Rome began, as we have seen, with the 
 days of Pompeius. 1 Julius Csesar who, as Philo informs us, felt an 
 undisguised admiration for the manly independence with which they held 
 themselves aloof from that all but idolatrous adulation into which the 
 degenerate Romans were so ready to plunge allowed them to settle in a large 
 district beyond the Tiber, and yearly to send deputies and temple-tribute to 
 their holy city. From that time forward they were the incessant butt for the 
 half-scornful, half -alarmed wit and wrath of the Roman writers. The district 
 assigned to them being in the neighbourhood of the wharfs where the barges 
 from Ostia were accustomed to unlade was particularly suitable for the retail 
 trade in which they were mainly occupied. 2 They increased with almost 
 incredible rapidity. Their wisp of hay and the basket, which were their sole 
 belongings, and were adopted to secure them from the danger of unclean 
 meats, were known in every quarter. Martial describes how Jewish hawkers 
 broke his morning slumbers with their bawling, and Juvenal complains of the 
 way in which their gipsy-like women got themselves smuggled into the 
 boudoirs of rich and silly ladies to interpret their dreams. 3 Others of them, 
 with a supple versatility which would have done credit to the Greeks them- 
 
 1 Oio. pro Place. 28 ; Jos. c. Apion. i. 7 ; Tao. Ann. IL 85 ; Philo, Leg. ad Quium, 
 p. 568. 
 
 2 Jos. Antt. rvii. 11, 1 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 85. See on the whole subject Friedlander, 
 Sittcngesch. Roins, iii. 500 ; Hausratli, p. 474, seqq. 
 
 Mart. L 41, 3; x. 5, 3; Juv. iv. 116; v. 8; xiv. 134, 
 20
 
 586 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 selves, thrust themselves into every house and every profession, flung them- 
 selves with perfect shamelessness into the heathen vices, and became the 
 useful tools of wealthy rascality, and the unscrupulous confidants of the 
 " gilded youth." l Some became the favourites of the palace, and made 
 nominal proselytes of noble ladies who, like Poppaea, had every gift except 
 that of virtue. 2 But whatever their condition, they were equally detested by 
 the mass of the population. If they were false to their religion they wore 
 flouted as renegades ; if they were true to it, their Sabbaths, and their circum- 
 cision, and their hatred of pork, their form of oath, their lamp -lightings, and 
 their solemn festivals were held up to angry ridicule, 3 as signs of the most 
 abject superstition. If a Roman saw a knot of Jew beggars, he turned from 
 them with a shudder of disgust ; if he noticed the statue of a Jewish king or 
 Alabarch, he frowned at it as a proof of the degradation of the age. Whether 
 successful or unsuccessful whether he was an Herodian prince or a match- 
 selling pedlar the Jew was to the Latin races an object of abhorrence and 
 disdain. They were regarded with the same feelings as those with which a 
 citizen of San Francisco looks on the Chinese immigrant as intruders, whose 
 competition was dangerous as aliens, whose customs were offensive. And 
 yet they made their presence tremendously felt. Borne, so tolerant and so in- 
 different in her own religious beliefs, was sometimes startled into amazement 
 by the raging violence of their internal disputes. Cicero, one hundred and 
 twenty years before this period, prided himself on his courage in defending 
 Flaccus against their charges, and was obliged to deliver his speech in a low 
 tone of voice, for fear of exciting a riot among the thousands of them who 
 besieged the court to denounce their enemy. Sober Quirites had listened with 
 astonishment to their wild wailing round the funeral pile of their patron 
 Julius Caesar. 4 Even poets and satirists imply that those who were attracted 
 by feelings of superstition to adopt some of their customs were neither few in 
 number nor insignificant in position. 6 
 
 Under Augustus their condition was not materially altered. Tiberius, recog- 
 nising them as a dangerous element in the population, made a ruthless attempt 
 to keep down their numbers by conscriptions and deportations. Grains, on the 
 other hand, grossly as he behaved to their most venerable ambassadors, was so 
 much attached to the elder Agrippa that he respected their religious and 
 political immunities. The position of the Herodian princes in the imperial 
 court was sufficient to protect them during the greater part of the reign of 
 Claudius. During the reign of Nero, and therefore at the very time of St. 
 Paul's Bornan imprisonment, they enjoyed a secret influence of the most for- 
 midable kind, since Poppsea never hesitated to intercede for them, and had 
 even given orders that after her death her body was in accordance with the 
 Jewish practice to be buried and not burnt, 
 
 -* "* 
 
 l Mart. xi. 94; vii. 30. 
 
 5 Tac. Ann. xiii. 44, "Huic mulieri cuncta alia fuere praeter hones turn animum." 
 
 8 See Pers. v. 180 ; Hor. Sat. ii. 3, 288. 
 
 Suetou. Cat*. 84, * Hor. Sat, I, is.. 20,
 
 ST. PAUL'S SOJOTTBN IN ROME. 587 
 
 2. If Fan! had little to hope from the Jewish community at Borne, he 
 had still less reason to place any confidence in the justice, or mercy, or even 
 the ordinary discernment, of the Caesar to whom he had appealed. The first 
 three Caesars had been statesmen and men of genius. For Gains might have 
 been urged the mitigating plea of congenital madness. Claudius was 
 redeemed from contempt by a certain amount of learning and good-nature, 
 But Nero was in some respects worse than any who had preceded him. 
 Incurably vicious, incurably frivolous, with no result of all his education 
 beyond a smattering of ridiculous or unworthy accomplishments, his selfish- 
 ness had been so inflamed by unlimited autocracy that there was not a single 
 crime of which he was incapable, or a single degradation to which he could 
 not sink. The world never entrusted its imperial absolutism to a more des- 
 picable specimen of humanity. He was a tenth-rate actor entrusted with 
 irresponsible power. In every noble mind he inspired a horror only alleviated 
 by contempt. The first five years of his reign that " golden quinquennium " 
 which was regarded as an ideal of happy government were a mere illusion. 1 
 Their external success and happiness had been due to the wise counsels exclu- 
 sively of Burrus and Seneca, which Nero who was but seventeen when his 
 stepfather Claudius had been poisoned by his mother Agnppina was too 
 ignorant, too careless, and too bent on personal pleasure to dispute. Yet in 
 all that concerned the personal conduct of himself and of Agrippina, even 
 those five years had been thickly sown with atrocities and infamies, of which 
 the worst are too atrocious and too infamous to be told. His very first year 
 was marked not only by open ingratitude to his friends, but also by the 
 assassination of Junius Silanus, and the poisoning of the young sou of 
 Claudius Britannicus, a boy of fourteen, from whom he had usurped the 
 throne. The second year was marked by the cowardly folly of his disguised 
 nightly marauding among his peaceful subjects, after the fashion of the 
 Mohawks in the reign of Queen Anne. From these he had descended 
 through every abyss of vice and crime, to the murder of his mother, his public 
 displays in the theatre, 2 the flight from place to place in the restless terrors of 
 a haunted conscience, and finally to the most abandoned wickedness when he 
 found that even such crimes as his had failed to sicken the adulation or to 
 shake the allegiance of his people. He was further encouraged by this 
 discovery to throw off all shadow of control. Shortly after Paul's arrival 
 Burrus had died, not without suspicion of being poisoned by his imperial 
 master. Nero seized this opportunity to disgrace Seneca from his high 
 position. To fill up the vacancy created by the death of Burrus, he returned 
 to the old plan of appointing two Praetorian Praefects. These were Fenius 
 Hufns, a man of no personal weight, but popular from bis benevolent disposi- 
 
 1 Nero succeeded Claudius on October 13, A.D. 54. 
 
 2 At the Juvenalia, which he instituted on the occasion of first shaving his beard, 
 Gallic had to submit to the degradation of publicly announcing his appearance in the 
 theatre, and Burrus and Seneca had to act as prompters and tutors, with praises on 
 their lips and anguish in their hearts " (Dion. Ixi. 20, 19 ; Tac. Ann. xiv. 15).
 
 588 THE LIVE AKD WORK Of ST. PAUL, 
 
 tion, 1 and Sofonius Tigellinus, one of the worst characters of that bad age. 
 Tigellinus was dear to Nero from the exceptional cruelty and infamy of his 
 nature, and to him was practically entrusted the entire power. 2 The banish- 
 ment and subsequent murder of Nero's wife Octavia, the unhappy daughter 
 of Claudius, took place within a year of St. Paul's arrival at Borne. 
 
 Such are some of the events which must have been whispered to the 
 Apostle from time to time by the Praetorians who guarded him ; and if his 
 condition was rendered less tolerable by the promotion of such a wretch as 
 Tigellinus, he must also have felt that his hopes for the future had been ren- 
 dered more precarious by the downfall of Seneca, and the now unchecked 
 tyranny of the incestuous matricide before whose tribunal his appeal must 
 soon be tried. But if deep fears as to the result of that appeal alternated with 
 passing hopes, neither his natural fears nor his earthly hopes disturbed the 
 serenity of his soul. He quietly continued the discharge of every duty which 
 was still possible to him in his captivity, and for the rest he knew that his 
 times were in God's hands, and that, whether life awaited him or death, all 
 things were his, whether things present or things to come, and he was Christ's 
 and Christ was God's. Alike on the stage of stormy publicity and in the soli- 
 tude of his sad imprisonment, his life was hid with Christ in God. 
 
 CHAPTEB XLVI. 
 
 EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY. 
 
 " That man is very strong and powerful who has no more hopes for himself, who 
 looks not to be loved any more, to be admired any more, to have any more honour or 
 dignity, and who cares not for gratitude ; but whose sole thought is for others, and 
 who only lives on for them." HELPS. 
 
 THE history of St. Paul's first imprisonment, as well as the thoughts by which 
 he was then occupied, can only be derived from the "Epistles of the Cap- 
 tivity." The extant Epistles of St. Paul fall naturally into four connected 
 groups, " separated from each other alike by chronological intervals and by 
 internal characteristics." They are respectively the letters of the second mis- 
 sionary journey (1, 2 Thess.) ; those of the third missionary journey (1, 2 Cor., 
 Gal., Bom.) ; those of the first imprisonment (Phil., Col., Philem., Eph.) ; 
 and those of the second imprisonment (1, 2 Tim., Tit.). These groups may be 
 respectively characterised as the Eschatological Epistles (1, 2 Thess.) ; the 
 Epistles of the anti-Judaic controversy (1, 2 Cor., GaL, Bom.) ; the letters 
 against incipient Gnosticism (Col., Eph.) ; and the Pastoral Epistles (1, 2 Tim. 
 
 1 Tac. Ann. xrr, 51. 
 
 3 " Validior Tigellinus in animo Principis et intimis libidinibus assumptus " (Tac. I. &). 
 TtycXAti/ov &f TWO. Sw^oviov a<Tf\yei* TV cat imufoviti ira,vrvs rovt Ko? wvrbr aytfpwwwc vwfpaipo>r 
 (Dion. Ixii. 13).
 
 EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY. 589 
 
 Tit.). The Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon stand in most respects, 
 separate from the gronp to which they belong. 
 
 1. The two letters to the Thessalonians are the simplest of all in their 
 matter and manner, and deal mainly (as we have seen) with the question 
 of the shortly-expected return of Christ. They were written about A.D. 52. 
 
 2. The next great gronp of letters may be called in one of their aspects the 
 letters of Judaic controversy. This group comprises the two Epistles to the 
 Corinthians which show St. Paul's method of dealing with questions of doc- 
 trine and discipline in a restless, intellectual, and partly disaffected Church ; 
 and those to the Galatians and Romans. They were written during the years 
 A.D. 57 and A.D. 58, a period pre-eminently of storm and stress in the 
 Apostle's life, of physical suffering and mental anxiety, which leave deep 
 traces on his style. 
 
 Of these, the Epistles to the Corinthians are largely occupied with the 
 personal question of Paul's Apostolate. His Jewish- Christian opponents had 
 found it easier to impugn his position than to refute his ai-guments. It became 
 a duty and a necessity to prove his claim to be a teacher of co-ordinate 
 authority with the very chiefest of the Twelve. 
 
 The Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans contain the defence of his 
 main position as regards the Law; a definition of the relations between 
 Christianity and Judaism ; and the statement and demonstration of the Gospel 
 entrusted to him by special revelation. Of these, the latter is calmer, fuller, 
 and more conciliatory in tone, and serves as the best commentary on the 
 former. 
 
 The Epistle to the Philippians finds its main motive in an entirely different 
 order of conceptions. In it we only hear the dying echoes of the great con- 
 troversy, and if his one outburst of strong indignation against his opponents 
 (iii. 2, 18, 19) reminds us of the heat of the Epistle to the Galatians, on the 
 other hand he here suppresses the natural sense of deep personal injuries, and 
 even utters an expression of rejoicing that these very opponents, whatever 
 may be their motives, are still preachers of the Gospel of Christ (i. 14 20). 
 
 3. The next two Epistles, those to the Colossians and Ephesians, mark the 
 rise of a new phase of error. They are the controversy with incipient 
 Gnosticism. Hence also they are the chief Christological and Ecclesiastical 
 Epistles, the Epistles of Christian dogma, the Epistles of Catholicity. The 
 idea and constitution of the Church of Christ was the destined bulwark 
 against the prevalence of heresy, and the doctrine of Christ was the sole pro- 
 servative against the victory of error. The dominant thought of the Colos- 
 3ians is Christ over all; that of the Ephesians, the Universal Church in 
 Christ. 
 
 The Epistle to Philemon, a sort of appendix to the Colossians, stands alone 
 as a letter addressed solely to an individual friend, though it involves the 
 statement of an immortal principle. 
 
 4. In the last group stand the three Pastoral Epistles, containing, as we 
 should have expected, the proof that there had been a development of the
 
 590 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Gnostic tendency on the one hand, and of Church organisation on the other. 
 In the Second Epistle to Timothy we have the last words and thoughts of 
 St. Paul before his martyrdom. 1 
 
 May we go further, and attempt, in one or two words, a description of 
 each separate Epistle, necessarily imperfect from its very brevity, and yet, per- 
 haps, expressive of some one main characteristic p If so, we might perhaps 
 say that the First Epistle to the Thessalonians is the Epistle of consolation in 
 the hope of Christ's return ; and the second, of the immediate hindrances to 
 that return, and our duties with regard to it. The First Epistle to the Corin- 
 thians is the solution of practical problems in the light of eternal principles ; 
 the Sec< .nd, an impassioned defence of the Apostle's impugned authority, his 
 Apologia pro vita sud. The Epistle to the Galatians is the Epistle of freedom 
 from the bondage of the Law ; that to the Romans, of justification by faith. 
 The Epistle to the Philippians is the Epistle of Christian gratitude and 
 Christian joy in sorrow ; that to the Colossians, the Epistle of Christ the uni- 
 versal Lord ; that to the Ephesians, so rich and many-sided, is the Epistle of 
 "the hoavenlies," the Epistle of grace, the Epistle of ascension with the 
 ascended Christ, the Epistle of Christ in His One and Universal Church j 
 that to Philemon, the Hagna Charta of emancipation. The First Epistle to 
 Timothy, and that to Titus, are the manuals of the Christian pastor ; the 
 Second Epistle to Timothy is the last message of a Christian ere his death. 2 
 
 He must doubtless have written others besides these, but intense as would 
 have been for us the theologic and psychologic interest of even the most 
 trivial of his writings, we may assume, with absolute certainty, that those 
 which we still possess have been preserved in accordance with God's special 
 providence, and were by far the most precious and important of all that he 
 wrote. 
 
 That the four letters which we shall now examine were written at Rome, 
 and not, as some critics have imagined, at Csesarea, may be regarded as abso- 
 lutely certain. Although Rome is not mentioned in any of them, yet the 
 facts to which they advert, and the allusions in which they abound, are such 
 as exactly suit the ancient and unanimous tradition that they were penned 
 during the Roman imprisonment, 8 while they agree far less with the novel and 
 
 1 Other classifications have been attempted e.y., thai of Baur, who divides them 
 Into ofno\oyoviJLeva (four), avrtAeyo/iei'a (si.c), and v&9a (three). 
 
 Similarly, M. Kenan classes the Epistles as follows : 1. Incontestable Gal., 1, 2 Cor., 
 Rom. 2. Authentic, though disputed 1, 2 Thess., Phil. 3. Probably authentic, though 
 open to serious objection Col. and Philem, 4. Doubtful Eph. 5. Spurious The 
 Pastoral Epistles. (St. Paul, v.) 
 
 Lange classes the Epistles as 1. Eschatological (1, 2Thess.). 2. Soteriological (Gal., 
 Rom). 3. Ecclesiastical (1 Cor., polemically ; 2 Cor., apologetically). 4. Christological 
 (Col., Eph.). 5. Ethical (Philipp.). 6. Pastoral (Philem., 1, 2 Tim., Tit.). (Introd. to 
 Romans.) 
 
 Olshausen's classification of them under the heads of 1. Dogmatic ; 2. Practical 
 8. Friendly is unsuccessful. 
 
 2 See Excursus y^TT,, " Distinctive Words, Keynotes, and Characteristics of the 
 Epistles." 
 
 * Ohrys. Pram ad Epist. ad Ephct. ; Jerome, ad Eph. ill. 1, IT, 1, yi. 20 ; Theodoret,
 
 KPISTLE8 OP THE CAPTIVITY. 591 
 
 fantastic hypothesis that they were sent from Caesarea. 1 If any confirmation 
 for this certain tradition were required, it would be found, as far as the 
 Epistle to the Philippians is concerned, in the salutation which St. Paul sends 
 from the converts in " Caesar's household." As regards the other three 
 Epistles it is sufficient to say that internal evidence conclusively proves that 
 all three were written at the same time, as they were despatched by the same 
 messengers, and that whereas during his Caesarean imprisonment St. Paul was 
 looking forward to visit Rome, 2 he is, at the time of writing these letters, 
 looking forward to visit, first Macedonia, then Colossae. 8 Further than this, 
 the allusions in these Epistles show that, prisoner though he was, he was 
 inabled to exercise a powerful influence for the spread of the Gospel in a city 
 of the highest importance. 4 Meyer, indeed with that hypercritical ingenuity 
 which, like vaulting ambition, so constantly overleaps itself and falls on the 
 other side argues that Onesimus is more likely to have fled from Colossae to 
 Caesarea than to Rome ; an argument of which we can only say that Caesarea 
 a mere Procuratorial residence full of Jews would be about the very last 
 town which any one would naturally have dreamt of suggesting as a likely 
 hiding-place for a runaway Asiatic slave. Meyer might as reasonably argue 
 that a London pickpocket would be more likely to hide himself at Biarritz than 
 at New York. His other arguments derived from the non-mention of the 
 name of Onesimus in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the incidental expres- 
 sion " you also" in that letter, are too trivial for serious discussion. 
 
 The question next arises, in what order these Epistles were written ; and 
 the primd fade argument that the Epistle to the Philippians seems to have 
 been written before the approaching crisis of his trial has been taken as a 
 sufficient proof that it was written after the other three. On the other hand, 
 there is the same expectation of approaching release in the Epistle to Phile- 
 mon, so that on this circumstance no conclusion can be built. The notion 
 that this Epistle shows traces of deeper depression than the others, and that 
 this may be accounted for by the change wrought in his affairs through the 
 influence of Tigellinus and Poppaea, is partly unsupported by fact, since a 
 spiiit of holy joy is the very key-note of the Epistle ; and partly inconsistent 
 with itself, since, if the hostile influences were at work at all appreciably, they 
 were quite as much so within a few months after Paul's Roman imprisonment 
 began, as they were at its close, 6 It is true that the letter could not have been 
 
 Procem ad Epist. ad Eph., &c. If I do not mention Oeder's theory (?) that the Epistle to 
 the Philippians was written from Corinth (see Schenkel, Der Brief an die Philippier, 
 p. 110), it ia because " it is not worth while," as Baur says, " to discuss vague hypotheses 
 which have no support in history, and no coherence in themselves." 
 
 1 I can only express my surprise that this theory should have commended itself not 
 only to Schula and Schneckenburger, but even to Holtzmann, Keuss, Schenkel, and 
 Meyer. 
 
 2 Acts xix, 21 ; xsaii 11. Phil. iL 24 ; Philem. 22, 
 Eph. vi. 19, 20 ; Col. iv. 3, 4. 
 
 8 The death of Burrus and the appointment of Tigellinus took place very early In 
 A.D. 62, some nine months after St. Paul's arrival. Nero's marriage with Fopprea took 
 place about the time, and indeed bears very little on the matter, since her influence aa 
 Nero's mistress was probably even greater than that which she enjoyed as hia wife,
 
 692 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 written during the earliest months of the captivity at Rome, because time 
 must be allowed for the news of Paul's arrival there to have reached the 
 Philippians ; for the despatch of Epaphroditus with their contributions ; for 
 his illness at Rome ; for the arrival of intelligence] to that effect at Philippi ; 
 and for the return of their expressions of sorrow and sympathy. 1 Now a 
 journey from Rome to Philippi a distance of seven hundred miles would, 
 under ordinary circumstances, occupy about a month, and as we do not sup- 
 pose that any of those letters were written during the first year of the 
 imprisonment, ample time is allowed for these journeys, and no objection 
 whatever to the traditional priority of the Epistle to the Philippians can be 
 raised on this score. 
 
 Still less can any argument be urged from the absence of greetings from 
 Luke and Aristarchus, or from the allusion to Timothy as the sole exception to 
 the general selfishness which the Apostle was grieved to mark in those around 
 him. The presence of particular names in the greetings of any letter may 
 furnish a probable or even positive argument as to its date, but their absence 
 is an indication of the most uncertain character. It needs no more than the 
 commonest everyday experience to prove the utter fallaciousness of the 
 " argument from silence ; " and we know far too little of the incessant missions 
 and movements, from church to church, and continent to continent, of the 
 companions of St. Paul, to be able in any way to build upon the non-occurrence 
 of the name of any one of them. Since, therefore, there are no adequate 
 arguments against regarding the Epistle to the Philippians as the earliest of 
 the four Epistles of the Captivity although it may have been written only a 
 few months before the other three full weight may be given to the internal 
 evidence, which is in favour of that supposition. That internal evidence con- 
 sists in the general resemblance of this Epistle to those of the earlier group 
 especially to the Epistle to the Romans which enables us to regard it as an 
 intermediate link between the Epistles of the Captivity and those of the third 
 Apostolic journey. 2 To the Epistle to the Romans it presents many and 
 close parallels in thought and language, while its general tone and spirit, its 
 
 1 Dr. Lightfoot (Philipp. p. 34) thinks that Aristarchus may have left St. Paul at 
 Myra, and may have conveyed to Philippi the news of St. Paul's journey to Rome, as he 
 was on his way home to Thessalonica ; but I can see no sufficient reason for believing that 
 Aristarchus, who was in some sense St. Paul's "fellow-prisoner" at Rome (Col. iv. 10), 
 went home from Adramyttium (Acts xxvii. 2). In any case he could only have taken the 
 news that St. Paul was on his way to Rome, not that he had arrived. 
 
 3 Lightfoot, Philippians, pp. 40 45, e.g. 
 
 PHILIPPIANS. ROMANS. 
 
 i. 3, 4, 7, 8 ... i. 811 
 
 L10 ii. 18 
 
 ii. 8, 9, 10, 11 ... adv. 9, 11 
 
 ii. 4 ... xii. 10 
 
 PHILIPPIANS. ROMANS. 
 
 iii. 4, 5 . ... xi. 1 
 
 iii. 9 x. 3 
 
 iii. 21 viii. 29 
 
 iii. 19 xvi. 18. 
 
 2 Tim. iv. 6, x-atpbs Ti)S ft^ a>/aAv<ri> c^eaTTj/cec. Phil. ii. 17, i Kal <rjrV8o;a<u, 2 Tim. iv. 6, 
 ryi> yap rjSi} (TjreVSo/xoi. Phil. iii. 14, Kara. ffKOirbv Siakw ni TO /3pa/3cioi/, 2 Tim. iv. 7 8, T&r 
 Sp6fi,ov Tere'AeKn, aTroKcirai ftoi 6 TJV 8tK
 
 EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY. 593 
 
 comparative calmness, the spiritual joy which breathes through its holy resig- 
 nation, the absence of impassioned appeal and impetuous reasoning, mark its 
 affinity to the three by which it was immediately followed. Although not 
 much more than four years had now elapsed since Paul, a free man and an 
 active Apostle, elaborated at Corinth the great argument which he had 
 addressed to the Gentiles and proselytes, who formed the bulk of the Church 
 of Rome, his controversy with Judaism had to some extent faded into the 
 background. Every Church that he had founded was now fully aware of 
 his sentiments on the questions which were agitated between the advocates 
 of Judaic rigour and Gospel freedom. In writing to the Philippians there 
 was no need to dwell on these debates, for whatever dangers might yet 
 await them dangers sufficiently real to call forth one energetic outburst, 
 which reminds us of his earlier tone they had up to this time proved 
 themselves faithful to his teaching, and were as yet unsophisticated by any 
 tampering interference of emissaries from Jerusalem. The Judaisers of the 
 party of James may have heard enough of the devotion of the Philippians for 
 St. Paul to show them that it would be unadvisable to dog his footsteps 
 through the Christian Churches of Macedonia. They might leave their view 
 of the question with better policy in the hands of those unconverted Jews, 
 who would never hesitate to use on its behalf the engines of persecution. 
 Thus St. Paul had no need to enter on the debate which had so recently 
 occupied the maturity of his powers ; and in the Epistle to the Philippians 
 we have only " the spent waves of this controversy." Nevertheless, as we 
 have seen, his was a mind whose sensitive chords continued to quiver long 
 after they had been struck by the plectrum of any particular emotion. He 
 was reminded of past controversies by the coldness and neglect of a commu- 
 nity in which some " preached Christ even of contention, supposing to add 
 affliction to his bonds." If, then, he dwelt on doctrinal considerations at all 
 in a letter of affectionate greetings to the community which was dearest to 
 his heart, they would naturally be those on which he had last most deeply 
 thought. By the time that he sat down to dictate the Epistle to the Colos- 
 sians a fresh set of experiences had befallen him. His religious musings had 
 been turned in an entirely different direction. The visit of Epaphras of 
 ColossEe had made him aware of new errors, entirely different from those 
 which he had already combated, and the Churches of Proconsular Asia evi- 
 dently needed that his teaching should be directed to questions which lay far 
 apart from the controversies of the last eight years. On the other hand, I 
 regard it as psychologically certain that, had the Epistle to the Philippians 
 been written, as so many critics believe, after those to the " Ephesians " and 
 Colossians, it could not possibly have failed to bear upon its surface some 
 traces of the controversy with that hybrid philosophy that Judaic form of 
 incipient Gnosticism in which he had been so recently engaged. These con- 
 siderations seem to me to have decided the true order of the Epistles of the 
 Captivity, and to give its only importance to a question on which little would 
 otherwise depend. 
 20*
 
 594 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 The Epistle to the Philippians l arose directly out of one of the few happy 
 incidents which diversified the dreary uncertainties of St. Paul's captivity. 
 This was the visit of Epaphroditus, a leading presbyter of the Church of 
 Philippi, with the fourth pecuniary contribution by which that loving and 
 generous Church had ministered to his necessities. At Rome, St. Paul was 
 unable with his fettered hands to work for his livelihood, and it is possible 
 that he found no opening for his special trade. One would have thought that 
 the members of the Roman Church were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently 
 wealthy to render it an easy matter for them to supply his necessities ; but the 
 unaccountable indifference which seems to have marked their relations to 
 him, and of which he complains both in this and in his later imprisonment, 
 shows that much could not be hoped from their affection, and strangely belied 
 the zealous respect with which they had come thirty or forty miles to meet 
 and greet him. It is, of course, possible that they may have been willing to 
 help him, but that he declined an assistance respecting which he was 
 sensitively careful. But the Phillippians knew and valued the privilege which 
 had been accorded to them and perhaps to them only by their father in 
 Christ the privilege of helping him in his necessities. It was a custom 
 throughout the Empire to alleviate by friendly presents the hard lot of 
 prisoners, 2 and we may be sure that when once the Philippians had heard of 
 his condition, friends like Lydia, and other converts who had means to spare, 
 would seize the earliest opportunity to add to his comforts. Epaphroditus 
 arrived about autumn, and flinging himself heartily into the service of the 
 Gospel which in a city like Rome must have required the fullest energies oi 
 every labourer had succumbed to the unhealthiness of the season, and been 
 prostrated by a dangerous and all but fatal sickness. The news of this illness 
 had reached Philippi, and caused great solicitude to the Church. 3 Whatever 
 gifts of healing were entrusted to the Apostles, they do not seem to have 
 considered themselves at liberty to exercise them in their own immediate 
 circle, or for any ends of personal happiness. No miracle was wrought, 
 except one of those daily miracles which are granted to fervent prayer. 4 Paul 
 had many trials to bear, and the death of "his brother, Epaphroditus," as he 
 tenderly calls him, would have plunged him in yet deeper sadness. "We can- 
 
 1 The notion that the Epistle is really two and not one seems to have originated in 
 Phil. iii. 1, and in a mistaken supposition that Polycarp, in his letter to the Philippians, 
 mentions more than one letter of St. Paul to them (5r ical auriw vii.lv iypatyev r7ro\as, ad 
 Philipp. c. 3). That 'EirrroXa, however, may only differ from e7rrro\r) in being a more 
 important term, is conclusively proved by Thuc. viii. 51 ; Jos. Antt. xii. 4, 10. That 
 St. Paul wrote other letters to the Philippians during the ten years which had elapsed 
 since he visited them, and that he may have written other letters after this, is not only 
 possible, but probable ; but if any such letters had survived till the time of Polycarp, it 
 is wholly improbable that they should not have been subsequently preserved. 
 
 2 Thus, the friends of Agrippa had helped him by providing him with better fare and 
 accommodation when he was imprisoned by Tiberius ; and Lucian relates the warmth 
 and open-handedness with which the Christians diminished the hardships, and even 
 shared night after night the confinement of Peregrinus. 
 
 3 Phil. ii. 26. 
 
 * Compare what Luther said of Melancthon's sickness and recover;.
 
 PISTLK8 OF THE CAPTIVITT. 595 
 
 not doubt that he pleaded with God for the life of his sick friend, and God 
 had mercy on him. Epaphroditus recovered; and deeply as Paul in his 
 loneliness and discouragement would have rejoiced to keep him by his side, 
 he yielded with his usual unselfishness to the yearning of Epaphroditus for 
 his home, and of the Christians of Philippi for their absent pastor. He there- 
 fore sent him back, and with him the letter, in which he expressed his thank- 
 fulness for that constant affection which had so greatly cheered his heart. 
 
 And thus it is that the Epistle to the Philippians is one of the least 
 systematic, the least special in character, of all St. Paul's writings. But it i? 
 this which raises the genuineness of the letter, not indeed beyond cavil, but 
 far beyond all reasonable dispute. The Tubingen school, in its earlier stages, 
 attacked it with the monotonous arguments of its credulous scepticism. 
 With those critics, if an Epistle touches on points which make it accord with 
 the narrative of the Acts, it was forged to suit them ; if it seems to disagree 
 with them, the discrepancy shows that it is spurious. If the diction is 
 Pauline, it stands forth as a proved imitation ; if it is un-Pauline, it could not 
 have proceeded from the Apostle. The notion that it was forged to introduce 
 the name of Clement because he was confused with Flavius Clemens, and 
 because Clement was a fellow-worker of St. Peter, and it would look well to 
 place him in connexion with Paul and the notion that in Phil. ii. 6 8 the 
 words form and shape express Gnostic conceptions, and that the verses refer 
 to the Valentinian JEon Sophia, who aimed at an equality with God are 
 partly founded on total misinterpretations of the text, and are partly the 
 perversity of a criticism which has strained its eyesight to such an extent as 
 to become utterly purblind. 1 This Epistle is genuine beyond the faintest 
 shadow or suspicion of doubt. The Philippian Church was eminently free 
 from errors of doctrine and irregularities of practice. No schism seems to 
 have divided it ; no heresies had crept into its faith ; no false teachers had 
 perverted its allegiance. One fault, and one alone, seems to have needed 
 correction, and this was of so personal and limited a character that, instead 
 of denouncing it, Paul only needs to hint at it gently and with affectionate 
 entreaty. This was a want of unity between some of its female members, 
 especially Euodia and Syntyche, whom Paul begs to become reconciled to each 
 other, and whose feud, and any partisanship which it may have entailed, he 
 tacitly and considerately rebukes by the constant iteration of the word " all " 
 to those whom he can only regard as one united body. In fact, we may say 
 that disunion and despondency were the main dangers to which they were 
 exposed ; hence " all " and " rejoice " are the two leading words and thoughts. 
 But this absence of any special object makes the letter less doctrinally dis- 
 tinctive than those which are more controversial in character. It would, 
 indeed, be colourless if it did not receive a colouring from the rich hues of the 
 writer's individuality. It is not, like the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, a 
 
 1 Baur, Paul. ii. 50, seqq. Schwegler, Nachapostal. Zeital. ii. 133, seqq. The three 
 arguments are : (1) Gnostic conceptions in ii. 69 ; (2) want of anything distinctively 
 Pauline ; (3) the questienableness of some of the historic data.
 
 596 THE LIFE AND WOliK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 consolation to the afflicted, by reminding them of the near advent of their 
 Lord ; 1 or a series of replies to questions, like the greater part of the First 
 Epistle to the Corinthians ; nor a trumpet note of defiance to powerful and 
 aggressive opponents, like the Epistle to the Galatians ; nor a treatise of 
 theology, like the Epistle to the Romans : but it is the warm, spontaneous out- 
 pouring of a loving heart expressing itself with unreserved gratitude and 
 tenderness towards the favourite children of his ministry. If it exhibits to us 
 somewhat less than other Epistles of St. Paul's peculiar teaching, it has this 
 high source of interest that it shows to us more of his character and feelings. 
 In this respect it somewhat resembles the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 
 except that in it St. Paul is writing to those who were kindest and most 
 faithful to him, whereas towards the Corinthians he had little cause for 
 gratitude, and much need of forbearance. Amid the trials and suspense of a 
 galling imprisonment it reveals to us, not directly, but as it were unconsciously, 
 the existence of an unquenchable happiness a peace as of the inmost heart of 
 the ocean under the agitation of its surface storms. It was dictated by a 
 worn and fettered Jew, the victim of gross perjury, and the prey of contend- 
 ing enmities ; dictated at a time when he was vexed by hundreds of opponents, 
 and consoled but by few who cared for him ; and yet the substance of it all 
 may be summed up in two words x a ^P>> x<'p T (" I rejoice ; rejoice ye "). 
 If any one compare the spirit of the best-known classic writers in their 
 adversity with that which was habitual to the far deeper wrongs and far 
 deadlier sufferings of St. Paul if he will compare the Epistle to the 
 Philippians with the " Tristia " of Ovid, the letters of Cicero from exile, or 
 the treatise which Seneca dedicated to Polybius from his banishment in 
 Corsica he may see, if he will, the difference which Christianity has made in 
 the happiness of man. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVn. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. 
 * Summa Epistolae gaudeo, gaudete." BENGEL. 
 
 THE greeting is from " Paul and Timothens, slaves of Jesus Christ, to all the 
 saints who are in Christ Jesus in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons." 
 Timothy is naturally associated with him as_one who had laboured at Philippi, 
 but so little is he supposed to have any share in the authorship that St. Paul 
 afterwards proceeds to speak of him in (he third person, The " bishops " 
 (i.e., the presbyters) and deacons are specially greeted, perhaps because they 
 had taken an active part in the collection of the contribution. He does not 
 
 1 The topic of " persecution " is prominent only in the Epistles to the Macedonian 
 Churches. It had led the Philippians to despondency ; the Thessalonians to a mistaken 
 form of hope.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. 597 
 
 call himself an apostle, because to them no assertion of his authority was in 
 any way needful. 1 
 
 The thanksgiving which follows is unusually full. He tells them that he 
 tliauks God in all his remembrance of them, always, in all his supplication on 
 behalf of them all, making his supplication with joy for their united work in 
 furtherance of the Gospel from the first day when ho had visited them ten 
 years ago until now ; and he is very sure that God, who began in them that 
 sacred work of co-operation in a good cause, will carry it on to perfection until 
 the day of Christ; 2 a conviction arising from his heartfelt sense that they 
 were ALL of them partakers of the grace which God had granted to him, and 
 which they had manifested by their sympathetic aid in his bondage, and in 
 the defence and establishment of the Gospel. God knows how much he yearns 
 for them in Christ ; and his prayer for them is that their love may abound 
 more and more in full knowledge of the truth, and all insight into its applica- 
 tion, so that they may discriminate all that is best and highest, 3 and be pure 
 towards God, and blameless towards men, for the day of Christ, having been 
 filled with the fruit of a righteousness attainable not by their own works, but 
 by Jesus Christ, for the glory and praise of God. 4 
 
 They must not suppose, he tells them, that he is the Apostle of a ruined 
 cause, or that his imprisonment is a sign that God's frown is on his work, and 
 that it is coming to nought ; on the contrary, he wants them to recognise that 
 his misfortunes have been overruled by God to the direct furtherance of the 
 Gospel. The necessity of his being coupled to guardsman after guardsman, 
 day after day and night after night, had resulted in the notoriety of his con- 
 dition as a prisoner for Christ among all the Praetorian cohorts, 6 and to every- 
 body else ; and the majority of tho brethren had been stimulated by his bonds to 
 a divine confidence, which had shown itself in a yet more courageous daring than 
 before in preaching the word of God. Some of them preach Christ out of 
 genuine good will, but some, alas ! tell tho story of Christ insincerely 8 out of 
 
 1 Phil. i. 1, 2. This Epistle may be thus summarised : i. 1, 2, Greeting ; i. 3 11 , 
 Thanksgiving and prayer ; 12 26, Personal details ; i. 27 ii. 16, Exhortation to unity 
 by the example of Christ ; ii. 17 30, Personal details ; iii. 1, 2, Last injunction suddenly 
 broken off by a digression in which he denounces Judaism and Antinomianism ; 
 iii. 3 iv. 1, Exhortation to unity ; iv. 2, 3, and to Christian joy ; 4 9, Gratitude for 
 their aid ; iv. 1020, Final greetings and benediction ; 21 23, The unity of the Epistle 
 (in spite of Heinrichs, "Weisse, &c.) is generally admitted. 
 
 2 " It is not God's way to do things by halves " (Neander). 
 
 8 Ver. 10, 5oKifiaiv TO 8ia4>e'poiTa, cf. Rom. ii. 18. " Non modo prae malis bona, sed 
 ex bonis optima " (Bengel). " Ut probetis potiora " (Vulg.). 
 * i. 311. 
 
 5 Ver. 13, iv o\a r<a TrpaiT<opia The word, though used of royal residences in the 
 provinces (Mark xv. l'6 ; Acts xxiii. 35), was purposely avoided at Rome, where the 
 ostentation of a military despotism was carefully kept out of sight (Merivale, vi. 268, n.). 
 The use of Prcetorium (properly " General's tent ") for the house of the Emperor on the 
 Palatine would have been an insult to the Romans. The contrast with TOW Aoitrotf iratriv 
 shows fh&t persons are meant (laghtfoot, pp. 9799 ; Schleusner, s.v.). 
 
 6 i. 15, KTjpvWovffiv : 16, jcarayy&Aovo-ti'. It is doubtful whether the change of word 
 implies as much as Dean Blakesley seems to think (Diet, of Bible, s.v. Philippi). 
 'Epiflet'o: 1, "Working for hire; 2, Canvassing of hired partisans; 3, "Factiousness" 
 Arist. Polit. v. 3).
 
 598 tfHE LIFE AND WOftK OF S. PAtTt. 
 
 mere envy and discord. The former are influenced by love to him, knowing 
 that he is appointed for the defence of the Gospel ; the latter announce Christ 
 out of partisanship with base motives, thinking to make his bonds more 
 galling. 1 Perhaps the day had been when Paul might have denounced them 
 in tones of burning rebuke ; but he is already Paul the prisoner, though not 
 yet Paul the aged. He had learnt, he was learning more and more, that the 
 wrath of man, even in a holy cause, worketh not the righteousness of God ; he 
 had risen, and was rising more and more, above every personal consideration. 
 What mattered it whether these preachers meant only to insult him, and 
 render his bondage yet more galling p After all, " in every way, whether with 
 mashed design or in sincerity, Christ is being preached, and therein I do 
 aye, and " whatever angry feelings may try to rise within my heart " I will 
 rejoice."* 
 
 It is thus that the Apostle first tramples on the snake of any mere personal 
 annoyance that may strive to hiss in his sad heart, and crushes it yet more 
 vigorously with a determined effort if its hiss still tries to make itself heard. 
 He has attained by this time to a holy resignation. 
 
 " For I know that this trouble will turn to salvation by means of your prayer, 
 and the rich out-pouring 3 of the spirit of Jesus Christ, in accordance with my 
 earnest desire 4 and hope that with all outspokenness, as always, so now " he was 
 going to say, " I may magnify Christ," but with his usual sensitive shrinking from 
 any exaltation of himself, he substitutes the third person, 5 and says, " So now 
 Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to 
 live is Christ, and to die is gain. 6 But if life in the flesh means that I shall reap 
 the fruit of labour . . . well, what to choose I cannot tell; but I am hard 
 pressed by the alternatives. I desire to break up my earthly camp, 7 and be with 
 Christ, for it is very far, far better ; 8 but to abide by this earthly life is more 
 necessary for your sakes. And I am confidently persuaded of this, that I shall bide 
 and abide 9 with you all, for the advance and joy of your faith, that by a second 
 stay of mine among you, you may have in me some further subject for^'your Christian 
 glorying." > 
 
 Only in any case he bids them play worthily the part, not only of Roman, 
 but of Christian citizens, 11 that, whether he camo and saw their state, or only 
 heard of it at a distance, he might know that they stood firm in one spirit, with 
 one heart, fellow- wrestlers with the Faith in the Gospel, and not scared in 
 anything by their adversaries conduct which would be to those adversaries a 
 proof of their ultimate perdition, and to themselves of salvation ; an evidence 
 
 i Leg. y*rpK (N, A, B, D, F, G). 
 
 8 i. 1218. Perhaps the \o$wv-<" Implies, " I shall in the long-run have good cause 
 to rejoice ; for," &c. 
 
 Ver. 19, ^xoprryc'* ; GaL iii. 5; 2 Cor. ix. 10 ; Eph. Iv. 16 ; 2 Pet. i. 5. 
 
 4 Ver. 20, iiroKapaSoicia.? ', Rom. viii. 19 ; iirvrtra^ivn irpocrJoKio, Chrys. (See Jos. B. J, 
 Iii. 7, 26, and Sclileusner, t.v.) 
 
 * Lightfoot, Phil. i. 20. 
 
 6 " Quicquid vivo, Christum vivo . . . In Paulo non Paulus vivit, sed Jesus Christus " 
 (Bengel). 
 
 7 2 Cor. v. 1 ; iv. 6 8. On the intermediate state of the dead, see 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52. 
 
 8 Ver. 23, iroAAip /u.aM.ov updvaov. ' juecu xol tropofiecoi (Lightfoot, Phil. i. 25). 
 10 i. 1926. icauxiifia, " a ground of boasting." " Ver. 27. woAmvcirfc.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILlPPIANB. 599 
 
 from God Himself, since, thus, they were privileged not only to believe in 
 Christ, but to suffer for Him, as sharers in a contest like that in which they 
 aaw Paul engaged when he was among them, and in which they knew by 
 rumour that he was at that moment engaged. 1 
 
 And this brings him to one main object of his letter, which was to urge on 
 them this earnest entreaty : 
 
 " If, then, there be any appeal to you in Christ, if any persuasiveness in love, if 
 ; my participation in the Spirit, if any one be heart and compassionateness, 2 complete 
 my joy by thinking tbe same thing, having the same love, heart-united, thinking 
 one thing. Nothing for partisanship, nor for empty personal vanity ; but in lowli- 
 ness of mind, 3 each of you thinking others his own superiors, not severally keeping 
 your eye on your own interests, but, also severally, on the interests of others. 4 
 
 " Be of tbe same mind in yourselves as Christ Jesus was in Himself, who exist- 
 ing in tbe form ((/uop<f>y) of God, deemed not equality with God a thing for eager 
 seizure, 5 but emptied Himself, taking tbe form of a slave, revealing Himself in 
 human semblance, and being found in shape (o-x^art) as a man,6 humbled Himself, 
 showing Himself obedient even to death, aye, and that death tbe death of tbe 
 Cross." 
 
 Those words were the very climax ; in striving to urge on the Philippians 
 the example of humility and unselfishness as the only possible bases of unity, 
 he sets before them the Divine lowliness which had descended step by step 
 into the very abyss of degradation. He tells them of Christ's eternal posses- 
 sion of the attributes of God; His self-abnegation of any claim to that 
 equality; His voluntary exinanition of His glory; His assumption of the 
 essential attributes of a slave ; His becoming a man in all external semblance ; 
 His display of obedience to His Father, even to death, and not only death, but 
 which might well thrill the heart of those who possessed the right of 
 Roman citizenship, and were therefore exempt from the possibility of so 
 frightful a degradation death by crucifixion. Such were the elements of 
 
 i i. 27-30. 
 
 * ii. 1, fl rtt inrXayxva icoi oucnpfioi. This reading of , A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, has 
 usually been treated as a mere barbarism. So it is grammatically ; but the greatest 
 writers, and those who most deeply stir the heart, constantly make grammar give way 
 to tbe rhetoric of emotion ; and if St. Paul in bis eager rush of words really aaid it, tbe 
 amanuensis did quite right to take it down. Possibly, too, the word tm-Aayxva had come 
 to be used colloquially like a collective singular (cf. spoglia, depouille, Bible, &c.). How 
 entirely it bad lost its first sense we may see from the daring ci/Sva-aotfe . . <nrAayx'a of 
 Col. Hi. 12. 
 
 3 A word redeemed from tbe catalogue of vices (Col. ii. 18 ; Plato, Legg. iv., p. 774 ; 
 Epict. i. 3) into that of virtues. 
 
 4 ii. 1^4, leg. oxon-ov? (M, A, B, F, G). 
 
 6 This interpretation of the Greek Fathers is preferable to that of most of tbe Latin 
 Fathers, followed by our E.V. It makes apna.yij.pv jjyei<r0a<. identical in meaning with tbe 
 common phrase apn-ay/na >jy. = "to clutcb at greedily." Besides, this sense is demanded 
 by the whole context (/tjj TO. eavTuv tnconelv). This is the passage which is supposed to be 
 borrowed from the conception of the Valentinian JEon Sophia, who showed an eccentric 
 
 and passionate desire, n-pooAAeerflat, " to dart forward ; " KeKoivuvijcrdat TU> n-o/rpl rif reAeiw, 
 
 "to be associated with the Perfect Father;" iuna\apfiv rb fteyeOos avroC, to grasp His 
 greatness ! (Iren. Adv. Haer. i. 2, 2). 
 
 6 Baur sees Docetism here, as he saw Valentinianism in ver. 6 (Paul. ii. 15 21) ; 
 itop^j), abiding substantial form (Rom. viii. 29 ; Gal. iv. 19) ; ffxwo, outward transitory 
 fashion (iii. 21 ; Bom. xii. 2 ; 1 Cor. vii 31).
 
 600 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. 
 
 Christ's self-abasement ! Yet that self-humiliation had purchased its owe. 
 infinite reward, for 
 
 " Because of it God also highly exalted Him, and freely granted Him the name 
 above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend of heavenly 
 and earthly and subterranean beings, and every tongue gratefully confess 1 that 
 Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father." 2 
 
 Could they have a stronger incentive P In his absence, as in his presence, 
 he exhorts them to maintain their obedience, and work out their own salvation 
 with fear and trembling, since the will and the power to do so came alike 
 from God. 3 Let them lay aside the murmur-ings and dissensions which were 
 the main hindrance to their proving themselves blameless and sincere 
 children of God, uncensured in the midst of a crooked and distorted genera, 
 tion, among whom they appeared as stars, 4 holding forth the word of life, so 
 as to secure to him for the day of Christ a subject of boast that he neither 
 ran his race nor trained for his contest to no purpose. 
 
 " Nay, even if I am poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and free offering 
 of your faith,* I rejoice and congratulate you all ; and likewise rejoice ye too, and 
 congratulate me." 6 
 
 Perhaps, then, he might never come to them himself. 
 
 " But I hope in the Lord Jesus speedily to send Timothy to you, that he in turn 
 may be cheered by a knowledge of your fortunes. For I have no emissary like him 
 no one who will care for your affairs with so genuine an earnestness. For," he 
 sadly adds, " one and all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. But 
 ye remember how he stood the test, since as a son for a father he slaved with me for 
 the Gospel. Him then, at any rate, I hope to send as soon as I get a glimpse of 
 how it will go with me at once. But I feel sure in the Lord that I myself too 
 shall quickly come. I think it necessary, however, to send you Epaphroditus, my 
 brother, and fellow-labourer, and fellow-soldier, 8 the messenger whom you sent to 
 minister to my need, since he was ever yearning for you, and feeling despondent 
 because you heard of his illness. Yes, he was indeed ill almost to death ; but God 
 pitied him, and not him only, but also me, that I may not have grief upon grief. 
 With all the more eagerness, then, I send him, that you may once more rejoice on 
 seeing him, and I may be less full of grief. Welcome him, then, in the Lord with 
 all joy, and hold such as him in honour, because for the sake of the work he came 
 
 1 o,aoXov7)<n7T<u. Of. Matt. xi. 25 ; Luke x. 21. 3 ii. 911. 
 
 s Vers. 12, 13, KaTepyae<r9e ... 6 ebs yap . . . Here we see the correlation of Divine 
 grace and human effort. Cf. 1 Cor. ix. 24, rpe'x*", Iva. /caToAajSrjT*. Bom. ix. 16, ov&s C 
 rpe'xoiros, aAAa TOV eXeoviros eov. 
 
 4 ?>w(rri}pes. Gen. i. 14; Rev. xxi. 11. Bp. Wordsworth makes it mean "torches in 
 the dark, narrow streets." 
 
 5 Cf . 2 Tim. iv. 6. Compare the striking parallel in the death of Seneca, Tac. Arm. 
 xv. 64. Some make eirl, not "over," but "in addition to," because Jewish libations were 
 poured, not "on," but "round" the altar. (Jos. Antt, iii. 9, 4.) But the allusion may 
 be to Gentile customs. 
 
 6 ii. 14 18. "We are reminded of the messenger who brought the tidings of the 
 battle of Marathon expiring on the first threshold with these words on his lips : \aip- 
 ecu xa/po/iev (Plut. Mor., p. 347)." (Lightfoot, ad loc.) 
 
 2 Tim. ii. 3 j philem. 2,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. 60] 
 
 aear to death, playing the gambler with his life, 1 in order to fill np the necessary 
 lack of your personal ministration towards me. 2 
 
 " For the rest, my brethren, farewell, and indeed fare ye well in the Lord. 1 To 
 write the same things to you is not irksome to me, and for you it is safe." 4 
 
 Then came a sudden break. 5 It seoms clear that the Apostle had intended 
 at this point to close the letter, and to close it with a repetition of the oft- 
 repeated exhortation for which he half apologises to greater peace and 
 unity among themselves. 6 It is quite possible that these last words might 
 have run on, as they do in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, to a 
 considerable length ; T but here something occurred to break the sequence of 
 the Apostle's thoughts. When he returned to his dictation he began a 
 digression far more severe and agitated in its tone than the rest of his letter, 
 and he does not resume the broken thread of his previous topic till the second 
 verse of the fourth chapter, where, instead of any general exhortation, he 
 makes a direct personal appeal. 
 
 As to the nature of the interruption we cannot even conjecture. It may 
 have been merely a change of the soldier who was on guard; but in the 
 exigencies of a life which, though that of a prisoner, was yet fully occupied, 
 many circumstances may have caused a little delay before everything could bo 
 ready, and the amanuensis once more at his post. And meanwhile something 
 had occurred which had ruffled the Apostle's soul nay, rather which had 
 disturbed it to its inmost depths. That something can only have been a 
 conflict, in some form or other, with Judaising teachers. Something must 
 either have thrown him in contact with, or brought to his notice, the character 
 and doctrine of false Apostles, of the same class as he had encountered at 
 Corinth, and heard of in the Churches of Galatia. Once more the thoughts 
 and tone of the Epistle to the Galatians, the truths and arguments of the Epistlo 
 to the Romans, swept in a storm of emotion over his soul ; and it is with a 
 burst of indignation, stronger for the moment than he had ever before ex- 
 pressed, that, on once more continuing his letter, he bids Timothy write to the 
 still uncontaminated Church : 
 
 " Beware of the dogs ! 8 Beware of the bad workers ! 9 Beware of the concision 
 party ! " 10 
 
 1 irapa/SoXevo-anevos (, A, B, D, E, F, G). It is used especially of one who endangers 
 his life by attendance on the sick (parabolani), (Wetst. ad loc.) 
 
 2 ii. 1930. 
 
 3 I have tried to keep up the two meanings of " farewell " and "rejoice." 
 * Hi. 1. 5 Ewald, Sendscfvr., p. 438. 
 
 6 This is the simplest and most reasonable explanation of TO. O.VTO. ypcufcn', and accords 
 with St. Paul's custom of a concluding warning (1 Cor. xvi. 22; Gal. vi. 15, &c.), or it 
 may refer to the topic of joy (i. 18, 25 ; ii. 17 ; iv. 4). It has led to all sorts of hypo- 
 theses. St. Paul had doubtless written other letters to the Philippians (the natural 
 though not the necessary inference from <. avmv vp.lv ey/xu^v run-oAo Polyc. ad Phil. 3), 
 but these words do not show it. (V, supra, p. 594.) 
 
 7 1 Thess. iv. 1. 
 
 8 Generally used of Gentiles and Hellenising Jews (Matt. xv. 26), involving a coarse 
 ihade'of reproach (Deut. xxiii. 18 ; Rev. xxii. 15). We cannot be sure of the allusion here. 
 
 9 Of. 2 Cor. xi. 13; Matt, xxiii. 15. 
 
 10 *piTofi, Ka.To.7ou.r. would be in Latin " clrcumdsl," "decisi," (Gurti, Hor. Sat. L
 
 602 THK LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAttL. 
 
 The words are intensely severe. He implies, " They call ns dogs, but they, 
 not we, are the veritable dogs ; and we, not they, are the true circumcision. 
 Their circumcision is but concision a mere mutilation of the flesh. We serve 
 by the Spirit of God 1 they serve ordinances; we boast in Christ Jesus they 
 do but trust in the flesh." And why should they put themselves into rivalry 
 with him ? If the external were anything in which to place confidence, he 
 could claim it in even a greater degree than any one else. He had been 
 circumcised when eight days old; he was an Israelite, and of one of the 
 noblest tribes of Israel, and not a mere Hellenist, but a Hebrew aye, and a 
 Hebrew of Hebrews; 2 and to pass from hereditary to personal topics of 
 carnal boasting as regards Law, he was a Pharisee; as regards Judaic 
 enthusiasm, he had even persecuted the Church ; as regards legal righteous- 
 ness, he had proved himself above all reproach. Things like these were at 
 one time the gains which he reckoned that life had brought him, but now for 
 Christ's sake he had got to count them as a loss. 
 
 " Aye, and more than that, I even count all things to be a loss for the sake of 
 the transcendence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I was 
 mulcted of all things, 3 and I regard them as refuse flung to dogs, 4 that I may gain 
 Christ, and may be found in Him, not having any righteousness of mine which is of 
 Law, but that which is by means of faith in Christ, that which comes of God, which 
 is based on faith, 5 that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and 
 the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if so be I may attain 
 to the resurrection (I mean not the general resurrection, but the resurrection of 
 those that are Christ's) from the dead." 6 
 
 And yet, as he goes on to warn them though he had all this pregnant 
 ground for confidence in externalisms, though he had rejected it all for the 
 sake of Christ as mere foul and worthless rubbish, though his whole trust was 
 now in Christ's righteousness, and not in his own so far was he even still 
 from the secure and vaunting confidence of their adversaries, that he did not 
 at all consider that he had grasped the prize, or had been already perfected : 
 
 " But I press forward to see if I may even grasp for which purpose 7 I too was 
 grasped by Christ. Brothers, I do not reckon myself to have grasped ; but one 
 thing forgetting the things behind, and leaning eagerly forward for the things 
 before, I press forward to the goal for the prize of my heavenly calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
 He is like one of those eager charioteers of whom his guardsmen so often 
 
 9, 70); In German, Beschnittenc, Zerschnittene. "Concision" means circumcision re- 
 garded as a mere mutilation. Cf. Acts vii. 51 ; Rom. ii. 2529 ; Col. ii. 11 ; Ezek. 
 xliv. 7 ; Deut. x. 16. 
 
 1 iii. 3, Xarpevoire?, intr. Luke ii. 37 ; Acts xxvi. 7. 
 
 2 iii. 5. A proselyte, son of a proselyte, was called a Oer ben-ger, but Paul was 
 n n T. (Pirke Abhdth, v.) 
 
 3 ' May this refer to some sudden loss of all earthly means of living at his conversion ? 
 4 Ver. 8, <TKv/3oAa. In derivation perhaps from root O*<XT, but in usage = v<7i/3oAo 
 (Suid.). Some prefer the technical sense of the word = "excrements " (Theodoret). 
 
 * Ver. 9, Sia n-wrrewy . . . e* 6eoC . . . em rn irioreit 
 
 iii. 211, leg. TJJV vexpwx (N, A, B, D, E). 
 
 7 i(f> $ may also mean "because (2 Cor. v. 4) ; or there may be an ellipse of the 
 accusative after KaroAajSw, as in the E. V,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. 60S 
 
 talked to him when they had returned from the contests in the Circua 
 Maximns, and joined their shouts to those of the myriads who cheered their 
 favourite colours leading forward in his flying car, bending over the shaken 
 rein and the goaded steed, forgetting everything every peril, every com- 
 petitor, every circling of the rneta in the rear, as he pressed on for the goal by 
 which sat the judges with the palm garlands that formed the prize. 1 
 
 " Let all, then, of us who are full grown in spiritual privileges have this mind ; 
 then if in any other respect ye think otherwise 2 than ye should, this shall God 
 reveal to you; only walk in the same path to the point whereunto we once 
 reached."* 
 
 And as a yet further warning against any danger of their abusing the 
 doctrine of the free gift of grace by antinomian practices, he adds 
 
 " Show yourselves, brethren, imitators of me, and mark those who walk as ye 
 have us for an example. For many walk about whom I often used to tell you, and 
 now tell you even with tears the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is 
 destruction, whose god their belly, and their glory in their shame, men minding 
 earthly things. For our real citizenship is in heaven, whence also we anxiously 
 await as a Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change the fashion of the body 
 of our abasement so as to be conformable to the body of His glory, 4 according to the 
 efficacy of His power to subject also every existing thing unto Himself. So, my 
 brethren, beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand ye firm in the Lord, 
 beloved." 5 
 
 Then after this long digression, which, beginning in strong indignation, 
 calms itself down to pathetic appeal, he once more takes up the exhortation to 
 unity with which he had intended to conclude. He entreats two ladies, Euodia 
 and Syntyche, to unity of mind in Christ, and he also affectionately asks 
 Syzygus 6 on whose name of "yokefellow" he plays, by calling him a 
 genuine yokefellow a yokefellow in heart as well as in name 7 to assist these 
 ladies in making up their quarrel, which was all the more deplorable because 
 of the worth of them both, seeing that they wrestled with him in the Gospel, 
 with Clement too, and the rest of his fellow-workers whose names are in the 
 Book of Life. 8 
 
 1 "Non progredi est regredi " (Aug.). 
 
 s ere'pio;, used euphemistically ( = tea/cut , Od. i. 234, darepov = TO KOKOV). So the Hebrew 
 " acheer." The meaning is, If you have the heart of the matter, God will enlighten you 
 in non-essentials. 
 
 3 iii. 1216, omit Kavovi, rb O.VTO tpovtiv (**, A, B). 
 
 * Ver. 21, fieTa<rx)/xaTi<ri , . . (rvV/iop^ov J U. 6. 
 
 * iii. 17 iv. 1. 
 
 ' iv. 3, ynjo-ie Sufvye. Clement of Alexandria seems to have taken the word to mean 
 
 Paul's Wife, ail* OKveZ T)V avrov irpo<rayopevty <rv$uyov fa ou refpiei>^u<J'ei' (Strom, ill. 6, 53), cf. 
 
 Euseb. H. E. iii. 30. Kenan (p. 145) thinks it was Lydia. Why is she not saluted? 
 If Lydia be merely a Gentilic name she may be one of those two ladies, or she may have 
 been dead. 
 
 7 Schwegler thinks that this is intended to be taken as an allusion to the Apostle 
 Peter ! The play on names is quite in St. Paul's manner. The only difficulty is that 
 Syzygus does not occur elsewhere as a name. 
 
 " iv. 2, 3. Baur's wild conjecture (?) about Clement that the whole story of his 
 Kouiish Episcopate is invented to give respectability to the early Christians, by insinuating
 
 604 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 " Fare ye well always ; again I will say, fare ye well. Let your reasonableness 
 be recognised by all men. Be anxious about nothing, but in everything, in your 
 general and special prayers, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known 
 before God. Then shall the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, keep 
 sentry over your hearts, and the devices of your hearts, in Christ Jesus. 
 
 " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are real, whatsoever things are awful, 
 whatsoever thing?, are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are 
 amiable, whatsoever things are winning, if ' virtue,' l if ' honour,' have a real mean- 
 ing for you, on these things meditate. The things which ye both learned and 
 received, both heard and saw in me, these things do, and the God of peace shall be 
 with you.' 5 3 
 
 Then comes the warm yet delicate expression of his heartfelt gratitude to 
 them for the pecuniary contribution by which now, for the fourth time, they, 
 and they only, had supplied the wants which he could no longer meet by 
 manual labour. 
 
 " One word more : I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now once more your 
 thought on my behalf blossomed afresh.* In this matter ye were indeed bearing mo 
 in mind, but ye were without opportunity. Not that I speak with reference to 
 deficiency, for I learnt to be always independent in existing circumstances. I know 
 how both to be humiliated, and I know how to abound. In everything and in all 
 things I have been initiated how both to be satisfied and to be hungry, both to 
 abound and to be in need. I am strong for everything in Him who gives me power. 
 Still ye did well in making yourselves partakers in my affliction. And ye know as 
 well as I do, Philippians, that in the beginning of the Gospel, when I went forth 
 from Macedonia, no Church communicated with me as regards giving and receiving, 
 except ye only, for even in Thessalonica both once and twice ye sent to my need 
 not that I am on the look-out for the gift, but I am on the look-out for the fruit 
 which abounds to your account. Now, however, I have all things to the full, 4 and 
 I abound. I have been fulfilled by receiving from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent, 
 an odour of sweet fragrance, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God. 5 But my 
 God shall fulfil all your need according to His riches, in glory, in Christ Jesus. 
 Now to our God and Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen. 6 
 
 " Salute every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren with me salute you. All the 
 saints salute you, and especially'' those of Caesar's household. 8 
 
 " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit." 
 
 his identity with the Consular Flavius Clemens, and that the whole of this Epistle is 
 forged to lead up to this passing allusion looks almost tame beside Volkmar s hypo- 
 thesis (?) about Euodia and Syntyche viz., that Euodia = "orthodoxy," the Petrine 
 party, and Syntyche, "the partner " = the Pauline party! Clement, though a Philip- 
 pian, may possibly be identical with " Clement of Rome " (Orig. in Joann. i. 29 ; Euseb. 
 H. E. iii. 15, &c.); we cannot even say "probably," because the name is exceedingly 
 common. 
 
 1 iv. 8, open?, here alone in St. Paul. 2 iv. 4 9. 
 
 3 Ver. 10, aveSoAeTe, literally, "ye blossomed again to think on my behalf." Chry- 
 sostom says, Sri trporepov ovres dvtfijpol efjjpav&ja-ai', which is to touch the metaphor with an 
 Ithuriel spear (Repullvlastis, Aug. ; Eeflaruistis, Vulg.). 
 
 4 Ver. 18, airexw. (Matt. vi. 2.) The word is used for "giving receipt in full." 
 * Gen. viii. 21. iv. 1020. 
 
 7 Why especially ? It Is impossible to say. 
 
 8 It should be borne in mind that these slaves would be counted by thousands 
 atrioises, cubicularii, secretarii, Icctores, introductory, nomcnclatores, dispensatores, 
 silentiarii (to keep the others quiet), &c. &c., and even slaves to tell the master the 
 names of his other slaves I We read of Romans who had 20,000 slaves. Four thousand 
 was no very extraordinary number (Sen. De Vit. Beat. 17 ; Plin. H. N. xxxiii. 10 ; Athen. 
 vi., p. 272):
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE GERM. 605 
 
 No great future awaited the Philippian Church. Half a century later, 
 Ignatius passed through Philippi with his " ten leopards," on his way to 
 martyrdom ; and Polycarp wrote to the Church a letter which, like that of St. 
 Paul, is full of commendations. Little more is heard of it. Its site is still 
 occupied by the wretched village of Filibidjek, but in spite of the fair promise 
 of its birth, " the Church of Philippi has," in the inscrutable counsel of God, 
 " lived without a history, and perished without a memorial." l 
 
 CHAPTER XLVin. 
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE GERM. 
 
 Oi>, K&Oairep &v ris et/ccftrete, avdpdiirois irmjpfTTjy rivk W^ij/a? ^ &yye\ov 4A./V avrbv 
 rdv rexvirrjv ital Sijfiiovpydv rwv ^\eav. Up. ad Diognet. 7. 
 
 THE remaining three of the Epistles of the Captivity were written within a 
 short time of each other, and were despatched by the same messengers. 
 Tychicns was the bearer of those to the Ephosians and Colossians. Onesimus, 
 who naturally took the letter to Philemon, was sent at the same time with him, 
 as appears from the mention of his name in the Epistle to the Colossians. In 
 both of these latter Epistles there is also a message for Archippus. 
 
 There is nothing but internal evidence to decide which of these letters was 
 written first. The letter to Philemon was, however, a mere private appendage 
 to the Epistle to the Colossians, which may have been written at any time. 
 The letter to this Church must claim the priority over the circular Epistle 
 which is generally known as the Epistle to the Ephesians. The reason for this 
 opinion is obvious the Epistle to the Colossians was called forth by a special 
 need, the other Epistle was not. It is in exact psychological accordance with 
 the peculiarities of St. Paul's mind and style that if, after writing a letter 
 which was evoked by particular circumstances, and led to the development of 
 particular truths, he utilised the opportunity of its despatch to send another 
 letter, which had no such immediate object, the tones of the first letter wonld 
 still vibrate in the second. When he had discharged his immediate duty to 
 the Church of Colossse, the topics dwelt upon in writing to the neighbouring 
 Churches would be sure to bear a close resemblance to those which had most 
 recently been occupying his thoughts. Even apart from special information, 
 St. Paul may have seen the desirability of warning Ephesus and its depen- 
 dencies against a peril which was infusing its subtle presence within so short a 
 distance from them ; and it was then natural that his language to them should 
 be marked by the very differences which separate the Epistle to the Colossians 
 from that to the Ephesians. The former is specific, concrete, and polemical ; 
 the latter is abstract, didactic, general. The same words and phrases predomi- 
 nate in both ; but the resemblances are far more marked and numerous in the 
 
 1 Lightfoot, p. 64.
 
 606 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 practical exhortations than in the doctrinal statements. In the Epistle to the 
 Colossians he is primarily occupied with the refutation of an error ; in that 
 to the Ephesians he is absorbed in the rapturous development of an exalted 
 truth. The main theme of the Colossians is the Person of Christ ; that of the 
 Ephesians is the life of Christ manifested in the living energy of His Church. 1 
 In the former, Christ is the " Plenitude," the synthesis and totality of every 
 attribute of God ; in the latter, the ideal Church, as the body of Christ, is the 
 Plenitude, the recipient of all the fulness of Him who filleth all things with 
 all. 2 Christ's person is most prominent in the Colossians ; Christ's body, the 
 Church of Christ, in the Ephesians. 
 
 The genuineness of these two letters has been repeatedly and formidably 
 assailed, and the grounds of the attack are not by any means- so fantastic as 
 those on which other letters have been rejected as spurious. To dwell at 
 length on the external evidence is no part of my scheme, and the grounds on 
 which the internal evidence seems to me decisive in their favour, even after 
 the fullest and frankest admission of all counter-difficulties, will best appear 
 when we have considered the events out of which they spring, and which at 
 once shaped, and are sufficient to account for, the peculiarities by which they 
 are marked. 
 
 Towards the close of St. Paul's Roman imprisonment, when his approach- 
 ing liberation seemed so all but certain that he even requests Philemon to bo 
 getting a lodging in readiness for him, he received a visit from Epaphras of 
 Colossae. To him, perhaps, had been granted the distinguished honour of 
 founding Churches not only in his native town, but also in Laodicea and 
 Hierapolis, which lie within a distance of sixteen miles from each other in the 
 valley of the Lycus. That remarkable stream resembles the Anio in clothing 
 the country through which it flows with calcareous deposits ; and in some parts 
 of its course, especially near Colossse, it flowed under natural bridges of 
 gleaming travertine deposited by its own waters, the course of which was fre- 
 quently modified by this peculiarity, and by the terrific earthquakes to which 
 the valley has always been liable. The traveller who followed the course of 
 the Lycus in a south-eastward direction from the valley of the Maeander into 
 which it flows, would first observe on a plateau, which rises high above its 
 northern bank, the vast and splendid city of Hierapolis, famous as the birth- 
 place of him who in Nicopolis 
 
 " Taught Arrian when Vespasian's brutal son 
 Cleared Rome of what most shamed him M3 
 
 and famous also for the miraculous properties of the mephitic spring whose 
 exhalations could be breathed in safety by the priests of Cybele alone. About 
 
 CoLii. 19; Eph. iv. 16. 
 
 8 CoL i. 19; ii. 9; Eph. i. 23; ffl. 19; iv. 13. (John i. 14, 16.) German writers 
 express the difference by saying that Christlichkeit is more prominent in the Colossians, 
 Kirchlichkeit in the Ephesians. 
 
 3 Epictetus was a contemporary of the Apostle. As to the Christian tinge of his Stoic 
 peculations, see my Seekers after God.
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE GERM. 607 
 
 aix miles further, upon the southern bank of the river, he would see Laodicea, 
 the populous and haughty metropolis of the " Cibyratie jurisdiction," which 
 alone of the cities of proconsular Asia was wealthy and independent enough 
 to rebuild its streets and temples out of its own resources, when, within a year 
 of the time at which these letters were written, an earthquake had shaken it. 1 
 Passing up the valley about ten miles further, he might before sunset reach 
 Colossae, a town far more anciently famous than either, but which had fallen 
 into comparative decay, and was now entirely eclipsed by its thriving and 
 ambitious neighbours. 2 
 
 This remarkable valley and these magnificent cities, St. Paul, strange to 
 say, had never visited. "Widely as the result of his preaching at Ephesus had 
 been disseminated throughout Asia, his labours for the Ephesian Church had 
 been so close and unremitting as to leave him no leisure for wider missionary 
 enterprise. 3 And although Jews abounded in these cities, the divinely guided 
 course of his previous travels had not brought him into this neighbourhood. 
 It is true that St. Luke vaguely tells us that in the second missionary journey 
 St. Paul had passed through " the Phrygian and Galatian country," 4 and that 
 in the shifting ethnological sense of the term the cities of the Lycus-valley 
 might be regarded as Phrygian. But the expression seems rather to mean 
 that the course of his journey lay on the ill-defined marches of these two dis- 
 tricts, far to the north and east of the Lycns. In his third journey his natural 
 route from the cities of Galatia to Ephesus would take him down the valleys of 
 the Hermus and Cayster, and to the north of the mountain range of Messogis 
 which separates them from the Lycus and Maaander. From St. Paul's own 
 expression it seems probable that the Churches in these three cities had been 
 founded by the labours of Epaphras, and that they had never " seen his face in 
 the flesh " at the time when he wrote these Epistles, though it is not impossible 
 that he subsequently visited them. 6 
 
 And yet he could not but feel the deepest interest in their welfare, because, 
 indirectly though not directly, he had been indeed their founder. Ephesus, as 
 we have seen, was a centre of commerce, of worship, and of political procedure ; 
 and among the thousands, " both Jews and Greeks," " almost throughout all 
 Asia," who heard through his preaching the word of the Lord, 6 must have been 
 Philemon, 7 his son, Archippus, and Epaphras, and Nymphas, who were leading 
 ministers of the Lycus Churches. 8 
 
 And there was a special reason why St. Paul should write to the Colossian 
 Christians. Philemon, who resided there, had a worthless slave named 
 
 1 Tac. Ann. xiv. 27, "propriis opibus revaluit." Rev. iii. 14. Cicero, who resided 
 there as Proconsul of Cilicia, frequently refers to it in his letters. 
 
 2 Now Chonos. Dr. Lightfoot calls it "the least important Church to which any 
 Epistle of St. Paul was addressed " (Col., p. 16). 
 
 Acts xx. 31. 
 
 4 Acts xvi. 6. In Acts xviii. 23 the order is " the Galatian country and Phrygia." In 
 the former instance he was travelling from Antioch in Pisidia to Troas; in the latter from 
 Antioch in Syria to Ephesus. 
 
 * Col. i. 4, 6, 9 ; ii. 1. * Acts six. 1026. 
 
 7 Philem. 1, 2. Col. iv. 12, 13, 16.
 
 608 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST, PAUL. 
 
 Onesiiuus a name which, under the circumstances, naturally lent itself to a 
 satiric play of words ; for instead of being " Beneficial," he had been very 
 much the reverse, having first (apparently) robbed his master, and then run 
 away from him. Borne was in anciout days the most likely place to furnish 
 a secure refuge to a guilty fugitive, aiid thither, even more than to modern 
 London, drifted inevitably the vice and misery of the world. Philemon was a 
 Christian, and some access of wretchedness, or danger of starvation, may have 
 driven the runaway slave to fling himself on the compassion of the Christian 
 teacher, whom he may have heard and seen when he attended his master on somo 
 great gala- day at Ephesus. The kind heart of Paul was ever open ; he had a 
 deep and ready sympathy for the very lowest and poorest of the human race, 
 because in the very lowest and poorest he saw those " for whom Christ died." 
 His own sufferings, too, had taught him the luxury of aiding the sufferings of 
 others, and he took the poor dishonest fugitive to his heart, and was the human 
 instrument by which that change was wrought in him which converted the 
 " non tressis agaso " into a brother beloved. But Onesimus was still legally the 
 debtor and the slave of Philemon ; and Paul, ever obedient to the law, felt it a 
 duty to send him back. He placed him under the protecting care of Tychicus 
 of Ephesus, and sent him with a letter which could not fail to ensure his 
 pardon. It was necessary, therefore, for him to write to a citizen of Colossae, 
 and another circumstance determined him to write also to the Colossian 
 Church. 
 
 This was the strange and sad intelligence which he heard from Epaphras. 
 They had many opportunities for intercourse, for, either literally or metaphori- 
 cally, Epaphras shared his captivity, and did not at once return to his native 
 city. In his conversations with St. Paul he told him of an insidious form of 
 error unlike any which the Apostle had hitherto encountered. The vineyard 
 of the Lord's planting seemed, alas ! to resemble the vineyards of earth in the 
 multiplicity of perils which it had to overcome before it could bring forth its 
 fruit. Now it was the little foxes that spoiled its vines ; now the wild boar 
 which broke down its hedge ; and now, under the blighting influence of neglect 
 and infertile soil, its unpruned branches only brought forth the clusters of 
 Gomorrah. An erroneous tendency, as yet germinant and undeveloped, but 
 one of which the prescient eye of St. Paul saw all the future deadliness, had 
 insensibly crept into these youthful Churches, and, although they only knew 
 the Apostle by name, he felt himself compelled to exert the whole force of 
 his authority and reasoning to check so perilous an influence. Doubtless 
 Epaphras had expressly sought him for the sake of advice and sympathy, and 
 would urge the Apostle to meet with distinct warnings and clear refutation 
 the novel speculations with which he may have felt himself incompetent to 
 cope. 
 
 The new form of error was partly Judaic, for it made distinctions in meata, 
 attached importance to new moons and sabbaths, 1 and insisted upon the value 
 
 > Ool. IL 1C.
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE QERM. 609 
 
 of circumcision, if not upon its actual necessity. 1 Yet it did not, as a whole, 
 resemble the Galatian Judaism, nor did it emanate, like the opposition at 
 Antioch, from a party in Jerusalem, nor was it complicated, like the Corinthian 
 schisms, with personal hostility to the authority of St. Paid. Its character was 
 Judaic, not so much essentially as virtually ; not, that is, from any special 
 sympathy with national and Levitical Hebraism, but rather because there were 
 certain features of Judaism which were closely analogous to those of other 
 Oriental religions, and which commanded a wide sympathy in the Eastern 
 world. 
 
 We must judge of the distinctive colour of the dawning heresy quite as 
 much from the truths by which St. Paul strives to check its progress, as by 
 those of its tenets on which he directly touches. 2 In warning the Colossians 
 respecting it, he bids them be on their guard against allowing themselves to be 
 plundered by a particular teacher, whose so-called philosophy and empty deceit 
 were more in accordance with human traditions and secular rudiments than 
 with the truth of Christ. The hollow and misguiding system of this teacher, 
 besides the importance which it attached to a ceremonialism which at the best 
 was only valuable as a shadow of a symbol, tried further to rob its votaries of 
 the prize of their Christian race by representing God as a Being so far removed 
 from them that they could only approach Him through a series of angelic 
 intermediates. It thus ignored the precious truth of Christ's sole mediatorial 
 dignity, and turned humility itself into a vice by making it a cloak for inflated 
 and carnal intellectualism. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than pride 
 which was thus aping humility ; and, in endeavouring to enforce an ignoble 
 self -abrogation of that direct communion with God through Christ which is 
 the Christian's most imperial privilege, it not only thrust all kinds of inferior 
 agencies between the soul and Him, but also laid down a number of rules and 
 dogmas which were but a set of new Mosaisms without the true Mosaic sanc- 
 tions. Those rules were, from their very nature, false, transient, and trivial. 
 They paraded a superfluous self-abasement, and insisted on a hard asceticism, 
 but at the same time they dangerously flattered the soul with a semblance of 
 complicated learning, while they were found to be in reality valueless as any 
 remedy against self-indulgence. That these ascetic practices and dreamy 
 imaginations were accompanied by a pride which arrogated to itself certain 
 mysteries as an exclusive possession from which the vulgar intellect must bo 
 kept aloof ; that, while professing belief in Christ, the Colossian mystic 
 represented Him as one among many beings interposed between God and man ; 
 that he regarded matter in general and the body in particular as something in 
 which evil was necessarily immanent, 3 seem to result from the Christology of 
 the Epistle, which is more especially developed in one particular direction than 
 
 i Col. ii. 11. 
 
 8 They were "Gnostic Ebionites," Baitr; "Corinthians," Mayerhoff; "Christian 
 Essenism in its progress to Gnosticism," Lipsius; "A connecting fink between Essence 
 and Cerinthians," Nitzsch ; "Ascetics and Theosophists of the Essene school," Holts 
 mann ; " Precursors of the Christian Essenes," Ritschl. (Pfleiderer, ii. 98.) 
 
 * So, too, Philo regarded the body M the Egypt of the sonL (Qua. rer. div. hoar. SIB.}
 
 610 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 we find it to be in any of St. Paul's previous writings. Already, in writing to 
 the Corinthians, he had said that " if he had ever known Christ after the flesh, 
 from henceforth he knew Him no more," and in this Epistle the Person of our 
 Lord as the Eternal Co-existent Son is represented in that divine aspect the 
 apprehension of which is a boon infinitely more transcendent than a human 
 and external knowledge of Jesus in His earthly humiliation. And yet as 
 though to obviate beforehand any Cerinthian attempt to distinguish between 
 Jesus the man of sorrows and Christ the risen Lord, between Jesns the 
 crucified and Christ the Eternal Word he is, even in this Epistle, emphatic 
 in the statement that these are one. 1 To say that there is any change 
 in St. Paul's fundamental conception of Christ would be demonstrably 
 false, since even the juxtaposition of our Lord Jesus Christ with God 
 the Father as the source of all grace, and the declaration that all 
 things, and we among them, exist solely through Him, are statements of 
 His divinity in St. Paul's earliest Epistles 2 as strong as anything which 
 could be subsequently added. But hitherto the Apostle had been led to 
 speak of Him mainly as the Judge of the quick and dead, in the Epistles 
 to the Thessalonians ; as the invisible Head and Ruler of the Church in those 
 to the Corinthians ; as the Author of all spiritual freedom from ceremonial 
 bondage, and the Redeemer of the world from the yoke of sin and death, as 
 in those to the Romans and Galatians ; as the Saviour, the Raiser from the 
 dead, the Life of all life, the Source of all joy and peace, in that to the Philip- 
 pians. A new phase of His majesty had now to be brought into prominence 
 one which was indeed involved in every doctrine which St. Paul had 
 taught concerning Him as part of a Gospel which he had received by 
 revelation, but which no external circumstance had ever yet led him to explain 
 in all its clearness. This was the doctrine of Christ, as the Eternal, Pre- 
 existing, yet Incarnate Word. He had now to speak of Him as One in whom 
 and by whom the Universe and that not only its existing condition but its 
 very matter and its substance are divinely hallowed, so that there is nothing 
 irredeemable, nothing inherently antagonistic to Holiness, either in matter or in 
 the body of man ; as One in whom dwells the " plenitude " of the divine per- 
 fections, so that no other angelic being can usurp any share of God which is 
 not found in Him ; as One who is the only Potentate, the only Mediator, the 
 only Saviour, the Head of the Body which is the Church, and the Source of 
 its life through every limb. And the expression of this truth was rendered 
 necessary by error. The Colossian teachers were trying tcf supplement Chris- 
 tianity, theoretically by a deeper wisdom, practically by a more abstentious 
 holiness. It was the beautiful method of St. Paul to combat false doctrine as 
 little as possible by denunciation and controversy (though these two have at 
 times their necessary place), and as much as possible by the presentation of 
 the counter truth. We are able, therefore, to find the theological errors of 
 
 i 1. 20, 22 ; ii. 6. 
 
 1 Thess. i. 1 ; v. 28 ; 1 Cor. viii. 6 ; 2 Cor. iv. 4 ; v. 19 ; Rom. ix. 5. Even Renas 
 fully admit this (St. Paul, x. 274),
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE OERM. 611 
 
 the Colossians reflected in the positive theology which is here developed in 
 order to counteract thorn. In the moral and practical discussions of the 
 Epistle we see the true substitute for that extravagant and inflating asceticism 
 which had its origin partly in will-worship, ostentatious humility, and trust in 
 works, and partly in mistaken conceptions as to the inherency of evil in the 
 body of man. St. Paul points out to them that the deliverance from sin wag 
 to be found, not in dead rules and ascetic rigours, which have a fatal tendency 
 to weaken the will, while they fix the imagination so intently on the very sins 
 against which they are intended as a remedy, as too often to lend to those very 
 sins a more fatal fascination but in that death to sin which is necessarily in- 
 volved in the life hid with Christ in God. From that new life that resurrec- 
 tion from the death of sin obedience to the moral laws of God, and faithfulness 
 in common relations of life, result, not as difficult and meritorious acts, but as 
 the natural energies of a living impulse in the heart which beats no longer 
 with its own life but with the life of Christ. 
 
 Alike, then, from the distinct notices and the negative indications of the 
 Epistle we can reproduce with tolerable clearness the features of the Colossian 
 heresy, and we at once trace in it the influence of that Oriental theosophy, 
 those mystical speculations, those shadowy cosmogonies and moral aberrations 
 which marked the hydra-headed forms of the systems afterwards summed up 
 in the one word Gnosticism. This very circumstance has been the main ground 
 for impugning the genuineness of the Epistle. It is asserted that Gnosticism 
 belongs to a generation later, and that these warnings are aimed at the 
 followers of Cerinthus, who did not flourish until after Paul was dead, or 
 even at those of Yalentinus, the founder of a Gnostic system in the second 
 century. In support of this view it is asserted that the Epistle abounds in 
 un-Pauline phrases, in words which occur in no other Epistle, and in technical 
 Gnostic expressions, such as plenitude, mystery, wisdom, knowledge, powers, 
 light, darkness. Now, that Gnosticism as a well-developed system belongs to 
 a later period is admitted ; but the belief that the acceptance of the Epistle 
 as genuine involves an anachronism, depends solely on the assumption that 
 Gnostic expressions 1 may not have been prevalent, and Gnostic tendencies 
 secretly at work, long before they were crystallised into formal heresies. As 
 far as these expressions are concerned, some of them are not technical at all 
 until a Gnostic meaning is read into them, and others, like " knowledge " 
 (gnosis), &c., "plenitude" (pleroma), though beginning to be technical, are 
 used in a sense materially different from that which was afterwards attached 
 to them. As for the asserted traces of doctrines distinctly and systematically 
 Gnostic, it is a matter of demonstration that they are found, both isolated and 
 combined, during the Apostolic age, and before it, as well as afterwards. The 
 esoteric exclusiveness which jealously guarded the arcana of its mysteries 
 
 1 The use of these expressions is admirably illustrated by some remarks of TertulHan, 
 Adv. Praxeam., 8. He nas used the word irpo/SaA.}), and anticipating the objection that 
 the word is tainted with Valentinianism, he replies that Herety baa taken that vcH 
 from Truth to mould it after its own likenesi,
 
 612 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 from general knowledge ; the dualism wliich became almost Manichaean in the 
 attempt to distinguish between the good and evil impulses ; the notion that 
 God's "plenitude" could only flow out in a multitude of imperfect emanations; 
 the consequent tendency to exalt and worship a gradation of angelic hierarchies ; 
 the rules and purifications which were designed to minimise all infection from 
 the inevitable contact with matter ; the attempt to explain the inherency of 
 evil in matter by vain and fanciful cosmogonies ; the multiplication of obser- 
 vances ; the reduction of food and drink to the barest elements, excluding all 
 forms of animal life; the suspicious avoidance or grudging toleration of 
 marriage as a pernicious and revolting necessity ; these are found in various 
 Oriental religions, and may be traced in philosophies which originated among 
 the Asiatic Greeks. They find a distinct expression in the doctrines of the 
 Essenes. 1 Their appearance in the bosom of a Christian community was 
 indeed new ; but there was nothing new in their existence ; nothing in them 
 with which, as extraneous forms of error, St. Paul's Jewish and Gentile 
 studies were it only his knowledge of Essene tenets and Alexandrian specu- 
 lations had not made him perfectly familiar. That they should appear in a 
 Phrygian Church, powerfully exposed to Jewish influences, and yet consisting 
 of Gentiles trained amid the mysteries of a ceremonial nature worship, and 
 accustomed to the utterances of a speculative philosophy 2 must have been 
 painful to St. Paul, but could not have been surprising. The proof that these 
 forms of heresy might have been expected to appear is rendered yet more 
 cogent by the knowledge that, within a very short period of this time, they 
 actually did appear in a definite and systematic form, in the heresy of Cerin- 
 thus, with whom St. John himself is said to have come into personal collision. 8 
 And under these circumstances, so far from seeing a mark of spuriousness, 
 we rather deduce an incidental argument in favour of the genuineness of the 
 Epistle from the nature of the errors which we find that it is intended to 
 denounce. Many critics have been eager to prove that St. Paul could not have 
 written it, because they reject that fundamental doctrine of the Eternal 
 Divinity of Christ, of which this group of Epistles is so impregnable a 
 bulwark ; yet this was so evidently the main article in the belief of St. Paul 
 
 1 Neander (Planting, p. 323, seq.) points out the Phrygian propensity to the mystical 
 and magical as indicated by the worship of Cybele, by Montanism, by the tendencies con- 
 demned at the council of Laodicea, and by the existence of Athinganians in the ninth 
 century, &c. Perhaps the incipient heresies of Asia might be most briefly characterised 
 as the germ of Gnosticism evolved by Essene and Oriental speculations on the origin of 
 evil. These speculations led to baseless angelologies injurious to the supremacy of Christ; 
 to esoteric exclusiveness injurious to the universality of the Gospel ; and to mistaken 
 asceticism injurious to Christian freedom. Cloudy theories generated unwise practices. 
 It is interesting to observe that some at least of the same tendencies are traceable in St. 
 John's rebukes to the seven Churches. Compare Rev. iii. 14 and Col. i. 15 18 ; Rev. iii, 
 21 and Col. iii. 1, Eph. ii. 6. Some interesting Zoroastrian parallels are quoted from 
 Bleeck by the Rev. J. LI. Daviea in his essay on traces of foreign elements in these 
 Epistles (Ephes. pp. 141 9). He says " the decay and mixture of old creeds in the 
 Asiatic intellect had created a soil of ' loose fertility a footfall there sufficing to upturn 
 to the warm air half -germinating ' theosophies." 
 
 Lightfoot, Col. pp. 114179. 
 
 * Neander, Planting, i. 325; G'/t. Hist. ii. 42; Lightfoot, Col., p. 107, seq.
 
 GNOSTICISM IN THE GERM. 613 
 
 that the proof of its being so would hardly be weakened, even if these 
 Epistles could be banished from the canon to which hostile criticism has only 
 succeeded in showing more conclusively that they must still be considered to 
 belong. 
 
 The Christology, then, of these Epistles is nothing more than the syste- 
 matic statement of that revelation respecting the nature of Jesus, which is 
 implicitly contained in all that is written of Him in the New Testament j 1 and 
 the so-called " Gnosticism " with which these Epistles deal is nothing more 
 than a form of error a phase of the crafty working of systematic decep- 
 tion which is common to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual aberrations 
 of all ages and countries. It is found in the Zend Avesta; it is found 
 in Philo ; it is found in Neoplatonism ; it is found in the Kabbala ; it 
 is found in Yalentinus. Abject sacerdotalism, superstitious ritual, extravagant 
 asceticism, the faithlessness which leads men to abandon the privilege of 
 immediate access to God, and to thrust between the soul and its One Mediator 
 all sorts of human and celestial mediators ; the ambition which builds upon 
 the unmanly timidity of its votaries its own secure and tyrannous exalta- 
 tion ; the substitution of an easy externalism for the religion of the heart ; the 
 fancy that God cares for such barren self-denials as neither deepen our own 
 spirituality nor benefit our neighbour ; the elaboration of unreasonable systems 
 which give the pompous name of Theology to vain and verbal speculations 
 drawn by elaborate and untenable inferences from isolated expressions of 
 which the antinomies are unfathomable, and of which the true exegetic history 
 is deliberately ignored ; the oscillating reactions which lead in the same sect 
 and in even the same individual to the opposite extremes of rigid scrupulosity 
 and antinomian licence : 2 these are the gerins not of one but of all the here- 
 sies ; these are more or less the elements of nearly every false religion. The 
 ponderous technicalities of the systematiser ; the interested self-assertions of 
 the priest ; the dreamy speculations of the mystic ; the Pharisaic conceit of 
 the externalist ; the polemical shibboleths of the sectarian ; the spiritual pride 
 and narrow one-sidedness of the self -tormentor ; the ruinous identification of 
 that saving faith which is a union with Christ and a participation of His life 
 with the theoretic acceptance of a number of formulae : all these elements 
 have from the earliest dawn of Christianity mingled in the tainted stream of 
 heresy their elements of ignorance, self-interest, and error. In their dark 
 features we detect a common resemblance. 
 
 " Facies non omnibus una 
 Nee diversa tarn en, quales decet esse sororum." 
 
 There was Gnosticism in the days of St. Paul as there is Gnosticism now, 
 though neither then nor now is it recognised under that specific name. 
 
 We may, therefore, pass to the study of the Epistle with the strongest 
 
 1 " Les plus Snergiques expressions de 1'Epltre aux Colossiens ne font qu'encherir on 
 pea ur celles des Epltreg anterieures" (Kenan, St. P. x.). 
 
 (Bern. Alex. Mrem. iii. 5; "Ow. iii. 1 7 J Jude 8; Rev. ii. 14, 2022.
 
 614 THE LIFE AJTD WORK OP ST. PATOU 
 
 Conviction tnat tfiere is no expression in it which, on these grounds at any 
 rate, disproves its genuineness. None but Paul could have written it. To say 
 that it is un-Pauline in doctrine is to make an arbitrary assertion, since it- 
 states no single truth which is not involved in his previous teachings. The 
 fact that, it is a splendid development of those teachings, or rather an expan- 
 sion in the statement of them, in order to meet new exigencies, is simply in 
 its favour. Nor do I see how any one familiar with the style and mind of St. 
 Paul can fail to recognise his touch in this Epistle. That the style should 
 lack the fire and passion the " meras flammas " of the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, and the easy, fervent outflowing of thought and feeling in those 
 to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, and Philippians, is perfectly natural. Of 
 all the converts to whom St. Paul had written, the Colossians alone were 
 entire strangers to him. He had not indeed visited the Church of Rome, 
 but many members of that Church were personally known to him, and he 
 was writing to them on a familiar theme which had for years been occupying 
 his thoughts. The mere fact that he had already written on the same topic 
 to the Galatians would make his thoughts flow more easily. But in writing 
 to the Colossians he was handling a new theme, combating a recent error with 
 which, among Christians, he had not come into personal contact, and of which 
 he merely knew the special characteristics at secondhand. When, in the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians, he reverts to the same Tange of conceptions, 1 his 
 sentences' run with far greater ease. The style of no man is stereotyped, and 
 least of all is this the case with a man so many-sided, so emotional, so 
 original as St. Paul. His manner, as we have repeatedly noticed, reflects 
 to an unusual degree the impressions of the time, the place, the mood, in 
 which he was writing. A thousand circumstances unknown to us may have 
 given to this Epistle that rigid character, that want of spontaneity in the 
 movement of its sentences, which led even Ewald into the improbable con- 
 jecture that the words were Timothy's, though the subject and the thoughts 
 belong to St. Paul. But the difference of style between it and other Epistles 
 is no greater than we find in the works of other authors at different periods 
 of their lives, or than we daily observe in the writings and speeches of living 
 men who deal with different topics in varying moods. 
 
 1 V. infra, p. 630, seq. "These two letters are twins, singularly like one another 
 in face, like also in character, but not so identical as to exclude a strongly-marked 
 individuality" (J. LI. Davies, Eph. and Col., p. 7). He says that the style is laboured, 
 but "the substance eminently genuine and strong." A forger would have copied 
 phrases ; who could copy the most " characteristic and inward conceptions of the 
 Apostle?" Even critics who fail to admit the genuineness of the whole letter, see that 
 its sentiments and much of its phraseology are so indisputably Pauline that they adopt 
 the theory of interpolation (Hitzig, Weiss, Holtzman), or joint authorship of Paul and 
 Timothy (Ewald).
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. 815 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. 
 
 " Per Me venitur, ad Me pervenitur, in Me permanetur." AUG. In Joann. xii. 
 " 'E,v avrf trtpnrarrtiTt. In eo ambulate ; in illo solo. Hie Epistolae acopus est.' 
 BENGEL. 
 
 " Viva, pressa, solida, nervis plena, mascula." BOHMER, Isag. Ix. 
 "Brevis Epistola, sed nucleum Evangelii continens." CALVIN. 
 
 AFTER a brief greeting " to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which 
 are in Colossse," 1 he enters on the usual "thanksgiving," telling them how in 
 his prayers he ever thanked God our Father 2 on their behalf, on hearing of 
 their faith in Christ and love to all the saints, because of the hope stored up 
 for them in heaven. Of that hope they had heard when the Gospel was first 
 preached to them in its true genuineness ; and as that Gospel grew and bore 
 fruit 3 in all the world, so it was doing in them, from the day when they heard 
 of the grace of God, and recognised it in all its fulness, from the teaching of 
 Epaphras, the Apostle's beloved fellow-prisoner and their faithful pastor on 
 the Apostle's behalf.* By Epaphras he has been informed of their spiritual 
 charism of love, and from the day that he heard of their Christian graces it 
 was his earnest and constant prayer that their knowledge of God's will might 
 be fully completed in all spiritual wisdom and intelligence, in practical holi- 
 ness, in fresh fruit-fulness and growth, in increasing power to endure even 
 suffering with joy, and in perpetual thanksgiving to God, who qualified us for 
 our share in the heritage of the saints in light, and who rescued us from the 
 power of darkness, and transferred us by baptism into the kingdom of the 
 Son of His love, in whom we have our redemption, the remission of our 
 sins. 5 
 
 Of the nature of that Son of God, on whose redemption he has finis 
 touched, he proceeds to speak in the next five verses. They form one of the 
 two memorable passages which contain the theological essence of this Epistle. 
 They are the full statement of those truths with respect to the person of 
 Christ which were alone adequate to meet the errors, both of theory and 
 practice, into which the Colossians were sliding under the influence of some 
 
 1 Ver. 2, Ko\o<rcra, , B, D, F, G, L ; but probably irpbs KoAao-o-aels in the later super- 
 scription. 
 
 This, If the reading of B, D, Origen, &c., be correct, is the only instance where God 
 the Father stands alone in the opening benediction. The briefest summary of the 
 Epistle is as follows : I. Introduction : L 1, 2, Greeting ; i. 38, Thanksgiving ; i. 9^-13, 
 Prayer. II. Doctrinal : the person and office of Christ, i. 13 ii. 3. in. Polemical : 
 warnings against error, and practical deductions from the counter truths, ii. 4 iii. 4. 
 IV. Practical : general precepts, iii. 5 17 ; special precepts, iii. 18 iv. 6. V. Personal 
 messages and farewell, iv. 7 18. 
 
 3 Ver. 6, Ko.piro<t>opoviifi'ov, "spontaneously bearing fruit'' (ver. 10, Kopwo^ovvTes), and 
 yet gaining progressive force in doing so (avfavo/ievoi). 
 
 4 Ver. 7, imep rtiJ-lav, , A, B, D, F, G. This can only mean that Epaphras preached 
 on St. Paul's behalf i.e., in his stead and, if it be the right reading, furnishes another 
 decisive proof that St. Paul had never himself preached in these Churches. 
 
 * i. 914. The "by His blood " of the E. v . is a reading interpolated from Eph. L 7.
 
 616 THB LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Essene teacher. The doctrine of Christ as the Divine Word, the Likeness 
 of God manifested to men the Pre-existent Lord of the created world could 
 alone divert them from the dualism and ascetic rigour which their Phrygian 
 mysticism and mental proclivities had led them to introduce into the system 
 of Christianity. And therefore having spoken of Christ, he shows "His 
 absolute supremacy in relation to the universe, the nativral creation (15 17), 
 and in relation to the Church, the new moral creation (ver. 18)." * 
 
 " Who is the Image of the Unseen God, the First-born of all Creation, since in 
 Him all things were created 2 in the heavens and upon the earth, the things seen 
 and the things unseen, whether 'thrones' or 'dominations,' ' principalities ' or 
 ' powers ' : 3 all things have been created 4 by Him and unto Him : and HE is 5 before 
 aU things, and in Him all things cohere ; and He is the head of the body the 
 Church ; who is the origin, the first-born from the dead, that He and none otber 
 may become the Presiding Power in all things ; because in Him God thought good 
 tbat the whole Plenitude 6 should permanently dwell, 7 and by Him to reconcile all 
 things to Himself, making peace by the blood of His cross ; by Him, whether the 
 things on tbe earth or the things in the heavens. And you, who once were alienated 
 and enemies in your purpose, in the midst of wicked works, yet now were ye 
 
 1 Dr. Lightfoot, in his valuable note (p. 209), shows that Christ is spoken of first in 
 relation to God the word tlmav involving the two ideas of Representation and Manifesta- 
 tion ; and, secondly, in relation to created things the words rrptoroTcwco? iro<r) TiVo? 
 involving the idea of mediation between God and Creation, and JTPTOTOKO? being applied 
 to the Logos by Philo, and to the Messiah in Ps. Ixxxix. 27. It implies priority to, and 
 sovereignty over, all creation. It seems as though there were already tendencies to find 
 the cross an offence, and to distinguish between the crucified Jesus and the ascended 
 Christ (L 19, 2022; ii. 69). 
 
 2 Ver. 16, e*KTiV0T/, "created by one word." 
 
 3 No definite angelology can be extracted from these words (of. ii. 18 ; Eph, i. 21), 
 The hierarchies of the pseudo-Dionysius are as entirely arbitrary as Milton's 
 
 " Thrones, dominations, virtues, princedoms, powers, 
 Warriori, the flower of heaven." 
 
 But to say that the passage is gnostic, &c., is absurd in the face of such passages as 
 Rom. viii. 38 ; 1 Cor. xv. 24. 
 
 4 Ver. 16, KTior<u, "have been created, and still continue." 
 
 5 UK is eoriv, not ecrrtv (so Lightfoot), since the tense and the repetition of the 
 pronouns imply pre-existence and personality (John viii. 58 ; Ex. iii. 14). 
 
 6 This rendering "Plenitude" in the sense of "completeness" and "completed 
 fulfilment " will be found to meet all the uses of the words in St. Paul, both in its 
 ordinary sense (1 Cor. x. 26; Rom. xi. 12, 25; xiii. 10; xv. 29; Gal. iv. 4; Eph. i. 10), 
 and in its later quasi -technical sense, as applied to the "totality of the Divine attributes 
 and agencies" (Col. i. 19; ii. 9; Eph. i. 23; iii. 19; iv. 13). It is directly derived from 
 the O.T. usage (Jer. viii. 16, &c.) ; and the later localised usage of Ceriuthus and 
 Valentinus is in turn derived from it. If it be derived from n-Aijpou, in the sense of 
 "fulfil" rather than its sense to "fill," the difficulties of its usage by St. Paul are 
 lessened ; I cannot say that they disappear. Lightfoot, Col. 323339. Those who 
 wish to see other views may find them in Baur, Paul. ii. 93 ; Pfleiderer, ii. 172 ; Holtz- 
 mann, Eph. Col. 222, scq. ; Fritzsche on Rom. x. 1. On the connexion of irA^pwjxo with 
 the Hebrew DlpO there are some valuable remarks in Taylor's Pirque Aboth, p. 54. 
 Makom, " place " = 186, and by Gematria was identified with Yehovah, because the 
 squares of the letters of the Tetragrammaton (10 2 + 5 2 + 6 s + 5 2 ) give the same result 
 (Buxt. Lex Chatd. 2001). So far from being exclusively gnostic, Philo had already said 
 (De Somniis, 1.) that the word has three meanings, of wliich the third is God. Hence 
 the interesting Alexandrianism in the LXX. of Ex. xxiv. 10, elSov rbv roirov o5 t<mjc 
 6 Offa. "God," said a celebrated Jewish proverb, "is not in Ha-Makom [the "Place," 
 the "Universe "1 but all Ha-Makom is in God." 
 
 7 Ver. 19, K aroiKfj(rtu t not a ropoucio or transient, but a Karetxia or permanent abode. 
 Cf. Gen. zxxvi. 44, LXX. ; Karouttlv, aty. ; TropoixnF, 113, &c.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. 617 
 
 reconciled 1 in the body of His flesh by death, to present yourselves holy and un- 
 blemished and blameless before Him, if, that is, ye abide by the faith, founded and 
 firm, and not being ever shifted from the hope of the Gospel which ye heard, -which 
 was proclaimed throughout this sublunary world of which I became I, Paul a 
 minister." 8 
 
 The immense grandeur of this revelation, and the thought that it should 
 have been entrusted to his ministry, at once exalts and humiliates him ; and 
 he characteristically 3 continues : 
 
 " Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and supplement the deficiencies 
 of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh on behalf of His body, which is the Church, 4 
 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship of God granted to me 
 to you-ward, to develop fully the word of God, the mystery 5 which has lain hidden 
 from the ages and the generations, but is now manifested to His saints, to whom 
 God willed to make known what is the wealth of the glory of this mystery among 
 the Gentiles, which mystery is Christ in you the hope of glory ; whom we preach " 
 not to chosen mystae, not with intellectual exclusiveness, not with esoteric reserves, 
 but absolutely and universally " warning every man, and teaching every man in all 
 wisdom, that we may present every man ' perfect ' in Christ. 6 For which end also I 
 toil, contending according to His energy, which works in me in power.? 
 
 " For I wish you to know how severe a contest 8 I have on behalf of you, and 
 those in Laodicea, and all who have not seen my face in the flesh, that their hearts 
 may be confirmed, they being compacted 9 in love, and so brought to all wealth of 
 the full assurance of intelligence, unto the full knowledge of that mystery of God, 
 which is Christ, 10 in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hid 
 treasures," yet, as the whole passage implies, hidden no longer, but now brought 
 to light." "This I say" i.e., I tell you of this possibility of full knowledge for 
 you all, of this perfect yet open secret of wisdom in Christ " that no man may 
 sophisticate you by plausibility of speech. For even though personally absent, yet 
 in my spirit I am with you, rejoicing in and observing your military array, and the 
 solid front of your faith in Christ. As, then, ye received the ChristJesus the 
 
 1 Ver. 21, o7roic<mjXAay>}T (B). The awo, as in an-oXa/m/Sawu- vio8e<rua> (Gal. Iv. 5) and 
 iiroKaTaoroo-w, points to the restoration of a lost condition. 
 
 2 i. 1523. At ver. 20 begins a sketch of Christ's work, first generally (20), then 
 specially to the Colossians (21 23). 
 
 3 Of. Eph. iii. 29 ; 1 Tim. i. 11. 
 
 4 TO. ixrrtmtiMra.. These latter words throw light on the former. Christ's sacrifice is, 
 of course, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins 
 of the whole world," and the sufferings of saints cannot, therefore, be vicarious. But 
 they can be ministrative, and useful nay, even requisite for the continuance of Christ's 
 work on earth ; and in that sense St. Paul, and every "partaker of Christ's sufferings " 
 (2 Cor. i. 7 ; Phil. iii. 10) can " personally supplement in Christ's stead (avra.va.ir\iipC,) 
 what ia lacking of Christ's afflictions on behalf of His body, the Church." Steiger, 
 Maurice, Huth, &c., read "the sufferings of the Christ in my flesh ; " but there can be 
 no xpi<rrbs in the <rop| which Christ destroys. 
 
 6 The mystery of th equal admission of the Gentiles (i. 27 ; iv. 8; Eph. L 10 ; iii. 
 3, 8. and passim). 
 
 * The repetition of the n-ai/ra is a clear warning against esoteric doctrines, and the 
 exclusive arrogance of intellectual spiritualism which is a germ of many heresies. It is 
 naturally a favourite word of the Apostle who had to proclaim the universality of the 
 Gospel (1 Cor. x. 1 ; xii. 29, 30, &c.). Te'Aetos was used of those initiated into the 
 mysteries. 
 
 7 i. 24 29. * Ver. 1. iyiva, referring back to ayw^d/xew, i. 29. 
 
 9 Bead <rv^pifia.<rOevTes. 
 
 10 Ver. 2. Read rov eoO, XPKTTOV. (Lightfoot, Col. p. 318.) 
 " Prov. ii. 4 ; Matt. xiii. 44 ; 1 Cor. ii. 7 ; iv. 5. 
 21
 
 618 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Lord walk in Him, rooted, and being built up in Him, 1 and being confirmed by 
 your faith, even as ye were taught, abounding in that faith with thanksgiving." * 
 
 He has thus given them a general warning against being dazzled by 
 erroneous teaching. He has laid down for them, with firm hand and absolute 
 defiuiteness, the truth that the Pleroma dwells permanently in Christ the 
 sole Lord of the created universe, and therefore the guarantee that there is in 
 matter no inherent element of inextinguishable evil ; the sole Head of the 
 Church, the solo Redeemer of the world ; the solo centre, and source, and 
 revealer of wisdom to all alike, as they had all along boon taught. But it is 
 now time to come to more specific warnings to the more immediate applica- 
 tion of these great eternal principles ; aud he continues ; 
 
 " Look that there be no person [whom one might name] 8 who is carrying you 
 off as plunder by his ' philosophy,' 4 which is vain deceit in accordance with mere 
 human traditions, and earthly rudiments, 5 and not in accordance with Christ. For 
 in Him all the Plenitude of Godhead 6 has bodily its permanent abode, and ye are 
 in Him. fulfilled with Sis Plenitude, who is the head of every ' principality ' and 
 ' power. ' " 7 
 
 From this great truth flow various practical consequences. For instance, 
 the Essene mystic, who was making a prey of them by the empty and specious 
 sophistry which he called philosophy, impressed on them the value of circum- 
 cision, though not, it would seem, with the same insistency as the Christian 
 Pharisees who had intruded themselves into Galatia. But what possible good 
 could circumcision do them P Their circumcision was spiritual, and had 
 already been performed not by human hands, but by Christ Himself ; not as 
 the partial mutilation of one member, but as the utter stripping away from 
 them of the whole body of the flesh. 8 It was, in fact, their baptism, in which 
 they had been buried with Christ, and also raised with Him through their 
 faith in the power of God who raised Him from the dead. 9 
 
 " You, too, doad by transgressions and the uucircumcision of your flesh, God 
 quickened with Him, freely remitting to us all our transgressions, wiping out the 
 bond which, by its decrees, was valid against us,i which was opposed to us this 
 bond He has taken away, nailing it to His cross. Stripping utterly away from Him 
 
 1 Ver. 7. Notice the chaugo from cppt^upcW, the permanent result of stability, to 
 tiroiKoSojuoupet'ot, the continuous process of edification. Notice, too, the confusion of 
 metaphor which is no confusion of thought: "walk," "rooted," "being built/' "being 
 strengthened." 
 
 2 ii. 17. Ver 8, , indefinitely definite (cf. Gal. i. 7). 
 
 4 Remarkable as being the only place where St. Paul uses the word "philosophy," 
 just as he only uses " virtue " once (Phil. iv. 8). Both are superseded by lof cier 
 conceptions. 
 
 * See tupra, p. 439. (Gal. iv. 3, 9.) 
 
 6 Storm, deitaa ; stronger than eeion??, diinnitas. 
 
 ^ ii. 710. 8 Ver. 11, dirSwr.t. Cf. Phil. iii. 10. 
 
 10 Deut. xxvii. 14 26 ; Gal. ii. 19, iv. 9; o*,-iXfT>)*. The "ordinances" are those of th* 
 Mosaic and the natural law. The &6yna<n.v is difficult ; the rendering 'consisting in ordi- 
 nances' would seem to require ev, as in Eph. ii. 15. Also the Greek Fathers made it mean 
 "wiping out by the decrees of the Gospd,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIAN8. 619 
 
 the ' principalities ' and ' powers ' (of wickedness), 1 He made a show of them boldly, 
 leading them in triumph on that cross " 2 thus making the gibbet of the slave His 
 fcretrum, on which to carry the spoils of His triumph as an Eternal Conqueror, after 
 deadly struggle with the clinging forces of spiritual wickedness. 
 
 Since, then, mere legal obligations are part of a dead compact, a torn and 
 cancelled bond, which is now nailed to Christ's Cross 
 
 " Let no one then judge you in eating and drinking, 8 and in the matter of a 
 feast, or a new moon, or Sabbath, 4 which things are a shadow of things to be, but 
 the substance is Christ's. Let no one then snatch your prize from you, by delight- 
 ing in abjectness, 5 and service of the angels, 6 treading the emptiness of his own 
 visiovis 7 in all the futile inflation of his mere carnal understanding, and not keeping 
 hold of Him who is " the Head," from whom, supplied and compacted by its 
 junctures and ligaments, the whole body grows the growth of God. 8 If ye died 
 with Christ from mundane rudiments, why, as though living in the world, are ye 
 ordinance-ridden with such rules as ' Do not handle,' ' Do not taste,' ' Do not even 
 touch,' referring to things all of which are perishable in the mere consumption, 9 ac- 
 cording to ' the commandments and teachings of men ' ? All these kinds of rules have 
 a credit for wisdom in volunteered supererogation 10 and abasement hard usage of the 
 body but have no sort of value as a remedy as regards the indulgence of the nesh." " 
 
 1 Tearing himself free from the assaults of evil spirits, which would otherwise have 
 invested Him as a robe (cf. 1 Pet. v. 5, ty/cowSoWotfe ; Heb. xii. 1, euVepiVraros ; L>a. xL 5, 
 &c.), He carried away their spoils, as trophies, on His cross. 
 
 2 ii. 1115. For OptanpevVas, cf. 2 Cor. ii. 14, infra, p. 700. 
 
 3 ' ' This is the path of the Thorah. A morsel with salt shalt thou eat ; thou shalt 
 drink also water by measure" (Perek. R. Meir). 
 
 4 If after nineteen centuries the Christian Church lias not understood the sacred 
 freedom of this language, we may imagine what insight it required to utter it in St. 
 Paul's day, and how the Jews would gnash their teeth when they heard of it. When 
 "the Emperor " asked E. Akibha how he recognised the Sabbath day, he said, "The 
 river Sambatyon (the so-called ' Sabbatic river ') proves it ; the necromancer proves it 
 (who can do nothing on the Sabbath) ; thy father's grave proves it (which smokes, to 
 show that its tenant is in hell, except on the Sabbath, on which day even hell rests "). 
 Sanhedrin, f. 65, 2. Myriads of passages might be quoted to show that it was the very 
 keystone of the whole Judaic system : see Babha Kama, f. 82, 1 ; Abhdda Zara, f. G4, 2, 
 &c. The law of the Sabbath, as our Lord strove so often to convince the Jews, is a law 
 of holy freedom, not of petty bondage. 
 
 5 PeAwv Iv, 3 ypn, 1 Sam. xviii. 22, &c. See Aug., Beng., Olsh., Lightf. 
 
 " Angelology of the most developed description existed in the Jewish Church long 
 before Gnosticism was heard of. See Gfrorer, Jahr. des Heils. i. 124, seq. I have collected 
 some of the facts in a paper on Jewish Angelology and Demonology (Life of Christ, ii. 4G5, 
 seq.). Neander refers to the K^pvyfia TTeVpov, and Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 635. Theodoret 
 (ii. IS) mentions that even in his day there were oratories to the Archangel Michael. 
 
 ^ a iopaiceK (, A, B, D). Dr. Lightfoot and others make the very simple conjectural 
 emendation, a iopaKev Ktvti<.p<neviov, aut s. a. This does not indeed occur in any MS., but 
 its disappearance would be easily explained (i.) by the homceoteleuton ; (ii.) by the rare 
 verb. The verb xevc/ij3<xTevw (not unlike the aepojSa-oxcalirepi^poi'iTbi/ jjAiov, "I trea.d the air 
 and circumspect the sun," of Arist. Nub. 225, and the aWepojSareiTe of Philo, i. 465) might 
 conceivably have been suggested by one of the heretical theosophic terms, if iceW/xa had 
 ever been used by some incipient Gnostic of that day (as afterwards) by way of antithesis 
 to Pleroma. But may not a eiipoutei< enparcvwx be taken (metaphorically) to mean "dwell- 
 ing upon what He has seen "? 
 
 8 The accordance of the passage with the highest scientific range of that age is remark- 
 able, and may be due to St. Luke. 
 
 9 Mark vii. 123. 
 
 10 Ver. 23, e0e\o0p>,<rKa, a happy coinage of St. Paul's, which Epiphanius expands into 
 *\irpi<r<roepjjoWa (Haer. i. 16). 
 
 11 ii. 1623. This remarkable passage, which is very obscure in the B. V., is an
 
 620 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAtTL. 
 
 The true remedy, he proceeds to imply, is very different : 
 
 "If then ye were raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ 
 is sitting on the right hand of God. Think of the things above, not the things 
 on the earth. For ye died " (to sin in baptism), " and your life has been hidden 
 with Christ in God. When Christ, our life, is manifested, then ye also with Him 
 shall be manifested in glory. Kill then at a blow " not by regulated asceticisms, 
 but by this outburst of a new life, which is in Christ, which is Christ " your 
 members that are on the earth fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and, 
 above all, covetousnoss, for that is idolatry because of which things cometh the 
 wrath of God. 1 In which things ye also walked once, when ye were living in them ; 
 but now put ye away also all vices, anger, wrath, malice, railing, foul calumny, 
 out of your mouths. Lie not one to another, since ye utterly stripped off the old 
 man with his deeds, and put on the new man, which is being ever renewed to full 
 knowledge, according to the image of his Creator, in a region wherein there is no room 
 for Greek or Jew, circumcision or uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, 2 slave, free, 
 but Christ is all things, and in all. Put on then, as elect of God, saints beloved, 
 hearts of compassion, kindness, humbleness, meekness, long-suffering, forbearing one 
 another, and forgiving one another, if any one have a complaint against any one. 
 Even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye. And over all these things put 
 on love, for love is the girdle of perfection ; and let the peace of Christ arbitrate in 
 your hearts, unto which peace ye were even called in one body, and show yourselves 
 thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching one 
 another and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, 3 spiritual songs in grace, 
 singing in your hearts to God. And everything whatever ye do, in word or in 
 deed, do all things in the name of the Lord Jesus, thanking God the Father by 
 Him." 4 
 
 Then follow various practical exhortations to wives to love their husbands, 
 as is eternally fit in the Lord ; 6 to husbands to love their wives, and 
 not behave bitterly towards them ; to children to obey their parents ; to fathers 
 not to irritate their children, that they may not lose heart. 6 To slaves, 
 of whose duties and position he must often have thought recently, from 
 his interest in Onesimus, he gives the precept to obey earthly masters, working 
 as ever in their Great Taskmaster's eye, looking for the reward of faithfulness 
 to Him who would also send the retribution for wrong-doing. On masters 
 he enjoins justice and equity towards their slaves, remarking that they too 
 have a Lord in heaven. 7 
 
 argument against, not for, the worrying scrupulosities of exaggerated asceticism on the 
 ground that they are useless for the end in view. St. Paul might have gone even further ; 
 for the lives of hermits and monks show us that the virulence of temptation is intensified 
 into insupportable agony by the morbid introspection which results from mistaken means 
 of combating it. 
 
 1 Ver. G, our rl TOUS vlous T>J aTreifleios, introduced probably from Eph. v. 6. 
 
 * Ver. 11. The Scythians were the lowest type of barbarians (Gal. iii. 28). 
 
 3 Christian hymnology began very early, though the hymns were not necessarily me- 
 trical (Rev. xv. 3 ; Acts xvi. 25 ; Eph. v. 19, 20 ; Plin. Ep. 97 ; Mart. S. Ign. vli. 
 uSa! in-' ipx^js virb ITKTTUV ypa<f>etocu, Euseb. H. E. v. 28. Rhythmic passages are Eph. v. 14 ; 
 1 Tim. iii. 16 ; vi. 15, 16 ; 2 Tim. ii. 1113 (Diet. Christ. Antt. s. v. Hymns). 
 
 4 iii. 117. 
 
 6 us anjxev, " as ever was, and ever is fitting" (cf. Acts xxii. 22). (See my Brief 
 Greek Syntax, 140.) 
 
 6 Notice the rare originality of the exhortation. Should we expect to find it In 
 a forger ? 
 
 7 iii. 1825. From ouch passages as these were drawn such noble warning rul^a of
 
 THE EPI8TLB TO THIS COLO88IAW8. 621 
 
 Then he tells them to be constant in watchful prayer and thanksgiving, 
 and asks their prayers that God would grant an opening for that ministry for 
 which he was a prisoner. To the outer world he bids them walk in wisdom, 
 buying up every opportunity, and addressing each one to whom they spoke 
 with pleasant and wholesome words " in grace seasoned with salt." * 
 
 He sends no personal news, because that will be conveyed by Tychicus, 
 his beloved brother, and a faithful minister and fellow-slave in the Lord, whom 
 he sends for that purpose 2 to strengthen their hearts, with Onesimus, their 
 fellow-citizen, and now their faithful and beloved brother, whatever he may 
 have been before. He sends them greetings from Aristarchus, his fellow- 
 prisoner; 3 from Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, 4 about whose possible visit 
 they had received special injunctions ; and Jesus surnamed Justus the only 
 three Jewish Christians who worked with him to further God's kingdom, and 
 so became a source of consolation to him. Epaphras, also one of themselves, 
 greets them a slave of Christ Jesus, ever contending on their behalf in his 
 prayers that they may stand perfect and entire in all God's will, and one who 
 was deeply interested in their Churches. Luke the physician, the beloved, 
 greets them, and Demas.' He begs them to greet the Laodicean brethren, and 
 Nymphas, and the church in the house of him and his friends. 8 He orders 
 his Epistle to be publicly read, not only in the Colossian, but also in the 
 Laodicean Church, and bids them read the circular letter which they couldprocure 
 from Laodicea. 7 " And say to Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which 
 thou receivedst in the Lord, that thou fulfil it." 8 The letter concludes with 
 his own autograph salutation, to which he briefly adds, " Remember my bonds. 
 Grace be with you." 8 
 
 It is no part of my present task to trace the subsequent history of 
 
 feudalism as : " Entre toi vilain, et toi seigneur, il n'y a juge fors Dieu." " Le seigneur 
 qui prend des droits injustes de son vilain, les prend au p6ril de son ame " (Beaumanoir). 
 These humble practical rules might be all the more necessary for those who looked on 
 outward family duties as vulgar, and obstructions to spiritual contemplation. (Maurice, 
 Unity, 587.) How different this from ovM >rporye\av 8ovAm 'APTTOT<AT)S eta wn- (Clem. 
 Alex. Strom, iii. 12, 84.) 
 
 1 iv. 1 6. s Iv. 8, leg. Iva. yyure TO. jrepi WLI> (A, B, D, F, Q). 
 
 3 Ver. 10, arvwuxftaXam*. Properly, " a fellow-captive taken in war." So of Epaphras 
 (Philem. 23), Andronicus, Junias (Rom. xvi. 7.) In none of these cases can we tell the 
 exact allusion, or whether the word is literal or metaphorical. 
 
 4 Barnabas was perhaps dead, and thus Mark would be free. Paul seems to have had 
 a little misgiving about his reception. 
 
 5 Perhaps Paul's insight into character is shown by his somewhat ominous silence 
 about Demas. (2 Tim. iv. 10.) 
 
 6 Ver. 15, avrwv (N, A, C) ; OUTT}? (B, Lachm.) ; afrrov (F, Q, K, &c.). 
 
 7 iV Aao&iceias, "written to Laodicea and coming to them from Thrace." Con- 
 structio praegnans. (Brief Greek Syntax, 89; Winer, Ixvi. 6.) There can be little 
 doubt that this was the Epistle to the " Ephesians." The apocryphal Epistle to Laodicea 
 is a miserable cento. (See Lightfoot, Col. 340 366 ; Westcott, Canon, p. 542.) 
 
 8 Archippus is believed to be a son of Philemon, and chief presbyter of Laodicea. 
 If so, Tychicus would see him on his way to Coloasae. It is at least curious that the 
 lukewarmness, the lack of zeal which seems here to be gently rebuked, is the distinguishing 
 character of the Laodicean Church, as represnted by its " angel " in Rev. iii. 15. (Trench, 
 Seven Churches, 180.) 
 
 9 This shorter form is characteristic of Paul's later Epistlea CoL L, 2 Tim., Tit. 
 The longer form is found in all up to this date.
 
 622 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 the Churches of the Lycus. The followers of Baur in Germany, ana 
 of Renan in France, have tried to represent that St. Paul's teaching in Asia 
 was followed by a reaction in which his name was calumniated and his 
 doctrines ignored. The theory is very dubious. The doctrines and the 
 warnings of -St. John to the Seven Churches are closely analogous to, 
 sometimes almost verbally identical with, those of St. Paul ; and the essence 
 of the teaching of both Apostles on all the most important aspects of 
 Christianity is almost exactly the same. An untenable inference has been 
 drawn from the supposed silence of Papias about St. Paul, so far as wo can 
 judgs from the references of Eusebius. It was the object of Papias to collect 
 traditional testimonies from various Apostles and disciples, and of these St. 
 Paul could not have been one. Papias was Bishop of Eierapolis, in which 
 St. Paul may never have set his foot. Even if he did, his visit was brief, and 
 had taken place long before Papias wrote, whereas after the destruction 
 of Jerusalem St. John resided for many years at Ephcsus, and there were 
 ' gathered around him Andrev/, Philip, Aristion, and others who had known the 
 Lord. These were the authorities to which Papias referred for his somewhat 
 loose and credulous traditions, and he may have quoted St. Paul, just 
 as Polycarp does, without its at all occurring to Eusebius to mention the fact. 
 Not only is there no proof of a general apostasy from Pauline principles, but 
 in the decrees of the Council held at Laodicea about the middle of the fourth 
 century, we read the very same warnings against angelolatry, Judaism, and 
 Oriental speculation, which find a place in these Epistles of the Captivity. 
 Colossae itself liable as it was to constant earthquakes, which were rendered 
 more ruinous by the peculiarities of the Lycus with its petrifying waters 
 was gradually deserted, and the churches of Asia finally perished 
 under the withering blight of Islam with its cruelties, its degradation, 
 and its neglect. 
 
 CHAPTER L. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND ONESIMTJS. 
 
 " Quasi vero curent divina de servis ! " MACROS. Sat. i. 11. 
 
 " In servos superbissiini, crudelissimi, contumeliosissimi sumus." SEN. Up. xlvii. 
 
 " Aequalitas naturae et fidoi potior est quam differentia statuum." BENGEL. 
 
 " Through the vista of history we see slavery and its Pagan theory of two 
 races fall before the holy word of Jesus, ' All men are the children of God.' 
 MAZZINI, Works, vi. 99. 
 
 " ' The story is too rare to be true.' Christian faith has answered that. ' It ifl 
 too suggestive to be true.' Christian science has answered that." LAN GE, Apostol. 
 Zeitalt. i. 134. 
 
 IN tho Epistle to the Colossians St. Paul had sent no greeting to Philemon 
 who was a prominent member of that Church because he purposed to write 
 liiiu a separata letter. A man like St. Paul, whose large and loving heart had
 
 ST. PAUL AND ONESIMU8. 623 
 
 won for him so many deeply-attached friends, must have often communicated 
 with them by brief letters, but the Epistle to Philemon is the only private 
 letter of this correspondence which has been preserved for us the only private 
 letter in the canon of the New Testament, with the exception of the brief 
 letter of St. John to the well-beloved Gaius. 1 "We cannot but regret the loss. 
 Hundreds of letters of Cicero, of Seiieca, and of Pliny, have come down to us, 
 and, though some of them are models of grace and eloquence, how gladly 
 would we resign them all for even one or two of those written by the Apostle t 
 In style, indeed, his letter is quite careless and unpolished ; but whereas the 
 letters of the great Romans, with all their literary skill and finish, often leave 
 on us an involuntary impression of the vanity, the insincerity, even in some 
 instances the entire moral instability of their writers, on the other hand, this 
 brief letter of St. Paul reveals to us yet another glimpse of a character worthy 
 of the very noblest utterances which we find in his other Epistles. These few 
 lines, at onee so warmhearted and so dignified, which theological bigotry was 
 once inclined to despise as insignificant, express principles of eternal ap- 
 plicability which even down to the latest times have had no small influence in 
 the development of the world's history. With all the slightness of its texture, 
 and the comparative triviality of the occasion which called it forth, the letter 
 is yet a model of tact, of sympathy, and of high moral nobleness. This little 
 " idyl of the progress of Christianity " 2 shows that under the worn and 
 ragged gabardine of the wandering missionary there beat the heart of a true 
 gentleman, whose high-bred manners would have done honour to any court. 3 
 
 We have seen that during his imprisonment St. Paul was, by " that unseen 
 Providence which men nickname Chance," brought into contact with a 
 runaway slave from Colossse, whose name was Onesimus, or " Profitable." Ho 
 had fled to Koine to Rome, the common sentina of the world 4 to hide 
 himself from the consequences of crimes for which a heat-lien master might 
 without compunction have consigned him to the erga^tulum or the cross ; and 
 in the basement of one of the huge Roman insulae, or in the hovel of some 
 fellow-child of vice and misery in that seething mass of human wretchedness 
 which weltered like gathered scum on the fringe of the glittering tide of 
 civilisation, he was more secure than anywhere else of remaining undetected. 
 What it was that rescued him from the degradations which were the sole 
 possible outcome of such an ill-begun career wo cannot tell. He would soon 
 exhaust what he had stolen from his master ; and as Rome was full to over- 
 flowing of slaves and idlers as the openings for an honest maintenance even 
 5n tho barest poverty were few it is hard to see what resource was left to 
 
 1 The " elect lady " of 2 John 1. 1 is believed to be, not an Individual, bat a Church. 
 s Davies. 
 
 * Even Baur seems to blush for the necessity which made him declare this Epistle 
 spurious. He only does so because it is more or less involved with the other three, and 
 stands or falls with them. "What has criticism to do with this short, attractive, 
 friendly, and graceful letter, inspired as it is by the noblest Christian feeling, and which 
 has never yet been touched by the breath of suspicion ?" (Paul. ii. 80.) 
 
 * SalL Cat. xxxviL 5.
 
 624 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 him except a life of villany. Perhaps in this condition he was met by his 
 fellow- Colossian, Epaphraa, who as a Presbyter of Colossae would be well 
 known to Philemon. Perhaps Aristarchus, or any other of those who had 
 been St. Paul's companions at Ephesus, had come across him, and recognised 
 him as having been in attendance on Philemon at the time of his conversion 
 by St. Paul. Perhaps he had himself been present at some of those daily 
 addresses and discussions in the school of Tyrannus, which, though at the 
 time they had not touched his heart, had at the least shown him the noble 
 nature of the speaker, and revealed to the instinctive sense of one who 
 belonged to an oppressed class, the presence of a soul which could sympathise 
 with the suffering. How this may have been we do not know, but we do 
 know that his hopes were not deceived. The Apostle received him kindly, 
 sympathetically, even tenderly. The Eabbis said, " It is forbidden to teach a 
 slave the Law." l " As though Heaven cared for slaves ! " said the ordinary 
 Pagan, with a sneer. 8 Not so thought St. Paul. In Christianity there is 
 nothing esoteric, nothing exclusive. Onesimus became a Christian. The 
 heart which was hard as a diamond against Pharisaism and tyranny, was yet 
 tender as a mother's towards sorrow and repentant sin. Paul had learnt in 
 the school of Him who suffered the penitent harlot to wash His feet with her 
 tears and wipe them with the hair of her head ; of Him who had said to the 
 convicted adulteress, " Neither do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no more." 
 Paul in no wise shared the anti- Christian respect of persons which made some 
 people in St. Jerome's days 3 argue that it was beneath his dignity to trouble 
 himself about a runaway slave. He understood better than the Fathers that 
 the religion of Christ is the Magna Charta of humanity. The drag-net of His 
 " fishers of men " was dropped to the very depths of the social sea. Here was 
 one whose position was the lowest that could be conceived. He was a slave ; 
 a slave of the country whose slaves were regarded as the worst there were ; a 
 slave who had first robbed a kind master, and then run away from him ; a 
 slave at whom current proverbs pointed as exceptionally worthless,* amenable 
 only to blows, and none the better even for them. 6 In a word, he was a 
 slave; a Phrygian slave; a thievish Asiatic runaway slave, who had no 
 recognised rights, and towards whom no one had any recognised duties. He 
 was a mere " live chattel ; " 8 a mere " implement with a voice ; " T a thing 
 which had no rights, and towards which there were no duties. But St. Paul 
 converted him, and the slave became a Christian, a brother beloved and 
 serviceable, an heir of immortality, a son of the kingdom, one of a royal 
 generation, of a holy priesthood. The satirist Porsius speaks with utter scorn 
 of the rapid process by which a slave became a freeman and a citizen: 
 
 1 Ketubhoth, f. 28, 1. 
 
 2 Macrob. Saturn. IL The better Stoics furnish a noble exception to this tone. 
 
 * In Ep. ad PhUem. 
 
 * Mv<riv rx<mw. Menand. Androg. 7 ', Plat. Theaet. 209, B. 
 
 3 Cic. pro Place. 27. ' Arist. Pol. i. 4, e/xija/xoi- opyoiw. 
 
 7 Varro, de Be Rust. i. 17. " instrument* gentu . . , vooale."
 
 8T. PATJI, AKD ONESIMUS. 625 
 
 " There stands Dama a twopenny stable-boy, and a pilfering scoundrel ; the 
 Praetor touches him. with his wand, and twirls him round, and 
 
 " Momento turbinis, exit 
 
 MARCUS Dama ! . . . . Papae ! Marco spondente recusas 
 Credere tu nummos P Marco sub judice palles ? " 1 
 
 But the difference between Dama the worthless drudge and Marcus Dama the 
 presumably worthy citizen was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the real 
 and unsurpassable difference which separated Onesimus the good-for-nothing 
 Phrygian fugitive from Onesimus the brother faithful and beloved. 
 
 And thus the Epistle to Philemon becomes the practical manifesto of 
 Christianity against the horrors and iniquities of ancient and modern slavery. 3 
 From the very nature of the Christian Church from the fact that it was " a 
 kingdom not of this world " it could not be revolutionary. It was never 
 meant to prevail by physical violence, or to be promulgated by the sword. It 
 was the revelation of eternal principles, not the elaboration of practical details. 
 It did not interfere, or attempt to interfere, with the facts of the established 
 order. Had it done so it must have perished in the storm of excitement 
 which it would have inevitably raised. In revealing truth, in protesting 
 against crime, it insured its own ultimate yet silent victory. It knew that 
 where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. It was loyal to the powers 
 that bo. It raised no voice, and refused no tribute even to a Gaius or a Nero. 
 It did not denounce slavery, and preached no fatal and futile servile war. It 
 did not inflame its Onesimi to play the parts of an Eunus or an Artemio. Yet 
 it inspired a sense of freedom which has been in all ages the most invincible foe 
 to tyranny, and it proclaimed a divine equality and brotherhood, which while 
 it left untouched the ordinary social distinctions, left slavery impossible to 
 enlightened Christian lands. 3 
 
 This delicate relation to the existing structure of society is admirably 
 illustrated by the Letter to Philemon. The tension always produced by the 
 existence of a slave population, vastly preponderant in numbers, was at that 
 moment exceptionally felt. Less than two years before St. Paul wrote to 
 
 1 Pers. Sat. v. 7680. 
 
 2 " Omnia in servum licent " (Sen. Clem. 1. 18). For an only too vivid sketch of what 
 those horrors and iniquities were, see Dollinger, Judenth. u. Heidenth. be. 1, 2 ; Wallon, 
 Hist, de VEsclavage dans I'AntiquitS. The difference between the wisdom which is of the 
 world and the wisdom which is of God may be measured by the difference between the 
 Epistle to Philemon and the sentiments of heathens even so enlightened as Aristotle 
 (Polit. i. 3 ; Eth. Nic. viii. 13) and Plato (Legg. vi. 777, seq. ; Rep. viii. 549). The differ- 
 ence between Christian morals and those of even such Pagans as passed for very models 
 of virtue may be estimated by comparing the advice of St. Paul to Christian masters, 
 and the detestable greed and cruelty of the elder Cato in his treatment of his slaves 
 (Pint. Cat. Maj. x. 21; Plin. H. N. xviii. 8. 3). See too Plautus, passim; Sec. 
 Up. xlvii. ; Juv. Sat. vi. 219, scq. ; Tac. Ann. xiv. 42 45 ; and Plut. Apophthegm, vi. 
 778 (the story of Vedius Pollio). 
 
 3 On the relation of Christianity to slavery see Lecky, Hist, of Rationalism, ii. 258 ; 
 Troplong. De Vlnflumce du Christ sur le Droit civil, &c. ; Gold. Smith, Docs the Bible 
 sanction American Slavery f De Broglie, L*E<jlise ct L'Emp. vi. 498, scq. ; i. 162, 306 ; 
 Wallon, DC VEsclavaye, ii. ad Jin., &c. The feeling is indicated in Rev. iviii. 13. 
 
 21
 
 626 tHE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Philemon, a Consular, a Praefect of the city, named Pedauius Secundus, had 
 been murdered by a slave under circumstances of infamy which characterised 
 that entire epoch. In spite of the pity of the people, the Senate had decided 
 that the old ruthless law, re-established by the Silanian decree under 
 Augustus, should be carried out, and the entire familia of slaves be pxit 
 to death. Regardless of the menaces of the populace, Nero ordered the 
 sentence to be executed by military force, and four hundred human beings of 
 every age and of both sexes had been led through lines of soldiers to their 
 slaughter in spite of the indubitable innocence of the vast majority. This 
 horrible event, together with the thrilling debate to which it had given rise in 
 the Senate, had made the subject of slavery a " burning question " at Borne, 
 and deepened the general feeling which had long found proverbial expression, 
 that "the more slaves the more enemies." In that memorable debate, it had 
 been asserted by C. Cassius Longinus that the only way in which the rich 
 could live in Rome few amid multitudes, safe amid the terrified, or, at the 
 worst, not unavenged among the guilty would be by a rigid adherence to the 
 old and sanguinary law. 
 
 Such then, was the state of things in which St. Paul sat down to write his 
 letter of intercession for the Phrygian runaway. Ho could not denounce 
 slavery ; he could not even emancipate Onesimus ; but just as Moses, " because 
 of the hardness of your hearts," 1 could not overthrow the lex talionis, or 
 polygamy, or the existence of blood-feuds, but rendered them as nugatory as 
 possible, and robbed them as far as he could of their fatal sting, by controlling 
 and modifying influences, so St. Paul established the truths that rendered 
 slavery endurable, and raised the slave to a dignity which made emancipation 
 itself seem but a secondary and even trivial thing. A blow was struck at the 
 very root of slavery when our Lord said, " Te all are brethren." In a 
 Christian community a slave might be a " bishop," and his master only a 
 catechumen ; and St. Paul writes to bid the Corinthians pay due respect and 
 subjection to the household of Stephanas, though some of the Corinthians 
 were people of good position, and these were slaves. 2 Onesimus repaid by 
 gratitude, by affection, by active and cherished services to the aged prisoner, 
 the inestimable boon of his deliverance from moral and spiritual death. 
 Gladly would St. Paul, with so much to try him, with so few to tend him, have 
 retained this warm-hearted youth about his person, one whose qualities, 
 however much they may have been perverted and led astray, wore so naturally 
 sweet and amiable, that St. Paul feels for him all the affection of a father 
 towards a son. 3 And had ho retained him, he felt sure that Philemon would 
 not only have pardoned the liberty, but would even have rejoiced that one over 
 whom he had some claim should discharge some of those kindly duties to the 
 
 1 Matt. six. 8. * See Hausrath, Newt. Zeitg. ii. 405. 
 
 8 It is not said in so many words that Onesinius was young, but the language used 
 respecting him seeins clearly to show that this was the case (Philem. 10, 12, &c.). The 
 expression an^dyxva., like the Latin viscera, is used of sons o! iraiSes <rn\d.yx.va Ax'yovrw 
 (Artemid. Onevrocr. i. 44 ; cf , v. 57)t
 
 ST. PAUL AND ONESIMTT8. 627 
 
 Apostle in his affliction which he himself was unable to render. 1 But Paul 
 was too much of a gentleman 2 to presume on the kindness of even a beloved 
 convert. And besides this, a fault had been committed, and had not yet been 
 condoned. It was necessary to show by example that, where it was possible, 
 restitution should follow repentance, and that he who had been guilty of a 
 great wrong should not be irregularly shielded from its legitimate conse- 
 quences. Had Philemon been a heathen, to send Onesimus to him would have 
 been to consign the poor slave to certain torture, to possible crucifixion. 3 He 
 would, to a certainty, have become henceforth a "branded runaway," a 
 stigmatias,* or liave boon turned into the slave-prison to work in chains. But 
 Philemon was a Christian, and the " Gospel of Christ, by Christianising the 
 master, emancipated the slave." 6 Paul felt quite sure that he was sending 
 back the runaway who had become his dear son, and from whom he could not 
 part without a violent wrench to forgiveness, to considerate kindness, in all 
 probability to future freedom; and at any rate right was right, and he felt that 
 he ought not to shrink from the personal sacrifice of parting with him. He 
 therefore sent him back under the kind care of Tychicus, and happily for us 
 with a " commendatory Epistle," which even Baur apologises for rejecting, 
 and which all the world has valued and admired. 6 It has been compared by 
 Grotius and others with the graceful and touching letter written by the 
 younger Pliny to his friend Sabinianus to intercede for an offending freeclman, 
 who with many tears and entreaties had besought his aid, That exquisitely 
 natural and beautifully-written letter does credit both to Pliny's heart and to 
 his head, and yet polished as it is in style, while St. Paul's is written with a 
 sort of noble carelessness of expression, it stands for beauty and value far 
 below the letter to Philemon. In the first place, it is for a young freedman 
 who had been deeply beloved, and not for a runaway slave. In the next place, 
 it is purely individual, and wholly wanting in the large divine principle which 
 underlies the letter of St. Paul. And there are other marked differences. 
 Paul has no doubt whatever about the future good conduct of Onesimus ; but 
 
 1 Philem. 13, fra vnep <rov fioi faaKovfi. It is unlikely that SKUCOVW here implies religioui 
 assistance. 
 
 3 Many writers have felt that no word but "gentleman," in its old and truest sense, 
 is suitable to describe the character which this letter reveals. (Stanley, Cor. 391 ; Newman, 
 Serm. on Various Occasions, 133.) "The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther 
 not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle was, but almost as great a genius '' 
 (Coleridge, Table Talk). 
 
 3 Juv. Sat. vi. 219 ; Plin. Ep. ix. 21, " Ne torseris ilium." 
 
 4 8pair6TT)s e<TTiynfvos (Ar. Av. 759), (Becker, Charikles, p. 370.) 
 1 Bp. "Wordsworth. 
 
 6 Baur's rejection of it is founded on un-Pauliue expressions i.e., expressions which 
 only occur in other Epistles which he rejects ; on the assertion that the circumstances are 
 improbable ; and that the word (nr^ayxya. which he admits to be Pauline, and which 
 might, he says, have occurred twice is used three times ! The Epistle is therefore to 
 him an "Embryo einer Christtichen DifMung." Admissirismntencatis? Tho " Vorwurf 
 der HyperkriMk, eines ubertriebenen Misstrauens, einer alles angreif enden Zweifelsucht " 
 is, however, one which applies not only to his criticism of this Epistle, but to much of 
 his general method ; only w this instance, as Wiesinger says, it is not only Hyperkrtiik 
 But Unkritik.
 
 628 THE LIFE AND WORK Of ST. PAUL. 
 
 Pliny thinks that the young freedman may offend again. Pliny assumes that 
 Sabinianus is and will be angry; Paul has no such fear about Philemon. 
 Paul pleads on the broad ground of Humanity redeemed in Christ; Pliny 
 pleads the youth and the tears of the freedman, and the affection which his 
 master had once felt for him. Paul does not think it necessary to ask 
 Philemon to spare punishment ; Pliny has to beg his friend not to use torture. 
 Paul has no reproaches for Onesimns ; Pliny severely scolded his young 
 suppliant, and told him without meaning to keep his word that he should 
 never intercede for him again. The letter of Pliny is the letter of an excellent 
 Pagan ; but the differences which separate the Pagan from the Christian stand 
 out in every line. 1 
 
 CHAPTER LI. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON, 
 
 " Servi sunt ? immo conservi." SEN. 
 
 " Evangelico decore conscripta est." JER. 
 
 " Epistola familiaris, mire aerrtTos summae sapientiae praebitura specimen.** 
 BENGEL. 
 
 " Ita modeste ct suppliciter pro infimo homine se dimittit ut vix alibi usquam 
 rnagis ad vivum sit expressa ingenii ejus mansuetudo." CALVIN. 
 
 " PAUL, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy the brother, to Philemon, our 
 beloved and fellow- worker, and to Apphia the sister, 2 and to Archippus our fellow- 
 soldier, and to the Church in thy house ; grace to you, and peace from God our 
 Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 " I thank my God always, making mention of thee in my prayers hearing thy 
 love, and the faith thou hast towards the Lord Josus and unto all the saints 3 that 
 the kindly exercise of thy faith may become effectual, in the full knowledge of every 
 blessing we possess, unto Christ's glory. For I had much joy and consolation in 
 thy love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed by thee, brother. 
 
 " Although, then, I feel much confidence in Christ to enjoin upon thee what is 
 fitting, yet I rather entreat thee for love's sake, being such an one as Paul the aged, 4 
 and at this moment also a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I entreat thee about my child, 
 whom I begot in my bonds Onesimus once to thee the reverse of his name profit- 
 
 1 A translation of Pliny's letter will be found in Excursus XI. (Ep. ix. 21.) 
 
 2 The reading is uncertain, but N, A, D, E, F, G (15 is here deficient) read aSetyrj, and 
 we jud^e from Theodore of Mopsuestia that ayamjTT) may in his age, and perhaps in the 
 Apostle's, have given rise to coarse remarks from coarse mindft. 
 
 3 Ver. 5, jrpbs . . . tit. 
 
 4 Ver. 9, TOIOVTOS &v ws is not unclassical, as Meyer asserts. (See instances in Light- 
 foot, Col., p. 404.) St. Paul must at this time have been sixty years old, and people of 
 that age, particularly when they have been battered, as he had been, by all the storms 
 of life, naturally speak of themselves as old. I cannot think that this means " an ambas- 
 sador (Eph. vi. 20). To say nothing of the fact that the reading is irpe<r/3vTi), not 
 7rpe<r/3euT>js, and allowing that the two might often have been confused (just as, indeed, 
 Trpeo-pi? and irpeo-/3euTTj? interchange the meanings of their plurals), yet would P&ul have 
 taid "an ambassador" without saying of whom?
 
 THE EPISTLE TO PHILEMON. 629 
 
 less 1 not 'profitable,' and no Christian, but now truly profitable* and a good 
 Christian whom I send back to thee. Him that is the son of my bo-.vels, 3 whom I 
 should have preferred to retain about my own person that he may on thy behalf 
 minister to me in the bonds of the Gospel but without thy opinion I decided to do 
 nothing, that thy kindly deed may not be a matter of compulsion, but voluntary. 
 For perhaps on this account he was parted for a season, that thou mayst have him 
 back for ever, no longer as a slave, but above a slave, a brother beloved, especially 
 to me, but how far more to thee, both naturally and spiritually. If, then, thou 
 boldest me as a comrade, receive him like myself. But if he wronged thee in any 
 respect, or is in thy debt, set that down to me. I Paul write it with my own hand, 
 I will repay it 4 not to say to thee that thou owest me even thyself besides. Yes, 
 brother, may I ' profit ' by thee in the Lord. 5 Kefresh my heart in Christ. Con- 
 fiding in thy compliance I write to thee, knowing that even more than I say thou 
 wilt do. But further than this, prepare for me a lodging, for I hope that by means 
 of your prayers I shall be granted to you. 
 
 " There salute thee Epaphras, my fellow-prisoner in Christ Jesus, Marcus, Aris- 
 tarchus, Demas, Luke, my fellow-labourers. 
 
 " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with the spirit of you and yours." 
 
 1 oxp. Litotes; crat enim noxius (Bengel). 
 
 2 Ver. 11. There seems here, as Baur acutely observes, to be a double paronomasia, 
 which I have endeavoured to indicate. For Xpiorbs and Xpijorbs were confused with each 
 other, and the Christians did not dislike this. ' rov /conjyopov/iuVov q.uwc ovoVai-o? 
 
 Xpi)<rroTaTot vna.pxoii.ev XP'OTiai/oi yap ilrai Karqyopovjiefa TOV 5e XP I ) OT 1 ' f"<m<T0ai ou SiKaiov 
 
 (Justin, Apol. i. 4). (Tert. Apol. 3.) Supra, p. 169. 
 
 3 "Son of my bowels, Anselm ! (Browning, The Bishop's Tomb.) SnAayxva = eor- 
 culum, "my very heart;" "the very eyes of me;" Dtim. The elliptic form of the 
 sentence, so characteristic of St. Paul, is filled up in some MSS. by 20 Se avroV, TevVeari 
 TO. fia tnrA.ayxva irp<xrA.aj3oO. 
 
 * 'Airi ypafj.uM.riov (a bond) rrjvSt Ka.rt\t TIJI' nrioroAiji'* irirav aiirij v yeypa.<f>a (Theodoret). Some 
 have supposed that Paul here took the pen from the amanuensis, and that this is the 
 only autograph sentence. Oosterzee, &c., treat this as "a good-humoured jest;" and 
 others think it unlike the delicacy which never once reminds the Judaisers of the chaluka 
 which St. Paul had toiled to raise. But a slave was valuable, and something in the 
 character of Philemon may have led to the remark. Bengel rightly says, Vinctus 
 scribit serio," as a father pays the debts of his son. Schrader. Lardner, Bleek, Hackett 
 regard it as "no better than calumny " to say that Onesimus had stolen anything. 
 
 5 Ver. 20, opoijtup'. " I send you back an Onesimus now worthy of his name ; will 
 you be my Onesimus ?" It is vain for critics to protest against these plays on names. 
 They have been prevalent in all ages, and hi all writers, and in all countries, as I have 
 shown by multitudes of instances in Chapters on Language, ch. xxii. As a parallel to 
 this play on Onesimus, compare Whitefield's personal appeal to the comedian Shuter, 
 who had often played the character of Ramble " And thou, poor Ramble, who hast so 
 often rambled from Him .... Oh, end thy ramblings and come to Jesus." 
 
 6 Paul had been trained as a Rabbi. To see what Christianity had taught him we 
 have only to compare his teachings with those of his former masters. Contrast, for 
 instance, the Rabbinic conception of a slave with that tender estimate of human worth 
 that high conception of the dignity of man as man which stands out so beautifully 
 in this brief letter. The Rabbis taught that on the death of a slave, whether male or 
 female and even of a Hebrew slave the benediction was not to be repeated for the 
 mourners, nor condolence offered to them. It happened that on one occasion a female 
 slave of Rabbi Eliezer died, and when his disciples came to condole with him he retired 
 from them from room to room, from upper chamber to hall, till at last he said to them, 
 "I thought you would feel the effects of tepid water, but you are proof even against hot 
 water. Have I not taught you that these signs of respect are not to be paid at the death 
 of slaves?" "What, then," asked the disciples, "are pupils on such occasions to say to 
 their masters?" "The same as is said when their oxen and asses die," answered the 
 Rabbi " May the Lord replenish thy loss." They were not even to be mourned for bj 
 their masters; Rabbi Jose only permitted a master to say "Alas, a good and faithful 
 man, and one who lived by his labour ! " But even this was objected to aa being to? 
 much LBerachtih. f. 16, 2 ; Maimonides, Hilch. Aval., 12 ; Hal. 12).
 
 630 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTL. 
 
 When Pliny interceded with Sabinianus for the offending freedman, he 
 was able to write shortly afterwards, " You have done well in receiving back 
 your freedman to your house and heart. This will give you pleasure, as it 
 certainly gives me pleasure ; first, because it shows me your self-control, and 
 secondly, because you esteem mo sufficiently to yield to my authority, and 
 make a concession to my entreaties." What was the issue of St. Paul's letter 
 we are not told, but we may feel quite sure that the confidence of one who 
 was so skilful a reader of human character was not misplaced ; that Philemon 
 received his slave as kindly as Sabinianus received bis freedman ; that he for- 
 gave him, and not merely took him into favour, but did what St. Paul does 
 not ask, but evidently desired, namely, set him free. 1 We may be sure, too, 
 that if St. Paul was ever able to carry out his intended visit to Colossse, it was 
 no more "lodging" that Philemon prepared for him, but a home under his 
 own and Apphia's roof, where they and the somewhat slack Archippus; and 
 the Church that assembled in their house, might enjoy his beloved society, and 
 profit by his immortal words. 
 
 CHAPTER LH. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 
 
 Tp 'KK\t}ffl<f TjJ a.iop.aKapTa.T<prfj ofiffr)lv'E.<l>tfftp T?JJ Afftas. ISNAT. ad Eph. i 
 " Nulla Epistola Pauli tanta habet mysteria tarn reconditis senflibus involuta.*' - 
 JEK. in Eph. iii. 
 
 . EPH. iv. 4. 
 
 THE polemical speciality of the Epistle to the Colossians, compared with 
 the far more magnificent generality of the great truths which occupy the 
 earlier chapters of the Epistle to " the Epliesiaus," 2 seems (as we have already 
 
 1 The ecclesiastical traditions about Philemon's episcopate, martyrdom, &c., are too 
 late ami worthless to deserve mention ; and the samo may be said of those respecting 
 Onesimus. As far as dates are concerned, he might be the Onesimus, Bishop of Ephesus, 
 mentioned forty-four years later by St. Ignatius. A postscript in two MSS. says that he 
 was martyred at Rome by having his legs broken on the rack. 
 
 2 That the Epistle was meant for the Ephesiaus, amonff^thers, is generally admitted. 
 and Alford points out the suitableness of " the Epistle of the grace of God " to a church 
 where Paul had specially preached " the Gospel of the grace of God " (Acts xx. 24, 3i!). 
 And the pathetic appeal contained in the words o SeV^tos (iii. 1 ; iv. 1) would come home 
 to those who had heard the prophecy of Acts xx. 22. Other points of parallel between 
 this Epistle and that to the Ephesian elders are the rare use of /?ou\>; (i. 11 ; Acts xx. 27), 
 of irepiiro)<r< (i. 14 ; cf. Acts xx. 28), and of <A>)po:<o;iia (i. 14, 18 ; v. 6 ; Acts xx. 32 ; and 
 Maurice, Unity, 512 514). But without going at length into the often-repeated argu- 
 ment. the mere surface-phenomena of the Epistle not by any means the mere omission 
 of salutations, and of the name of Timothy but the want of intimacy and speciality, 
 the generality of the thanksgiving, the absence of the word " brethren" (see vi 10), the 
 distance, so to speak, in the entire tone of address, together with the twice-repeated elye 
 (iii. 2 ; iv. 21). and the constrained absence of strong personal appeal in iii. 24, would 
 alone be inexplicable, even if there were no external grounds for doubting the authenticity 
 of the words <!> '$&. But when we find these words omitted for no conceivable reason 
 in N, B, and know, on the testimony of Basil, that he had been traditionally informed of
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 631 
 
 observed) to furnish a decisive proof that the latter, to some extent, sprang 
 out of the former, and that it was written because the Apostle desired to 
 utilise the departure of Tychicus with the letter which had been evoked by 
 the heresies of Colossae. 
 
 Of the genuineness of the Epistle, in spite of all the arguments which have 
 been brought against it, I cannot entertain the shadow of a doubt. I examine 
 the question without any conscious bias. If the arguments against its Pauline 
 authorship appeared valid, I am aware of no prepossession which would lead 
 me to struggle against their force, nor would the deepest truths of the Epistle 
 appear to me the less profound or sacred from the fact that tradition had erred 
 in assigning its authorship. 1 
 
 To the arguments which endeavoured to show that the Phaedo had not 
 been written by Plato it was thought almost sufficient to reply 
 
 el fj.f fl\dra>y ov ypdtye 5t5o> tjfvovro H\drtaves. 
 
 Certainly if St. Paul did not write the Epistle to " the Ephesians," there must 
 have been two St. Pauls. Banr speaks contemptuously of such an objection ; 2 
 but can any one seriously believe that a forger capable of producing the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians could have lived and died unheard of among the 
 holy, but otherwise very ordinary, men and mediocre writers who attracted 
 notice in the Church of the first century ? It is true that De Wette, and his 
 followers, 3 treat the Epistle de haut en bos as a verbose and colourless repro- 
 duction, quite inferior to St. Paul's genuine writings, and marked by poverty 
 of ideas and redundance of words. We can only reply that this is a matter of 
 taste. The colour red makes no impression on the colour-blind ; and to some 
 readers this Epistle has seemed as little colourless as is the body of heaven in 
 
 or omsson, an oun em ome, v TO? naXaios TUV avnypaav, as aso arcon, 
 
 Tcrtullian, and Jerome, we are led to the unhesitating conclusion that the letter was not 
 addressed exclusively to the Ephesians. The view which regards it as an encyclical, sent, 
 among other places, to Laodicea, is highly prohable (Col. iv. 16). In Eph. vi. 21, /cal 
 v^f?? is most easily explicable, on the supposition that the letter was to go to different 
 cities. In any case, the absence of greetings, &c., is a clear mark of genuineness, for a 
 forger would certainly have put them in. The Epistle is by no means deficient in external 
 evidence. Irenaeus (Hatr. v. 2, 3), Clement of Alexandria (Strom, iv. 8), Polycarp (ad 
 Phil. L, xii.), Tertullian (adv. Marc. v. 1, 17), and perhaps even Ignatius (ad Eph. vi.), 
 have either quoted or alluded to it ; and it is mentioned in the Muratorian Canon. Im- 
 pugners of its authenticity must account for its wide and early acceptance, no less than 
 for the difficulty of its forgery. It is a simple fact that the Epistle was accepted as 
 unquestionably Pauline from the days of Ignatius to those of Schleiermacher. Renan 
 sums up the objections to its authenticity under the heads of (i.) Recurrent phrases and 
 an-af \ey6iJLf-va. ', (ii.) style weak, diffused, embarrassed ; (iii. ) traces of advanced Gnosticism ; 
 
 !iv.) developed conception of the Church as a living organism ; (v.) un-Pauline exegesis ; 
 vi.) the expression "holy Apostles;" (vii.) un-Pauline views of marriage. I hope to 
 show that these objections are untenable. 
 
 1 That the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by the Apostle is now almost 
 universally believed, yet this conviction has never led the Church to underrate its value 
 as a part of the sacred canon of the New Testament Scriptures. 
 " Paul. ii. 2. 
 
 8 Dr. Davidson, Introd. ii. 388. In his earlier edition, Dr. Davidson thought 
 "nothing more groundless " than such assertions, and he then said, "The language is 
 rich and copious, but it is everywhere pregnant with meaning." (See Gloag, Introd.. 
 p. 313,)
 
 632 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAtTL. 
 
 its clearness. Chrysostoin no bad judge surely of style and rhetoric spoke 
 of the lofty sublimity of its sentiments. Theophylaet dwells on the same 
 characteristics as suitable to the Ephesians. Grotius says St. Paul here 
 equals the sublimity of his thoughts with words more sublime than any human 
 tongue has ever uttered. Luther reckoned it among the noblest books of the 
 New Testament. Witsius calls it a divine Epistle glowing with the flame of 
 Christian love, and the splendour of holy light, and flowing with fountains of 
 living water. Coleridge said of it, " In this, the divinest composition of man, 
 is every doctrine of Christianity: first, those doctrines peculiar to Chris- 
 tianity ; and secondly, those precepts common to it with natural religion," 
 Lastly, Alf ord calls it " the greatest and most heavenly work of one whose 
 very imagination is peopled with things in the heavens, and even his 
 fancy rapt into the visions of God." Pfleiderer, though he rejects the 
 genuineness of the Epistle, yet says that " of all the forms which Paulinism 
 went through in the course of its transition to Catholicism, that of the 
 Epistle to the Ephesians is the most developed and the richest in dogma." 
 
 The close resemblance in expression, and in many of the thoughts, to 
 the Epistle to the Colossians, when combined with the radical differences l 
 which separate the two Epistles, appears to me an absolutely irresistible 
 proof in favour of the authenticity of both, even if the external evidence 
 were weaker than it is. Roughly speaking, we may say that the style 
 of Colossians shows a " rich brevity ; " that of Ephesians a diffuser fulness. 
 Colossians is definite and logical; Ephesians is lyrical and Asiatic. In 
 Golossians, St. Paul has the error more prominently in view ; in Ephesians 
 ho has the counteracting truth. In Colossians he is the soldier; in Ephe- 
 sians the builder. In Colossians he is arguing against a vain and deceitful 
 philosophy; in Ephesians he is revealing a heavenly wisdom. Colossians 
 is " his caution, his argument, his process, and his work-day toil ; " Ephe- 
 sians is instruction passing into prayei*, a creed soaring into the loftiest of 
 Evangelic Psalms. Alike the differences and the resemblances are stamped 
 with an individuality of style which is completely beyond the reach of 
 imitation. 2 A forger might indeed have sat down with the deliberate pur- 
 pose of borrowing words and phrases and thoughts from the Epistle to 
 the Colossians, but in that case it would have been wholly beyond his 
 power to produce a letter which, in the midst of such resemblances, con- 
 
 1 There is the general resemblance that in both (Col. iii. ; Eph. iv. 1) the same tran- 
 sition leads to the same application the humblest morality being based on the sublimest 
 truths ; and there are the special resemblances (<*) in Christological views ; (ft) in phrase- 
 ology seventy-eight verses out of 155 being expressed in the same phrases in the two 
 Epistles. On the other hand, there are marked differences (a) there are airo| 
 
 in both ; {) the leading word TO. f-n-ovpavia is peculiar to Ephesians ; (y) Ephesians has 
 deep thoughts and whole sections (i. 314 ; iv. 515 ; v. 7 14 ; 2331 ; vi. 1017) 
 which are not found in Colossians ; (S) there are seven Old Testament allusions or 
 quotations in Ephesians, and only one in Colossians (ii. 21). 
 
 2 Hence the critics are quite unable to make up their minds whether the Epistles were 
 written by two authors, or by one author ; and whether St. Paul was in part the author 
 of either or of neither ; and whether the Colossians was an abstract of the Ephesians, 01 
 the Ephesians an amplification of the Colossiaua.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 633 
 
 veyed so different an impression in a style so characteristic and so intensely 
 emotional. 1 Even if we could regard it as probable that any one could 
 have poured forth truths so exalted, and moral teaching so pure and pro- 
 found, in an Epistle by which he deliberately intended to deceive the 
 Church and the world, 2 it is not possible that one actuated by such a pur- 
 pose should successfully imitate the glow and rush of feeling which marks 
 the other writings of the Apostle, and expresses itself in the to-and-fro- 
 conflicting eddies of thought, in the one great flow of utterance and pur- 
 pose. The style of St. Paul may be compared to a great tide ever advanc- 
 ing irresistibly towards the destined shore, but broken and rippled over 
 every wave of its broad expanse, and liable at any moment to mighty 
 refluences as it foams and swells about opposing sandbank or rocky cape. 9 
 With even more exactness we might compare it to a river whose pure 
 waters, at every interspace of calm, reflect as in a mirror the hues of 
 heaven, but which is liable to the rushing influx of mountain torrents, and 
 whose reflected images are only dimly discernible in ten thousand fragments 
 of quivering colour, when its surface is swept by rufning winds. If we 
 make the difficult concession that any other mind than tha,t of St. Paul 
 could have originated the majestic statement of Christian truth which is 
 enshrined in the doctrinal part of the Epistle, we may still safely assert, 
 on literary grounds alone, that no writer, desirous to gain a hearing for such 
 high revelations, could have so completely merged his own individuality in 
 that of another as to imitate the involutions of parentheses, the digressions 
 at a word, the superimposition of a minor current of feeling over another 
 
 1 The similarity of expressions (Davidson, Introd. L 384) often throws into more 
 marked relief the dissimilarity in fundamental ideas. It is another amazing sign of the 
 blindness which marred the keen insight of Baur in other directions, that he should say 
 the contents of the Epistles "are so essentially the same that they cannot well be dis- 
 tinguished"! (Paul. ii. 6.) The metaphysical Christology, which is polemically dwelt 
 upon in the Colossians, is only assumed and alluded to in the Ephesians; and the 
 prominent conceptions of Predestination and Unity which mark the doctrinal part of the 
 Ephesians find little or no place in the Colossians. The recurrence of any word ^ns 
 icriSdireo-o-i vewrarr) <i//4>iirA7/T<u is a common literary phenomenon, and any careful student 
 of ^Eschylus is aware that if he finds a startling word or metaphor he may find it again 
 in the next hundred lines, even if it occurs in no other play. Nothing, therefore, was 
 more natural than that there should be a close resemblance, especially of the moral parts 
 of two Epistles, written perhaps within a few days of each other ; and that even though 
 the doctrinal parts had different objects, and were meant for different readers, we should 
 find alternate expansions or abbreviations of the same thoughts and the repetition of 
 phrases so pregnant as 6 TI-AOUTOS rijs Jofrj? (Eph. i. 18; Col. i. 27) ; TO irAijpw^a (Eph. i. 23 j 
 
 Col. i. 19); irpiTO(U.i| ax<Hpoiroir)To's (Eph. ii. 11; Col. ii. 11); and 6 TroAcubs a^pun-os (Eph. 
 
 iv. 22 ; Col. iii. 9). When Schneckenburger talks of " a mechanical use of materials " he 
 is using one of those phrases which betray a strong bias, and render his results less 
 plausible than they might otherwise seem. '" How can he have overlooked the 
 memorable fact, which all readers of the Epistle have noticed, that the idea of catho- 
 licity is here first raised to dogmatic definiteness and predominant significance?" 
 (Pfieiderer, ii. 164.) 
 
 2 iii. 1, 8, &c. 
 
 3 " Every one must be conscious of an overflowing fulness in the style of this Epistle, 
 as if the Apostle's mind could not contain the thoughts that were^at work in him, as if 
 each one that he uttered had a luminous train before it and behind it, from which it 
 could not disengage itself " (Maurice, Unity of the New Testament, p. 535),
 
 634 THB LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 that is flowing steadily beneath it, the unconscious recurrence of haunting 
 expressions, the straggle and strain to find a worthy utterance for thoughts 
 and feelings which burst through the feeble bands of language, the dominance 
 of the syllogism of emotion over the syllogism of grammar the many other 
 minute characteristics which stamp so ineffaceable an impress on the Apostle's 
 undisputed works. This may, I think, bo pronounced with some confidence 
 to be a psychological impossibility. The intensity of the writer's feelings is 
 betrayed in every sentence by the manner in which great truths interlace each 
 other, and are yet subordinated to one main and grand perception. Mannerisms 
 of style may be reproduced ; but let any one attempt to simulate the lan- 
 guage of genuine passion, and every reader will tell him how ludicrously he 
 fails. Theorists respecting the spuriousness of some of the Pauline Epistles 
 have, I think, entirely underrated the immense difficulty of palming upon the 
 world an even tolerably successful imitation of a style the mosi living, the 
 most nervously sensitive, which the world has ever known. The spirit in 
 which a forger would have sat down to write is not the spirit which could 
 have pom-ed forth so grand a eucharistic hymn as the Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians. 1 Fervour, intensity, sublimity, the unifying or, if I may use the 
 expression, esemplastic power of the imagination over the many subordinate 
 truths which strive for utterance ; the eagerness which hurries the Apostle to 
 his main end in spite of deeply important thoughts which intrude themselves 
 into long parentheses and almost interminable paragraphs all these must, 
 from the very nature of literary composition, have been far beyond the roach 
 of one who could deliberately sit down with a lie in his rigut hand to write a 
 false superscription, and boast with trembling humility of the unparalleled 
 spiritual privileges entrusted to him as the Apostle of the Gentiles. 
 
 A strong bias of prejudice against the doctrines of the Epistle may 
 perhaps, in some minds, have overborne the sense of literary possibilities. 
 But is there in reality anything surprising in the developed Christology of 
 St. Paul's later years P That his views respecting the supreme divinity of 
 Christ never wavered will hardly, I think, be denied by any candid contro- 
 versialist. They are as clearly, though more implicitly, present in the First 
 Epistle to the Thessalonians as in the Second Epistle to Timothy. No human 
 being can reasonably doubt the authenticity of the Epistle to the Romans ; 
 yet the Pauline evangel logically argued out in that Epistle is identical with 
 that which is so triumphantly preached in this. They are not, as Reuss has 
 observed, two systems, but two methods of exposition. In the Romans, 
 Paul's point of view is psychologic, and his theology is built on moral facts 
 the universality of sin, and the insufficiency of man, and hence salvation by 
 the grace of God, and union of the believer with the dead and risen Christ. 
 But in the Ephesians the point of view is theologic the idea of God's eternal 
 plans realised in the course of ages, and the unity in Christ of redeemed 
 humanity with the family of heaven. " The two great dogmatic teachers of 
 
 1 J. LI. Davies, Eph., p. 19,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 635 
 
 the sixteenth century, both essentially disciples of St. Paul, have both, so to 
 speak, divided between them the inheritance of their master. The manual of 
 Molancthon attaches itself to the Epistle to the Romans; the ' Institiites ' 
 of Calvin follow the direction marked out in that to the Ephesians ; party 
 spirit will alone be able to deny that, in spite of this difference of method, the 
 system of the two writers has, after all, been one and the same." * Is there a 
 word respecting Christ's exaltation in the Epistle to the Ephesians which 
 implies a greater or diviner Being than Him of whom St. Paul has spoken as 
 the Final Conqueror in the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corin- 
 thians ? 
 
 "We can imagine that when he began to dictate this circular letter to the 
 Churches of Asia, the one overwhelming thought in the mind of the Apostle 
 was the ideal splendour and perf ectness of the Church of Christ, and the con- 
 sequent duty of holiness which was incumbent on all its members. The thought 
 of Humanity regenerated in Christ by an eternal process, and the consequent 
 duty of all to live in accordance with this divine enlightenment these 
 are the double wings which keep him in one line throughout his raptm-ous 
 flight. Hence the Epistle naturally fell into two great divisions, doctrinal and 
 practical ; the idea and its realisation ; pure theology and applied theology ^ 
 the glorious unity of the Church in Christ its living head, and the moral 
 exhortations which sprang with irresistible force of appeal from this divine 
 mystery. But as he was in all his doctrine laying the foundations of practice, 
 and throughout founded the rules of practice on doctrine, the two elements 
 are not so sharply divided as not to intermingle and coalesce in the general 
 design. The glory of the Christian's vocation is inseparably connected with the 
 practical duties which result from it, and which it was directly intended to 
 educe. Great principles find their proper issue in the faithful performance of 
 little duties. 
 
 It is naturally in the first three chapters that St. Paul is most overpowered 
 by the grandeur of his theme. Universal reconciliation in Christ as the central 
 Being of the Universe is the leading thought both of the Ephesians and the 
 Colossiaus, and it is a deeper and grander thought than that of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, which only sees this unity in Christ's priesthood, or that of the 
 Pseudo-Clementines, which sees it in Christ as the Prophet of Truth. 3 St. 
 Paul is endeavouring to impress upon the minds of all Christians that they 
 have entered upon a now aeon of God's dispensations the ceon of God's ideal 
 Church, which is to comprehend all things in heaven and on earth. Round this 
 central conception, as round a nucleus of intense light, there radiate the con- 
 siderations which he wishes them specially to bear in mind : namely, that this 
 perfected idea is the working out of a purpose eternally conceived ; that the 
 ceconomy i.e., the Divine dispensation 3 of all the past circumstances 
 of history has been fore-ordained before all ages to tend to its completion ; 
 that, it is a mystery t.e,,a truth hidden from previous ages, but now revealed ; 
 
 1 Reuss, Les Epitrcs Paulin. ii. 146. 
 
 * Baur, First Three Cent. i. 126. olMvop.*, Epli. i. 10; iii. 2,
 
 636 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 that each Person of the Blessed Trinity has taken direct part therein ; that 
 this plan is the result of free grace ; that it is unsurpassable in breadth and 
 length, and height and depth, being the exhibition of a love of which the 
 wealth is inexhaustible and passes knowledge ; that the benefits of it extend 
 alike to Jew and Gentile ; that it centres in the person of the risen Christ ; 
 and that to the Apostle himself, unworthy as he is, is entrusted the awful 
 responsibility of preaching it among the Gentiles. 
 
 The incessant recurrence of leading words connected with these different 
 thoughts is a remarkable feature of the first three chapters. 1 Thus, in the 
 endeavour to express that the whole great scheme of redemptive love is part of 
 the Divine "Will" and "Purpose," those two words are frequently repeated, 
 Grace (x<fy s ) is so prominent in the Apostle's mind that the word is used 
 thirteen times, and may be regarded as the key-note of the entire Epistle. 3 
 The writer's thoughts are so completely with the risen and ascended Christ 
 as the head, the centre, the life of the Church, that he six times uses the 
 expression " the heavenlies " without any limitation of time or place. 3 He 
 feels so deeply the necessity of spiritual insight to counteract the folly 
 of fancied wisdom, that the work of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man 
 is here peculiarly prominent. 4 The words "wealth," 6 and "glory," 6 and 
 "mystery," 7 and "plenitude," 8 show also the dominant chords which are 
 vibrating in his mind, while the frequent compounds in farip, -n-po, and fftv, 9 
 gbow how deeply he is impressed with the loftiness, the fore-ordainment, and 
 the result of this Gospel in uniting the Jew and Gentile within one great 
 spiritual Temple, of which the middle wall has been for ever broken down. " It 
 would, indeed," says Mr. Maurice, "amply repay the longest study to examine 
 the order in which these details are introduced, in what relation they stand to 
 each other, how they are all referred to one ground, the good pleasure of His 
 
 1 ee'XTjfta, Eph. L 1, 5, 9, 11 (v. 17 ; vi. 6) ; /3ovXtj, L 11 ; tb&oKtn, i. 9 ; trpd0o-i, iii. 11. 
 
 2 x< p ts , u 2, 6 (W), 7 ; ii. 5, 7, 8 ; iii. 2, 7, 8; iv. 7,29 ; vi. 24. 
 
 8 ra ftfovpavta., i. 3, 20 ; ii. 6; iii. 10; vi. 12. "The Apostle carries us into 'the 
 heavenlies ' (not 'the heavenly places,' as our translators render it, so perverting the 
 idea of a sentence from which place and time are carefully excluded), into a region of 
 voluntary beings, of spirits, standing by a spiritual law, capable of a spiritual blessing " 
 (Maurice, Unity of the New Testament, p. 523). 
 
 4 irvtvua. and jryev/iaTKcbs occurs thirteen times in this Epistle (i. 3, 13, 17 ; ii. 18, 22 ; 
 Iii. 5, 16; iv. 3, 4, 23, 30 j v. 18; vi. 17, 18); and only once in the Colossians (i. 8, 9). 
 (Baur, Paul. ii. 21.) 
 
 6 irXovros, TrXovVtos, i. 7, 18 ; ii. 4, 7 ; iii. 8, 16. This word is only used in this sense 
 by St. James (ii. 5). See Paley, Horae Paulimae, Ephes. ii. But see 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; 
 Phil. ii. 7. 
 
 6 Jo'fo, L 6, 12, 14, 17, 18 ; iii. 16, 21, &c. 
 
 7 ii.virrripi.ov, Eph. i. 9 ; iii. 3, 4, 9 (v. 32) ; vi. 19. In no other Epistle, except that to 
 the Colossians and 1 Cor., does it occur more than twice. 
 
 8 jrAip<o(jia, i. 23 ; iii. 19 ; iv. 10 13 (i. 10). In the quasi-technical sense it is only 
 found in the Epistle to the Colossians, i. 19 ; ii. 9. 
 
 bad word, 
 
 Phryn., p. 172) ; a-uvoiKoSo^elcrOa, 22 ; <ruy(cATjpdvoj*a, awarwua, avunfToxpi iii 6 ; 
 iv, 3 ; trvfipi/fa^opevov, crvpapnoAoyou/iecov,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIAN8." 637 
 
 will, and to one end, the gathering up of all things in Christ. 1 But however 
 desirable the minute investigation is, after the road has been travelled 
 frequently, the reader must allow the Apostle to carry him along at his 
 own speed on his own wings, if he would know anything of the height from 
 which he is descending and to which he is returning." * 
 
 After his usual salutation to the saints that are in (perhaps leaving a 
 
 blank to be filled up by Tychicus at the places to which he carried a copy of 
 the letter), he breaks into the rapturous sentence which is "not only the 
 exordium of the letter, but also the enunciation of its design." 
 
 " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who blessed us with 
 all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ, even as He chose us out in Him 
 before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before 
 Him, in love ; fore-ordaining us to adoption by Jesus Christ into Himself, according 
 to the good pleasure of His will, for th praise of the glory of His grace wherewith 
 He graced us in the beloved."* 
 
 This leads him to a passage in which the work of the Son in this great 
 fore-ordained plan is mainly predominant. 
 
 " In whom we have our redemption through His blood, the remission of trans- 
 gressions, according to the wealth of His grace, wherewith He abounded towards 
 us, in all wisdom and discernment, making known to us the mystery of His will, 
 according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, with a view to the 
 dispensation of the fulness of the seasons to sum up all things in Christ, both the 
 things in the heavens and the things on the earth in Him. In whom we also were 
 made an inheritance, being fore-ordained according to the purpose of Him who 
 worketh all things according to the counsel of His will, that we should be to tht 
 praise of His glory who have before hoped in Christ." 4 
 
 This repetition of the phrase " to the praise of His glory," introduces the 
 work of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. 
 
 " In whom (Christ) ye also " (as well as the Jewish Christians who previously 
 had hoped in Christ) " on hearing the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation, 
 in whom (I say), believing, ye too were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who 
 is the earnest of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of the purchased 
 possession unto the praise of His glory."* 
 
 Since, therefore, it is the fixed ordinance, from all eternity, of the Blessed 
 God, that man should be adopted through the redemption of Christ to the 
 praise of the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and should receive the seal of the 
 
 1 The Epistle may be thus briefly summarised : Salutation (i. 1, 2). Thanksgiving 
 for the election of the Church, and the unity wrought by Christ's redemption and calling 
 of both Jews and Gentiles (i. 3 14). Prayer for their growth into the full knowledge of 
 Christ (15 23). Unity of mankind in the heavenlies in Christ (ii. 1 22). Fuller ex- 
 planation of the mystery, with prayer for the full comprehension of it, and doxology 
 (iii. 1 21). Exhortation to live worthily of the ideal unity of the Catholic Church in 
 love (iv. 1 16). Exhortation to the practical duties of the new life, in the conquest 
 over sin (iv. 17 v. 21), and in social relations (v. 22 vi. 9). The armour of God 
 (vi. 1017). Final requests and farewell (vi. 1024). 
 
 8 Unity of the New Testament, p. 525. See Excursus XXV., "Phraseology and Doc- 
 trines of the Epistle to the Ephesians. " 
 
 3 i. 3 6. Notice the marvellous compression aiid exhaustive fulness of this great 
 outline of theology. 
 
 4 i. 7 _ 12> * L 13, 14.
 
 638 THE LIPE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 Spirit as the pledge of full and final entrance into his heritage, St. Paul tells 
 them that, hearing of their faith and love, ho ceaselessly prayed that God 
 the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of the Glory would grant tbcm 
 a full knowledge 1 of Himself, giving them "illuminated eyes in their hearts" 
 to know what their calling means, and the wealth and glory of this heritage, 
 and the surpassing greatness of the power which He had put forth in raising 
 Christ from the dead, and seating Him at His right hand in the heavenlies, as 
 the Supreme Ruler now and for ever of every spiritual and earthly power, and 
 as the Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, " the Pleroma" 
 (i.e., the filled continent, the brimmed receptacle) " of Him who filloth all 
 things with all things." 2 
 
 But for whom were these great privileges predestined, and how were they 
 bestowed P The full answer is contained in the second chapter. They were 
 intended for all, both Jews and Gentiles, and were bestowed by free grace. 
 In this section the leading conception is the unity of mankind, in the heaven- 
 lies, in Christ. The Gentiles had been dead in transgressions and sins, 
 absorbed in the temporal and the external, 3 showing by their disobedience the 
 influence of the Prince of the power of the air ; and the Jews, too, had been 
 occupied with the desires of the flesh, doing the determinations of the flesh 
 and the thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath 4 even as the rest; 
 but God in His rich love and mercy quickened both Jews and Gentiles to- 
 gether, while still dead in their transgressions, and raised them together, and 
 seated them together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus a name that occurs in 
 verse after verse, being at the very heart of the Apostle's thoughts. The in- 
 strumental cause of this great salvation is solely free grace, applied by faith, 
 that this grace might be manifested to the coming ages in all its surpassing 
 wealth of kindness; and that we, thus created anew in Christ, and so pre- 
 vented from any boast 5 that we achieved by good works our own salvation, 
 might still walk in good works, to which God predestined us. 6 The Gentiles, 
 
 1 'EiriyiKo<ri<;, i. 17 ; iv. 13. I have already alluded to the importance attached to true 
 knowledge in these Epistles, written as it was to counteract the incipient but already 
 baneful influence of a "knowledge falsely called." Hence we have also yi/itrts, iii. 19; 
 <rvytcri9, iii. 4 ; <J>p6iTjo-i?, L 8 ; o-o^i'o, ib. ; an-oKaAvi/a?, iii. 3 ; ^xoTuJeii/, iii. 9 ; &c. &c. 
 
 2 i. 15 23. See iv. 10. Cf . Xen. HcU. vi. 2, 14, TOS va.v<t 7rArjpoCTO. On the different 
 application of the word Pleroma here and in Col. i. 19, v. supra. The view that it here 
 means " complement 1 ' like parapleroma seems to me much less probable. On the expres- 
 sion the " God of our Lord Jesus Christ," cf. ver. 3 ; John xx. 17. In the unique phrase, 
 " the Father of the Glory," 6 irarrjp ITJS Sofa, Canon Barry sees an allusion to the Jewish 
 identification of "the Word" with "the Shcchinah. Compare the use of Ada in 
 James ii. 1 ; Titus ii. 13 ; Heb. i. 3. 
 
 11. 2, Kara rov aHava. roD KOCT/JOU TOVTOV. 
 
 4 Mr. Maurice's rendering, "children of impulse," is untenable. 
 
 5 ii. 9. The last appearance of the word "boast" in St. Paul. 
 
 8 ii. 10. It is interesting to see how the epoch of controversy on the great topic of 
 these verses is here assumed to be closed ; JT' ?pyo ayaflots, ols 7rpoi)Toiju.acri/ 6 ecj IVa iv 
 ourots Trepuranjcrcoftev. Certainly o's may be by attraction for a ; but it is surely a very 
 awkward expression to say that " God created good works that we should walk in them," 
 and although jj^os is not expressed, it is involved in irepuranjo-eafiev. Alford, who adopts 
 the E.V.j compares it with John v. 38, which is, however, no parallel. Nowhere is the 
 uf good works with free grace more admirably illustrated than here. Good
 
 THE EPISTLE XO " THE EPHESIAN8." 639 
 
 then, were to remember that their former uncircumcision, so far as it was of 
 any importance, was that spiritual uucircumcisiou which consisted iu utter 
 alienation from Christ, His kingdom, and His promises. But now in Christ, 
 by the blood of Christ, the once afar have been made near. For He is our 
 Peace; Ho has broken down the separating partition the enmity between 
 the two members of His great human family by doing away with the law of 
 ordinances and decrees, 1 that He might create the two Jew and Gentile 
 uito one fresh human being, making peace ; and might reconcile them both in 
 one body to God by the cross, slaying thereby the enmity between them both, 
 and between them and God. The result, then, of His advent is peace to the 
 far-off and to the nigh ; for through Him we both have access by one Spirit 
 to the Father. The Gentiles are no longer aliens, but fellow-citizens with the 
 saints, built on the corner-stone of Christ which the Apostles and prophets 
 laid like stones compaginated 3 into the ever-growing walls of the one 
 spiiitual House of God. 3 
 
 Then follows a chapter of parentheses, or rather of thoughts leading to 
 thoughts, and linked together, as throughout the Epistle, by relatival con- 
 nexions. 4 Resuming the prayer (i. 17) of which the thread had been broken 
 by the full enunciation of the great truths in which he desired them to be 
 enlightened : " For this cause," he says namely, because of the whole blessed 
 mystery which he has been expounding, and which results in their corporate 
 union in Christ " I, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, on behalf of you Gentiles " 
 and there once more the prayer is broken by a parenthesis which lasts 
 through thirteen verses. For, remembering that the letter is to be addressed 
 not only to the Ephesians, of whom the majority were so well known to him, 
 but also to other Asiatic Churches, some of which he had not even visited, and 
 which barely knew more of him than his name, 5 he pauses to dwell on the 
 exalted character of the mission entrusted to him, and to express at the same 
 time his own sense of utter personal unworthiness. Having called himself 
 " the prisoner of the Lord on behalf of you Gentiles," he breaks off to say 
 
 " Assuming that you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God given 
 me towards you that by revelation was made known to me the mystery [of the 
 
 works are here included iu the predestined purpose of grace, so that they are not a con- 
 dition of salvation, but an aim set before us, and rendered practicable by God's uncon- 
 ditional favour. (See Pfleiderer, ii. 189.) 
 
 1 Of. Col. i. 2022. The application of the word is somewhat different ; but it is 
 exactly the kind of difference which might be made by an author dealing independently 
 with his own expressions, and one on which a forger would not have ventured. The 
 breaking down of the Chel, "the middle wall of partition," was that part of Christ's 
 work which it fell mainly to St. Paul to continue. The charge that he had taken 
 Trophimus into the Court of Israel, literally false, was ideally most true. And Paul the 
 Apostle was the most effectual uprooter of the " hedge, '' which Saul the Pharisee 
 thought it his chief work to make around the Law. 
 
 2 This word, used by St. Jerome, may express the unusual cn>i/ap/io,V>yovfi<rV>|. 
 
 3 ii. 122. 4 See Ellicott, ad iii. 5. 
 
 5 Although undoubtedly the elye ^ova-are, like the similar expression in iv. 21, 
 Gal. iii. 4, &c., implies that the fact is assumed, yet it is certainly not an expression 
 which would well accord with a letter addressed only to a church in which the writer had 
 long laboured.
 
 640 THE LIFE AND WOBK OF ST. PAtTL. 
 
 calling of the Gentiles], as I previously wrote to you in brief, 1 in accordance with 
 which you can, as you read it, perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ 
 a mystery which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men as 
 it is now revealed to His holy Apostles 2 and prophets by the Spirit (namely) that 
 the Gentiles are 3 co-heirs, and concorporate, and comparticipant 4 of the promise in 
 Christ Jesus by the Gospel, of which I became a minister, according to the gift of 
 the grace of God given to me according to the working of His power. To me, the 
 less-than-least 5 of all saints, was given this grace, to preach among the Gentiles the 
 untrackable 6 wealth of Christ ; and to enlighten all on the nature of the dispensa- 
 tion of the mystery that has been- hidden from the ages in God, who created all 
 things ; that, now to the principalities and the powers in the heavenlies may be made 
 known by the Church the richly- variegated wisdom of God, 7 according to the pre- 
 arrangement of the ages which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have 
 our confidence and our access by faith in Him : wherefore I entreat you not to lose 
 heart in my afflictions on your behalf, seeing that this is your glory. For this 
 cause, then" (and here he resumes the thread of the prayer broken in the first verse) 
 " I bend my knees to the Father, 8 from whom every fatherhood 9 in heaven and on. 
 earth derives its name, that He would give you, according to the wealth of His 
 glory, to be strengthened by power through His Spirit into spiritual manhood, 10 that 
 Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ye having been rooted and founded in 
 love, that ye may have strength to grasp mentally with all saints what is the length 
 and breadth and depth and height, and to know (spiritually) the knowledge-sur- 
 passing love of Christ, that ye may be filled up to all the plenitude of God." n 
 
 " Now to Him that is able above all things to do superabundantly above la all that 
 we ask or think, according to the power [of the Holy Spirit] which worketh in us, 
 
 1 i. 9 scq. ; ii. 13 seq. 
 
 2 Serious objections have been made to this phrase, as proving that it could not have 
 been written by the pen that wrote Gal. ii. The objection is groundless. Assuming the 
 oyiots to be correct (though not found in every MS. ; cf. Col. i. 26) i. It is perfectly 
 generic, not individual ; cf . ver. 8 and ii. 20 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 1, 15. ii. Apostles and prophets 
 are bracketed, and the epithet "holy " means " sanctified," a title which they share with 
 all " saints." iii. "Apostles" does not here necessarily bear its narrower sense. 
 
 3 Not "should be," as in A.V. 
 
 * iii. 6, ovyKAijpdfOfia, <rvtr<r<afia t <rv/u/xeVoxa. The two parts Jews and Gentiles are to 
 become one body, the body of Christ, the Christian Church (ii. 16). The strange English 
 words may perhaps correspond to the strange Greek words which St. Paul invented to 
 express this newly-revealed mystery hi the strongest possible form, as though no words 
 could be too strong to express his dominant conception of the reunion in Christ of those 
 who apart from Him are separate and divided, 
 
 5 iii. 8, e\axto-TOTe'p<j). Would a forger have made St. Paul write thus ? The expression 
 has been compared to' 1 Cor. xv. 9, but expresses a far deeper humility, because it is used 
 when the writer is alluding to a far loftier exaltation. Those who criticise the phrase as 
 exaggerated must be destitute of the deepest spiritual experiences. The confessions of 
 the holiest are ever the most bitter and humble, because their very holiness enables them 
 to take the due measure of the heinousness of sin. The self-condemnation of a Cowper 
 or a Fe'nelon is far stronger than that of a Byron or a Voltaire. ' ' The greatest sinner, 
 the greatest saint, are equi-distant from the goal where the mind rests in satisfaction 
 with itself. With the growth in goodness grows the sense of sin. One law fulfilled 
 shows a thousand neglected " (Mozley, Essays, i. 327). 
 
 6 iii. 8, a.vei\t>ia.<TTov, Job V. 9, "\j7TJ p*. Cf . Rom. xi. 33, oref epevrrjTa Tot KpijiaTa auroO (tat 
 ai/ef ixy cWroi at 65oi. 
 
 7 7ro\ujro'iciXos. Cf. are^ai/ov w. avOeuv. EubuluS, Ath. XV. 7, p. 679. 
 
 8 The addition " of our Lord Jesus Christ," however ancient, is probably spurious, as 
 It is not found in , A, B, C, the Coptic, the JSthiopic versions, &c. 
 
 9 Not "the whole family," as in A.V. 10 iii. 16, STOJ> e<r<o ZvQpairov. 
 
 11 iii. 1 19. In other words, " that ye may be filled with all the plenitude of good- 
 ness wherewith God is filled ; " " omnes divinae naturae divitiae " (Fritzsche). 
 
 12 Of twenty-eight compounds in virip in the New Testament, no less than twenty ar 
 found in St. Paul alone.
 
 THE EPfSTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 641 
 
 to Him be glory in the Church, in Christ Jesus, to all the generations of the age of 
 the ages. Amen." * 
 
 With this prayer he closes the doctrinal part of the Epistle ; the remaining 
 half of it is strictly practical. St. Paid would have felt it no descent of 
 thought to pass from the loftiest spiritual mysteries to the humblest moral 
 duties. Ho knew that holiness was the essence of God's Being, and he saw 
 in the holiness of Christians the beautiful result of that predestined purpose, 
 which, after being wrought out to gradual completion in the dispensation of 
 past ccons, was now fully manifested and revealed in Christ. He knew that 
 the loftiest principles were the necessary basis of the simplest acts of faithful- 
 ness, and that all which is most pure, lovely, and of good report, in the 
 Christian life, is the sole result of all that is most sublime in the Christian's 
 faith. The lustre of the planets may be faint and poor, but yet it is reflected 
 from the common sun ; and so the goodness of a redeemed man, however pale 
 in lustre, is still sacred, becaiise it is a reflexion from the Sun of righteousness. 
 The reflected light of morality is nothing apart from the splendour of that 
 religion from which it is derived. There is little which is admirable in the 
 honesty which simply results from its being the best policy ; or in the purity 
 which is maintained solely by fear of punishment ; or even in the virtue which 
 is coldly adopted out of a calculation that it tends to the greatest happiness of 
 the greatest number. It was not in this way that St. Paul regarded morality. 
 Many of the precepts which he delivers in the practical sections of his 
 Epistles might also have been delivered, and nobly delivered, by an Epictetus 
 or a Marcus Aurelius; but that which places an immeasurable distance 
 between the teachings of St. Paul and theirs, is the fact that in St. Paul's 
 view holiness is not the imperfect result of rare self -discipline, but the natural 
 outcome of a divine life, imparted by One who is the common Head of all the 
 family of man, and in participation with whose plenitude the humblest act of 
 self-sacrifice becomes invested with a sacred value and a sacred significance. 
 And there are these further distinctions (among many others) between the 
 lofty teachings of Stoicism and the divine exhortations of Christianity. 
 Stoicism made its appeal only to the noble-hearted few, despising and despair- 
 ing of the vulgar herd of mankind in all ranks, as incapable of philosophic 
 training or moral elevation. Christianity, in the name of a God who was no 
 respecter of persons, appealed to the very weakest and the very worst as being 
 all redeemed in Christ. Again, Stoicism was dimmed and darkened to the 
 very heart's core of its worthiest votaries by deep perplexity and incurable 
 sadness ; Christianity breathes into every utterance the joyous spirit of victory 
 and hope. Even the best of the Stoics looked on the life of men around them 
 with a detestation largely mingled with contempt, and this contempt weakened 
 the sense of reciprocity, and fed the fumes of pride. But St. Paul addresses 
 i revelation unspeakably more majestic, more profound, more spiritual, than 
 any which Stoicism could offer, to men whom he well knows to have lived in 
 
 * iii. 20, 2L
 
 842 THE LIFE ANI> WORK OF ST. PA171* 
 
 the trammels of the vilest sins of heathendom, and barely even yet to have 
 escaped out of the snare of the fowler. Ho confidently addreases exhortations 
 of stainless purity and sensitive integrity to men who had been thieves and 
 adulterers, and worse ; and so far from any self-exaltation at his own moral 
 superiority, he regards hia own life as hid indeed with Christ in God, but as 
 so little fit to inspire a feeling of satisfaction that ho is lost in the conviction 
 of his own unworthiness* as contrasted with the wealth of God's compassion, 
 aud the unspeakable grandeur of the long-hidden mystery which now in due 
 time he is commissioned to set forth. The mingled prayer and paean of 
 this magnificent Epistle is inspired throughout " by a sense of opposites of 
 the union of weakness and strength, of tribulation and glory, of all that 
 had been and all that was to be, of the absolute love of God, of the discovery 
 of that love to man in the Mediator, of the working of that love in man 
 through the Spirit, of the fellowship of the poorest creature of flesh and blood 
 on earth with the spirits in heaven, of a canopy of love above and an abyss of 
 love beneath, which encompasses the whole creation." The Apostle would 
 have delighted in the spirit of those words which a modern poet has learnt 
 from the truths which it was his high mission to reveal : 
 
 " I say to thee, do thou repeat 
 To the first man thou mayest meet 
 In lane, highway, or open street, 
 That he, and we, and all men move 
 Under a canopy of love 
 As broad as the blue sky above." * 
 
 * I then," continues the Apostle and how much does that word " then " 
 involve, referring as it does to all the mighty truths which he has been setting 
 forth ! " I then, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthily of the 
 calling in which ye were called." This is the keynote to all that follows. So 
 little was earthly success or happiness worth even considering in comparison 
 with the exceeding and eternal weight of glory which affliction was working 
 out for them, that while ho has urged them not to lose heart in his tribula- 
 tions, he makes those very tribulations a ground of appeal, and feels that he 
 can speak to them with all the stronger influence as " a prisoner in the Lord," 
 and " an ambassador in a chain." And the worthy elevation to the grandeur 
 of their calling was to be shown by virtues which, in then- heathen condition, 
 they would almost have ranked with abject vices lowliness, meekness, en- 
 durance, the forbearance of mutual esteem. The furious quarrels, the mad 
 jealousies, the cherished rancours, the frantic spirit of revenge which charac- 
 terised their heathen condition, are to be fused by the heat of love into one 
 great spiritual unity and peace. Oneness, the result of love, is the ruling 
 thought of this section (iv. 3 13). " One body, and one spirit, even as also 
 ye were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, 
 one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all." a 
 Tet this unity is not a dead level of uniformity. Each has his separate 
 
 1 Archbishop Trench. 2 Omit futv, M, A, B, 0, Ac,
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHE8IANS." 643 
 
 jrtMisure of grace given by Him who, ascending in triumph, with Sin and 
 Deatn bound to His chariot-wheels, " gave gifts for men," 1 having first 
 descended that by ascending " far above all heavens " He might fill all things. 
 Apostles therefore, and Prophets, and Evangelists, and Pastors, and Teacher* 
 were all appointed by virtue of the gifts which He gave, with a view to per- 
 fect the saints, and so to build up the Church which is tho body of Christ, 
 until we all finally attain 2 to the unity of the faith, and the full knowledge of 
 the Son of God, to perfect manhood, to the measure of the stature of t he 
 Plenitude of Christ." But to contribute to this perfect growth we must lay 
 aside moral and spiritual childishness j we must keep the hand firmly on tho 
 helm that we may not be tossed like dismantled hulks by every wave and 
 storm of doctrine, in that frandf ul sleight and craft which many devote to 
 further the deliberate system of error. To be true and to be loving is the 
 secret of Christian growth. 3 Sincerity and charity are as tho life-blood in the 
 veins of that Church, of which Christ is the Head and Heart, " from whom 
 tho whole body being fitly framed and compacted by means of every joint of 
 tho vital supply, according to the proportional energy of each individual part, 
 tends to the increase of the body, so as to build itself up in love.'** 
 
 After this expansion of the duty of Unity, he returns to his exhortation ; 
 and, as before he had urged them to walk worthily of their vocation, he now urges 
 them not to walk, as did the rest of the Gentiles, in tho vanity of their mind, 
 having been darkened in their understanding, and utterly alienated from tho 
 life of God because of their ignorance and the callosity of their hearts, 6 seeing 
 that they, having lost all sense of shame or sorrow for sin, 9 abandoned themselves 
 to wantonness for tho working of all nncleanness, in inordinate desire : 7 
 
 "But NOT eo did ye learn Christ assuming that ye heard Him, and were taught 
 in Hun as the truth is in Jesua, 8 that ye put off, as concerns your former conversa- 
 tion, the old man which is over being corrupted according to the lusts of deceit, and 
 undergo renewal by the spirit of your mind, and put on tho new man which after 
 God was created in righteousness and holiness of truth." * 
 
 Then follow the many practical applications which result from this clothing 
 of the soul with the new-created humanity. Put away lying, because we are 
 
 1 On this singular reference to Ps. Ixviii., and the change of the Ao/3 &6^ara tv 
 ai/0pwiroi?, see Da vies, p. 44. It is at least doubtful whether there is the slightest allusion 
 to the descent into hell. The point is the identity of Him who came to earth (i.e., the 
 historic Jesus) and Him who ascended, i.e., of the Eternal and the Incarnate Christ. 
 
 ' The omision of i* marks the certain result. 
 
 * iv. 15, iA>,eevoiT i iv dyaTTD r.ot merely " sjxaking the truth," but " being true." 
 
 * iv. 116. 
 
 * jrfipos, "tufa-stone," is used, secondarily, for a hard tumour, or callus at the end of 
 injured boces. 
 
 6 amjAyTjxoTK. " Qui postquam peccaverint, non detent." "A siu committed a 
 kucond time does net seem a sin " (Moed Katon, f. 27, 2). 
 
 * ir\eovef<u 
 
 8 The form of expression might seem to point to a warning against any incipient 
 docetic tendency (cf. 1 John iv. 2, 3) to draw a distinction between Christ and Jesus, 
 between the Eternal Christ and the human Jesus. 
 
 * iv. 17-24.
 
 644 THE UFE AND WORK OP ST. PAUL. 
 
 members of one another. 1 Let not just anger degenerate into chronic ex- 
 asperation, neither give room to the devil. Let honest work, earning sufficient 
 oven for charity, replace thievishness. For corruption of speech 2 let there be 
 such as is " good for edification of the need 8 that it may give grace to the 
 hearers," since unwholesome impurity is a chronic grief to that Holy Spirit 
 who has sealed you as His own to the day of redemption. Then, returning to 
 his main subject of unity, he says . 
 
 " Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away 
 from you with all malice, and become kind to one another, compassionate, freely 
 forgiving one another, as God also in Christ* freely forgave you. Become, then, 
 imitators of God as children beloved, and walk in love, even as Christ loved us aud 
 gave Himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God for a savour of sweet smell." 9 
 
 Then, proceeding to other practical duties, he forbids every form of im- 
 purity or obscenity, in word or deed, with the worldly polish 6 which was of tea 
 nearly akin to it, since they are unsuitable to the Christian character, and they 
 who are addicted to such things have no inheritance in the kingdom of God, 
 and whatever men may say, such things are the abiding source of God's wrath. 7 
 Let thanksgiving take the place of indecency of speech. For though they 
 were darkness, they are now light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. 
 For the fruit of light 8 is in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth. Light 
 is the prevalent conception here, as love was in the last chapter. 9 Let them 
 not participate in the unfruitful infamies of secret darkness, "but rather 
 even convict them, for all things on being convicted are illumined by the light, 
 for all that is being illumined is light." 1 * And this is the spirit of what is 
 perhaps a Christian hymn : 
 
 1 The necessity of the following moral exhortations will excite no astonishment in the 
 minds of those who have studied the Epistle to the Corinthians, or who have sufficient 
 knowledge of the human heart to be aware that the evil habits of a heathen lifetime 
 were not likely to be cured in all converts by a moment of awakeument, or by an 
 acceptance of Christian truths, which in many cases may have been mainly intellectual. 
 
 2 iv. 29, o-ojrobj, "rotten" (Matt. vii. 17), the opposite of vyii^, "sound," in 2 Tim. 
 L 13, &c., and seasoned with salt," CoL iv. 6. 
 
 3 Not "for the use of edification," as in B.V., but for such edification as the occasion 
 requires. 
 
 * iv. 32, Iv Xf>t<rr<p, not as in E.V., " for Christ's sake." 
 
 * iv. 25 v. 2. 
 
 * Ver. 4, iipairAta, Aristotle defines it as "cultivated impertinence " (Rhet. il. 12), 
 and places the polished worldling (evrpd-oXos, facctus) midway between the boor (cfy>oio?) 
 and the low flatterer (j3<,fi.oAi$x<x) (Eth. N. ii. 7). The mild word, TO. OUK AnjKovra, is due, 
 not to the comparatively harmless " polish " which has been last mentioned, but to litotes 
 the use of a soft expression (like Virgil's \Qeorg. iii. 6j "iliaudati Busiridis aras "), to be 
 corrected by the indignant mental substitution of a more forcible word. (See supra, p. 694.) 
 
 7 Ver. 6, epxereu, is ever coming. 
 
 8 This is the try e reading ($*<*)> not "fruit of the Spirit," as in the E.V. The 
 reading was doubtless alterea to soften the harshness of the metaphor ; but St. Paul is 
 i:n indifferent as Shakespeare himself to a mere verbal confusion of metaphors when the 
 aeuse in clear. To see allusions here to Ormuzd and Ahriman is surely absurd. 
 
 ' Paley (H<#. Paul.) says that St. Paul here " goes off " at the word light ; but thi 
 IB not nearly so good an instance of this literary peculiarity as iv. 8, "ascended." 
 
 10 Deeds of darkness must cease to be deeds of darkness when the light shines on 
 them. The light kills them. Everything on which light is poured is light, because i* 
 reflects light. ^avepovfievov cannot mean 'that inaketh manifest," as in the B.V.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE KPHESIAK8.' 645 
 
 '7* ipt 6 
 
 'Aj/((TTa IK TWV 
 
 (" Awake thee, thou that sleepest, 
 And from the dead arise thou, 
 And Christ shall shine upon thee.") 
 
 " Take heed, then, how ye walk carefully, not as unwise but as wise, buying up 
 the opportunity because the days are evil. Do not prove yourselves senseless, but 
 understanding what is the will of the Lord." 2 
 
 Thus, mingling special exhortation with universal principles, he proceeds to 
 warn them against drunkenness, and recalling perhaps the thrill of emotion 
 with which he and they have joined in such stirring words as those he 
 has just quoted, he bids them seek rather the spiritual exaltations of that holy 
 enthusiasm which finds vent in the melodies of Christian hymnology, and in 
 the eucharistic music of the heart, while at the same time all are mutually 
 submissive to each other in the fear of God. 3 
 
 The duty of submissiveness thus casually introduced is then illustrated 
 and enforced in three great social relations. 4 Wives are to be submissive 
 to their husbands, as the Church is to Christ ; and husbands to love their 
 wives, as Christ loved the Church, to sanctify it into stainless purity, and 
 to cherish it as a part of Himself in inseparable union. Children are to obey 
 their parents, and parents not to irritate their children. Slaves are to render 
 sincere and conscientious service, as being the slaves of their unseen Master, 
 Christ, and therefore bound to fulfil all the duties of the state of life in which 
 He has placed them ; and masters are to do their duty to their slaves, abandon- 
 ing threats, remembering that they too have a Master in whose sight they all 
 are equal. 5 
 
 Having thus gone through the main duties of domestic and social life as 
 contemplated in the light of Christ, he bids them finally " grow strong in the 
 Lord and in the might of His strength." 6 The exhortation brings up the 
 image of armour with which the worn and aged prisoner was but too familiar. 
 Daily the coupling-chain which bound his right wrist to the left of a Roman 
 legionary clashed as it touched some part of the soldier's arms. The baldric, 
 the military boot, the oblong shield, the cuirass, the helmet, the sword of the 
 Praetorian guardsman were among the few things which he daily saw. But 
 
 1 Isa. be. 1, 2. The versification is of the Hebrew type. On Christian hymnology, 
 v. supra, on Col. iii. 16. Antiphonal congregational singing was very early introduced 
 (Rev. xix. 14). 
 
 ' Vers. 317. s Vers. 1& 21. 
 
 4 All commentators have felt a difficulty in seeing the connexion between singing and 
 subjection. I believe that it lies in a reminiscence of the unseemly Babel of contentioua 
 vanities which St. Paul had heard of, perhaps even witnessed, at Corinth, where such 
 disorder had been caused by the obtrusive vanity with which each person wished to 
 display his or her particular xapta-^a. If so or even if the association was something 
 else we have another inimitable maik of genuineness. No forger would dream of 
 appending a most important section of his moral teaching to a purely accidental thought. 
 
 * Ver. 22 vi. 9. 
 
 8 vL 10. The aSfXfa! is wanting in , B, D, E, and does not occur in Eph. or OoL
 
 646 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL 
 
 we cannot doubt that, with his kindly human interest in life and youth, ths 
 Apostle, who knew that heathendom too was redeemed in Christ, whoso boy- 
 hood had been passed in a heathen city, who loved man as man because he saw 
 a vision of all humanity in God would have talked often to the weary soldiers 
 who guarded him ; would have tried by wholesome and courteous and profitable 
 words it) dissipate their tedium, until we can well imagine that the legionaries 
 who had to perform the disagreeable task would, in spite of intense national 
 repugnances, prefer to bo chained to Paul the Jewish prisoner than to any 
 wlium caprice, or justice, or tyranny consigned to their military charge. 
 Doubtless the soldiers would tell him in what countries they had been stationed, 
 What barbarians they had helped to subdue. He would ask them in what 
 tumult they had got that fracture in the helmet, in what battle that dint upon 
 the shield, by what blow they had made that hack in the sword. 1 They would 
 tell him of the deadly wrestle with foes who grappled with them in the melee, 
 and of the falaricae? the darts wrapped round with flaming tow, from which 
 their shields had saved them in the siege. And thinking of the sterner 
 struggle against deadlier enemies, even against the world-rulers of this dark- 
 ness, against the spiritual powers of wickedness in the heavenlies, 3 in which 
 all God's children are anxiously engaged, he bids the Christian converts assume, 
 act " the straw-armour of reason," but the panoply of God, that they may be 
 able to withstand in the evil day. Let spiritual truth be their baldric or bind- 
 ing girdle;* moral righteousness their breastplate; zealous alacrity in the 
 cause of the Gospel of Peace their caligae of war ; 5 and in addition to these, 
 let faith bo taken up as their broad shield 6 against the darts of the evil one, 
 however fiercely ignited. Their one weapon of offence is to be the sword of 
 the Spirit, which is the Word of God. 7 Prayer and watchfulness is to be 
 their constant attitude ; and in their prayers for all saints he begs also for 
 their prayers on his own behalf, not that his chains may bo loosed, but that he 
 may boldly and aptly make known the mystery of the Gospel, on behalf of 
 
 1 The pilum, or heavy javelin, which a soldier would not bring with him to the 
 guard-room, is omitted. 
 * Or mallcoli (Ps. vii. 13). 
 3 The Kabbinical vranp-DDV' Similarly, in 2 Cor. Iv. 4, St. Paul goes so far as to call 
 
 " the Prince of the power of the air," 6 flcb? rov oUwvos TOVTOV. (Of, 1 John v. 19 ; John xiv. 
 30 ; xvi. 11.) "The spirituals of wickedness in the heav-enlies" are the Gdstcrchaft of 
 iniquity in the regions of space ; but one would expect inrovpaviot.?. The E.V. conceals 
 the difficulty by its " high places ;" but if eTi-ovpaWois be right, it can only be in a physical 
 sense. As for mortal enemies: "vasa sunt, alius utitur; organa sunt, alius jungit" 
 
 * " Veritas astringit hominem, mendaciorum magna est laxitas" (Grot.). 
 '> Cf. Horn. iii. 16 ; x. 15; ero^aa-la. may, however, mean "basis," "sole" ()i3O, Ezra iii. 
 3 Ps. Ixxxviii. 15, LXX.). The Gospel of Peace gives a secure foothold even in war. 
 ' * Faith, not merit, as in "VVisd. v. 19. (Cf. Ps. xviii. 31, &c.) Notice the emphatic 
 
 position of ireirupu^eVa. 
 
 7 Dr. Davidson finds this a tedious and tasteless amplification of 1 Thess. v. 8, 
 2 Cor. x'. 3, 4, and has many similar criticisms (Introd. i. 388, 390). It is impossible to 
 argue' against such criticisms as bearing on the question of genuineness. The general 
 metaphor is not uncommon (Isa. Ibc. 1619 ; 1 Thess. v. 8 ; Wisd. v. 1720 ; Bleeck, 
 Zend Arfstn, p. 90; Davies, p. 61). (See the account of the arms In the Interpreter's 
 House in Pilgrim's Progress, and Gurnall's Christian Annow,)
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHE8IAN8." 647 
 
 which he is an ambassador not inviolable, not splendid, but " an ambassador 
 iu a coupling-chain." 1 
 
 He sends no news or personal salutations, because he is sending the f aitiif ul 
 and beloved Tychicus, who will tell them, as well as other cities, all his affairs ; 
 but he concludes with a blessing of singular fulness : 
 
 " Peace to the brethren and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruption." a 
 
 Wo have now examined all the Epistles of St. Paul except the last group 
 of all the three addressed to Timothy and Titus. These are usually known 
 as the Pastoral Epistles, because they sketch the duties of the Christian 
 Pastor. Of the Epistle to the Hebrews I have said nothing, because I hope 
 to speak of it hereafter, and because, for reasons which appear to me abso- 
 lutely convincing, I cannot regard it as a work of St. Paul's. But even if the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews be accepted as having been written by the Apostle, it 
 adds nothing to our knowledge of his history. But for the preservation of 
 the Pastoral Epistles, we should not know a single additional fact about him, 
 except such as we can glean from vague and wavering traditions. 
 
 The Acts of the Apostles ends with the statement that Paul remained a 
 period of two whole years in his own hired lodging, and received all who 
 came in to visit him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the tilings 
 concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence unmolestcdly. 3 The 
 question why St. Luke deliberately ended his sketch of the Apostle at tliat 
 point, is one which can never receive a decisive answer. He only related cir- 
 cumstances of which he was an eyewitness, or which he knew from trustworthy 
 information, and for that reason his narrative, in spito of its marked lacunae, 
 is far more valuable than if it had been constructed out of looser materials. 
 It may, however, be safely asserted that since he had been with St. Paul 
 during at least a part of the Roman imprisonment, he brought down his story 
 to the period at which he first wrote his book. A thousand circumstances may 
 liave prevented any resumption of his work as a chronicler, but it is incon- 
 ceivable that St. Paul should have died almost immediately afterwards, by a 
 martyr's death, and St. Luke have been aware of it before his book was pub- 
 lished, and yet that he should not have made the faiutost allusion to the 
 subject. 4 The conjecture that Theophilus know all the rest, so that it was 
 ijeedless to commit it to writing, is entirely valueless, for whoever Theophilus 
 
 1 Vi. 10 20. In ver. 18 it is irepl rr&vnav ruv iyitav teal ujrep ejioS. "Paradoxon : miUldus 
 habet splendidos legates " (Bengel). - vi. 21 24. 
 
 8 The cadence is expressive of stability ; of motion succeeded by rest ; of action settled 
 In repose. "An emblem of the history of the Church of Christ, and of the life of every 
 true believer in Him " (Bishop Wordsworth). 
 
 4 So far as anything can be said to be probable in the midst of sxicli uncertainties, the 
 probability is that the leisure of his attendance on St. Paul during the Koman imprison- 
 ment had enabled St. Luke to draw up the main part of his work ; that he concluded it 
 exactly at the point at which St. Paul was expecting immediate liberation, and that 
 he either published it at .the first favourable opportunity after that time, or waa pre- 
 vented it may be even by death from ever continuing or completing his task.
 
 648 THE LIFE AND WORK OP ST. PATTL. 
 
 may have been, it is clear that St. Luke was not writing for him alone. It is 
 also, to say the least, a probable conjecture that soon after the close of those 
 two whole years some remarkable change took place in the condition of the 
 prisoner. That such a change did take place is the almost unanimous tradi- 
 tion of the Church. However slight may be the grounds of direct testimony, 
 it has been generally believed in all ages that (about the beginning of the year 
 A.D. 64) St. Paul was tried, acquitted, and liberated ; and that after some two 
 years of liberty, during which he continued to prosecute his missionary 
 labours, he was once more arrested, and was, after a second imprisonment, put 
 to death at Rome. This would, at least, accord with the anticipations 
 expressed in his own undoubted Epistles. Although he was still a prisoner 
 when he wrote the letter to the Philippians, his trial was near at baud, and 
 while promising to send Timothy to inquire about their fortunes, he adds, 
 " But I am confident in the Lord that I myself too shall come speedily ;" and 
 this is so far from being a casual hope that he even asks Philemon " to get a 
 lodging ready for him, for he hopes that ho shall be granted to them by their 
 prayers." It is, of course, quite possible that St. Paul's sanguine expectations 
 may have been frustrated, 1 but he certainly would not have expressed them so 
 distinctly without good grounds for believing that powerful friends were at 
 work in his favour. Whether Festus, and Agrippa, and Lysias, and Publius 
 had used their influence on his behalf, or whether he had reason to rely on any 
 favourable impression which he may have made among the Praetorian soldiers, 
 or whether he had received intelligence that the Jews had seen reason to 
 abandon a frivolous and groundless prosecution it is impossible to conjecture ; 2 
 but his strong impression that he would be liberated at least helps to confirm 
 the many arguments which lead us to believe that he actually was. If so, it 
 must have been very soon after the close of that two years' confinement with 
 which St. Luke so suddenly breaks off. 
 
 For in July, A.D. 64, there broke out that terrible persecution against the 
 Christians, from which, had he been still at Home, it is certain that he could 
 
 1 For this reason I have not here laid any stress on his once-purposed visit to Spain 
 (Rom. xv. 24, 28). It seems clear from Philem. 22 that he had either abandoned this 
 intention, or at any rate postponed it till he had re- visited Asia. 
 
 2 It is undesirable to multiply uncertain conjectures, but perhaps the Jews may have 
 sent their documents, witnesses, &c., with Josephus when he went to Rome, A.D. 64. 
 He tells us that, by the influence of the Jewish pantomimist Aliturus and of Poppsea, he 
 was enabled to secure the release of some Jewish priests, friends of his own, whom 
 Festus had, on grounds which Josephus calls trivial, sent bound to Rome. Josephus was 
 doubtless one of commission dispatched for this purpose, and it is conceivable that 
 the prosecution of St. Paul's trial may have been a subordinate object of this com- 
 mission, and that the trial may have broken down all the more completely from the 
 loss of witnesses and evidence in the shipwreck which Josephus underwent. His vessel 
 foundered on the voyage, and out of two hundred souls only eighty were picked up by 
 a ship of Cyrene, after they had swum or floated all night in the waves. Josephus 
 then proceeded to Puteoli in another ship. He makes little more than a dry allusion to 
 these events ( Vit. 3), which contrasts singularly with the vivid minuteness of St. Luke : 
 but the general incidents so far resemble those of St. Paul's shipwreck that some have 
 conjectured that the two events were identical. Chronology and other considerations 
 render this impossible, nor is there any great reason to sxippose that Josephus is here 
 introducing embellishments from the story of St. Paul.
 
 THE EPISTLE TO "THE EPHESIANS." 649 
 
 not have escaped. If, therefore, the Pastoral Epistles be forgeries, we have 
 heard the last words of St. Paid, aud at the last verse of the Acts the curtain 
 rushes down in utter darkness upon the remainder of his life. Let ua, then, 
 consider what tradition says, and whether we can still accept as genuine the 
 Epistles to Timothy and Titus. If the indications derived from these sources 
 are in any degree trustworthy, we have still to hear some further thoughts and 
 opinions of the Apostle. We catch at least a glimpse of his final movements, 
 and attain to a sure knowledge of his state of mind up to the moment of his 
 death. If tradition be mistaken, and if the Epistles are spurious, then we 
 must acquiesce in the fact that we know nothing more of the Apostle, and that 
 he perished among that " vast multitude " whom, in the year 64, the vilest of 
 Emperors, nay, almost of human beings, sacrificed to the blind madness which 
 had been instigated against them by a monstrous accusation. If, indeed, St. 
 Paul perished amid that crowd of nameless martyrs, there is but little pro- 
 bability that any regard would have been paid to his claim as a Roman citizen. 
 He may have perished, like them, by crucifixion ; or have been covered, like 
 them, in the skins of wild beasts, to be mangled by dogs ; or, standing in his 
 tunic of ignited pitch, may with his dying glance have caught sight of the 
 wicked Emperor of triumphant Heathendom, as the living torch of hideous 
 martyrdom cast a baleful glare across the gardens of the Golden House. 1 
 From all this, however, we may feel a firm conviction that, by the mercy of 
 God, he was delivered for a time. 2 
 
 It is true that, so far as direct evidence is concerned, we can only say that 
 St. Paul's own words render it probable that he waa liberated, and that this 
 probability finds some slight support in a common tradition, endorsed by the 
 authority of some of the Fathers. But this tradition goes little further than 
 the bare fact. If we are to gain any further knowledge of the biography of 
 St. Paul, it must be derived from the Pastoral Epistles, and from them alone. 
 If they be not genuine, we know no single further particular respecting his 
 fortunes. 
 
 Now, it must be admitted that a number of critics, formidable alike in 
 their unanimity and their learning, have come to the conclusion that the 
 Epistles to Timothy and Titus were not written by St. Paul. 3 Their arguments 
 are entitled to respectful attention, and they undoubtedly suggest difficulties, 
 which our ignorance of all details in the history of those early centuries 
 venders it by no means easy to remove. Nevertheless, after carefully and 
 impartially weighing all that they have urged of which some account will be 
 found in the Excursus at the end of the volume I have cotne to the decided 
 conviction that the Epistles are genuine, and that the first two of them were 
 written during the two years which intervened between St. Paul's liberation 
 *ud his martyrdom at Rome. 
 
 i Tac. Ann. xv. 44 (cf. Mart. x. 25 ; Juv. Sat. viii. 235) ; Sen. Ep. 14, 4 ; Schol. In 
 Juv. i. 155 ; Tert. Apol. 15 ; ad Nat. 118; ad Mart. 5. 
 
 : See Excursus XXVI., "Evidence aa to the Liberation of St. Paul. 
 
 8 Schmidt, Schleiermaclier, Eichhorn, Credner, De Wette, Baur, Zeller, Hilgeufeld, 
 Schenkel, Ewald, Hausrath, Renan, Pfieidei-er. Krenkel, Davidson, &c. 
 
 as
 
 650 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 CHAPTER LHL 
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY. 
 
 vov ffn6rei 4 > Aev<W' tlcren rare ruv, fl Kai rives fanipxov, irapatpdetptn- 
 ni x.a.v6va. TOV <ro>ri]piov Kijp{iyfj.aros. HaGBSiPPTJS JD. Euseb. 
 S.JS. iii. 32. 
 
 I SHALL not attempt, by more than a few sentences, to dispel the obscurity of 
 that last stage of the Apostle's life which began at the termination of his 
 Eoman imprisonment. We feel that our knowledge of his movements 
 is plunged in the deepest uncertainty the moment that we lose the guidance 
 of St. Luke. I cannot myself believe that he was able to carry out his 
 intention of visiting Spain. The indications of his travels in the two later 
 Pastoral Epistles seem to leave no room for such a journey ; nor, if it had 
 really taken place, can we imagine that no shadow of a detail respecting it 
 should have been preserved. But even if he did accomplish this new mission, 
 we cannot so much as mention a single church which he founded, or a single 
 port at which he touched. To speak of his work in Spain could only theref ore 
 leave a fallacious impression. If he went at all, it must have been im- 
 mediately after his imprisonment, since his original object had been merely 
 to visit Rome on his way to the " limit of the West." In writing to the 
 Romans he had expressed a hope that he would be furthered on his journey 
 by their assistance. Judging by the indifference with which they treated hint 
 in both of his imprisonments, there is too much reason to fear that this hope 
 was in any case doomed to disappointment. The next trace of his existence is 
 the First Epistle to Timothy. That Epistle is less organic that is, it has less 
 structural unity than any other of St. Paul's Epistles. The time and place 
 at which it was written are wholly uncertain, because the only historic 
 indication which it contains is that " on his way to Macedonia Paul had 
 begged Timothy to remain at Ephesus." l 
 
 "Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the commandment of God our 
 Saviour, 8 and Christ Jesus our hope, to Timothy my true child in the faith ; grace, 
 mercy, and peace from God the Father 8 and Christ Jesus our Lord." * 
 
 This salutation is remarkable for the title " Saviour " applied to God the 
 
 1 The general outline of the Epistle u as follows : Salutation (i. 1, 2). The object 
 of the letter to encourage Timothy to resist false teachers, and hold fast the faith (8 
 11, 18 20), with the Apostle's thanks to God for the mercy which had made him a 
 minister of the Gospel (12^-17). The duty of praying for rulers, with rules about the 
 bearing of women in public worship (ii.). The qualifications of "bishops" (presbyters) 
 and deacons (iii. ). Fresh warnings respecting the false teachers, and the way in which 
 Timothy is to deal with them (iv.). His relations to elders (v. 1, 2) ; to the order of 
 " widows " (3 16) ; and to presbyters, with rules as to their selection (17 25). Direc- 
 tions concerning slaves, especially with reference to the false teachers ; warnings against 
 covetousness ; with final exhortations and benediction (vi.). 
 
 2 Not, of course, "a Saviour." The spread of Christianity is naturally marked by 
 the increasing anarthrousness (omission of the article) of its commonest terms. We 
 mark this fact in the word Christ, which is an appellative in the Gospels (almost always 
 "the Christ" 1.., the Messiah) , but has become, in the Epistles, a proper name. 
 
 Omit w5> v , N, A, D, F, G (B, deficient). < 1. 1, 2.
 
 THE PIE8T EPISTLB TO TIMOTHV. 651 
 
 Father, perhaps derived from some recent study of Psalm Ixiii. 7, and 
 continued throughout^the Pastoral Epistles when once adopted ; for the name 
 " our Hope," applied to Christ, and not improbably borrowed from the same 
 verse ; and for the word " mercy " so naturally introduced by the worn and 
 tried old man, between the usual greetings of " grace and peace." l 
 
 " As I begged thee to remain still in Ephesus, on my way to Macedonia, that 
 thou mightest command some not to teach different doctrine, nor to give heed to 
 myths and interminable genealogies," seeing that these minister questions rather 
 
 than the dispensation of God 3 which is in faith " 4 The sentence, quite 
 
 characteristically, remains unfinished; but St. Paul evidently meant to say, "I 
 repeat the exhortation which then I gave." 
 
 In contrast with these false teachers he tells him that the purpose of the 
 Gospel is love out of a pure heart, a good conscience, and faith unfeigned, 
 failing of which some turned aside to vain jangling. They wanted to pass 
 themselves off as teachers of the Jewish Law, but their teaching was mere 
 confusion and ignorance. 
 
 The mention of the Law leads him to allude to its legitimate function. 6 
 To those who were justified by faith it was needless, being merged in the 
 higher law of a life in unity with Christ ; but its true function was to warn 
 and restrain those who lived under the sway of mere passion in heathenish 
 wickedness. 6 For these, though not for the regenerate, the thunders of Sinai 
 are necessary, "according to the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God, 
 wherewith I was entrusted." T 
 
 He then at once digresses into an expression of heartfelt gratitude to God 
 for that grace which superabounded over his former ignorant faithlessness, a 
 faithlessness which had led him to outrage and insult, such as only his 
 ignorance could palliate. 
 
 " Faithful is the saying, 8 and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came 
 into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. 9 But on this account I 
 gained mercy, that in me first and foremost Christ Jesus might manifest His entire 
 long-suffering as a pattern for those who were hereafter to believe on Him to 
 
 i Cf. Gal. vi. 16. 
 
 8 Though the Sephiroth of the Kabbala belong to a much later period, and the Zohar 
 is probably a mediaeval book, yet Judaic speculations of the same kind seem to have been 
 the prototype of the Valentinian emanations with then- successive intermarriages of asons. 
 
 3 i. 4 ; leg. olKovo^lav (, A, B, F, G, &c.). The questions do not further the divine 
 scheme of God, which works, not in the sphere of misty uncertainties, but in the sphere 
 of faith. 
 
 4 3, 4. For similar anakolutha, see Gal. ii. 4, 5 ; Kom. v. 12, &c. 
 
 * 1. 8, 9, i/ouo; . . . vojjii;i.w?. 
 
 6 For the true use of the Law, and the limitation to its validity, see Rom. rii. 12 ; 
 Gal. iii. 19 ; Phil. iii. 9. It is idle to pretend that there is anything un-Pauline in this 
 sentiment. With the list of crimes which is, however, varied with perfect independence 
 cf. Rom. i. 29 ; 1 Cor. vi. 9 ; Gal. v. 19. 
 
 7 i. 811. 
 
 8 This arresting formula would naturally arise with the rise of Christian axioms ; 
 cf. " These words are faithful and true " (Rev. rxi. 5 ; xxii. 6). 
 
 Of. " Ged be merciful to me the Mnnw " (Luke xviM. IS ; irpirot, " nen tempore sed 
 maUgnitete " (Aug. in fa. Imi. 1),
 
 652 THK LIFE AKD WORK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 life eternal Now to the King of the Agea, 1 the incorruptible, invisible, only God,* 
 houour and glory unto the ages of the agea. Amen. 8 
 
 " This charge I commit to thee, son Timothy, in accordance with the prophecies 
 which in time past were prophesied of thee, 4 that thou in them mayest war the good, 
 warfare, 8 having faith and a, good conscience, which some rejecting have been 
 wrecked as regards the faith; of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I 
 handed over to Satan, that they may be trained not to blaspheme u ' 
 
 It will be seen that in this section he begins with the false teachers, and 
 after two digressions one suggested by the mention of the Law, the other by 
 his personal commission to preach the Gospel returns to them again. 
 
 The second chapter contains regulations for public worship, the duty of ' 
 praying for those in authority, and the bearing and mutual relations of men 
 and women in religious assemblies broken by brief and natural digressions 
 on the universality of God's offered grace, and on his own Apostolic office. He 
 directs that 
 
 "Petitions, prayers, supplications, and thanksgivings 7 should be made for all, 
 and especially for kings, 8 and those in authority, that we may spend a calm and 
 quiet life in all godliness and gravity. This is fair and acceptable before our 
 Saviour, God, who wills all men to be saved, and to come to full knowledge of the 
 truth. For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man 
 Christ Jesus, 9 who gave Himself a ransom for all the testimony in its own seasons. 
 For which testimony I was appointed an herald and an Apostle (I speak the 
 truth; 10 I lie not, 11 ) in faith and truth."" 
 
 1 Not here in its technical sense of ' ' the moms ; " of. Ps. oxlv. 13, " a kingdom of all ages. " 
 
 2 Omit o-ocfxp (, A, D, F, G, &c.). 
 
 8 For similar personal digressions, see GaL i. 12 ; 1 Thess. ii. 4 ; 2 Cor. iii. 6 ; iv. 1, 
 &c. ; and for the dpxology (Rom. xv. 33 ; xvi. 27 ; 2 Cor. ii. 14 ; ix. 15 ; Phil. iv. 20, 
 &c. The passage is intensely individual, for " all Paul's theology is in ultimate analysis, 
 the reflex of his personal experience " (Reuss, Les Epttres, ii. 352). 
 
 4 Perhaps a reference to his solemn ordination, as in iv. 14, when Silas, who was a 
 prophet (Acts xv. 32), was present among others (Acts xiii. 3). 
 
 vrpaTtia, not a^uv, as in 2 Tim. iv. 7. It is St. Paul's favourite metaphor (Rom. xiiL 
 12 ; 2 Cor. x. 5 ; 1 Thess. v. 8, &c.). 
 
 4 i. 12 20. It is impossible to know the exact circumstances referred to. For 
 Hymenaeus, see 2 Tim. ii. 17. For Alexander, 2 Tim. iv. 14 ; Acts xix. 33 ; but even 
 the identifications are precarious. For " delivering to Satan," see 1 Cor. v. 5. "Whether 
 it was excommunication, or generally giving up from all Church influences, and leaving 
 Satan to deal with them, or the delivery to preternatural corporal sufferings, iheintention, 
 we see, was merciful and disciplinary (irot&vdwert)- 
 
 7 The synonyms are mainly cumulative, though perhaps Stfati* means special, 
 7rpoeru\a? general, and vrevfis earnest prayers (see Phil. iv. 6). 
 
 8 Baur sees in this plural an indication that the Epistle was written in the times of 
 the Antonines, when Emperors took associates in the Empire. Can theorising be more 
 baseless? The word "kings" does not necessarily refer only to local viceroys, &c., like 
 the Herods, but was in the provinces applied genetically to the Emperors, as it constantly 
 is in the Talmud. It was most important to both Jews and Christians that they should 
 not be suspected of civic turbulence (Jos. B. J. ii. 10, 4 ; Bingham, xv. 8, 14). Hence 
 we see how baseless is the conjecture of Pfleiderer (Protestcmten bibel) that it was written 
 in the time of Hadrian, who befriended the Christians (Euseb. H. E. iv. 8, 9). 
 
 9 The word ^.tvi-ny; as applied to Christ is new, but not the conception (Rom. v. 10 ; 
 2 Cor. v. 19). There may be a silent condemnation of incipient Docetism in avdpuiros, 
 as well as of the supposed mediation of angels in U (Col. ii. 15, 18). 
 
 Om. iv Xprr<j> (A, D, F, G, &c.). 
 
 11 A natural reminiscence of the occasions when such asseverations had been BO 
 necessary that they had become habitual (2 Cor. xi. 31 ; Rom. xi. 1). 
 a ii. 17.
 
 THE FIBS? EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY. 653 
 
 After this double digression he expresses his wish that the men l should 
 pray in every place, " uplifting holy hands, 2 without wrath and doubting ; and 
 that women, with shamefastuess and sobriety, should adorn themselves, not 
 with plaits of hair, and gold or pearls, or costly raiment, but, in accordance 
 with their Gospel profession, with good works." Let them be silent and 
 submissive, not obtrusive and didactic. This rule he supports by the 
 narrative of the Fall, as illustrative of generic differences between the sexes, 3 
 adding, however, that in spite of the greater liability to deception and sin, 
 woman " shall be saved through motherhood, if they abide in faith and love 
 and sanctification with sober-mindedness." * 
 
 The third chapter passes into the qualifications for office in the Church. 
 It is introduced by a sort of Christian aphorism, " Faithful is the saying, If 
 any man desires the office of the pastorate, 8 he desires a good work." The 
 qualifications on which St. Paul insists are irreproachableness, faithful 
 domestic life, 6 soberness, sobennindedness, decorousness, hospitable dispo- 
 sition, and aptitude to teach. He who is quarrelsome over wine, given to 
 blows and covetousness, is unfit. Moderation, peacefulness, indifference to 
 money, a well-ordered household, grave and obedient children, are signs that a 
 man may aspire to the sacred work ; but he must not be a neophyte, 7 that he 
 
 1 TOVS avSpas (ii. 8). 
 
 2 The ancient attitude of pra7er (Bingham, Antiq. nil. 8, 10 ; Ps. xxiv. 4 ; xxvi. 6) ; 
 of. Tennyson 
 
 " For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 That nourish a bliiid life within the brain, 
 If knowing God they lift not Jumds of prayer 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend f" 
 
 8 This is quite independent of, yet exactly analogous to, his reasoning in 1 Oor. xl. 
 S, 9 (cf. 2 Cor. xi. 3 ; Wisd. xxv. 24). 
 
 4 ii. 8 15. It Will be seen that he is here looking at the question from a wholly 
 different point of view to that in 1 Cor. vii., which applies not to the whole sex, but to 
 a chosen few. So, too, in the previous verses, he is considering concrete fact*, not the 
 abstract abolition of all sexual distinctions in Christ (Gal. iii. 28). The ^ Tewtyoviti is 
 probably not specific ("the child-bearing" i.e., the Incarnation surely a most obscure 
 allusion), but generic i.e., a holy married life, with the bearing and training of children, 
 is, as a rule, the appointed path for women, and it will end in their salvation, in spite 
 of their original weakness, if that path be humbly and faithfully pursued. Doubtless 
 St. Paul was thinking of Gen. iii. 16. 
 
 6 To translate this "the office of a bishop" is, as Alford says in his usual incisive 
 way, "merely laying a trap for misunderstanding." Episcopacy proper was developed 
 after the death of St. Paul, but before that of St. John, as a bulwark against heresy. 
 
 6 I am not persuaded that jjufis ywoucbs avSpa. really implies more than this, with 
 reference to the prevalence of divorce, &c. The early prejudice against second marriages 
 naturally inclined the ancient commentators to take it exclusively in one way ; but the 
 remark of Chryspstoin, TIJX i/meTpww icwAu'ei, seems to me to be nearest the truth. St. Paul's 
 opinion was not in the least that of Athenagoras, that a second marriage is ' ' specious 
 adultery," since in some cases he even recommends it (v. 14; 1 Cor. vii. 39; Rom. vii., 
 2, 3), but he would possibly have held -with Hermas (Pastor, ii. 4), that though a second 
 marriage is no sin, it is a better and nobler thing to avoid it. It is as Gregory of 
 Naziauzus says, " a concession " (<nryxwpi7<ns Orat. xxxi.). 
 
 J The first occurrence of the word neophyte" " nevrly -planted " a recent convert. 
 For the metaphor, see 1 Cor. iii. 6. At Ephesus there must have been a choice of 
 presbyters who were not "neophytes." Perhaps the reason why this qualification is 
 omitted in Tit. i. 6 is that there would have been greater difficulty in carrying it out in 
 the more recent Churches of Crete.
 
 654 THE LITE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 may not, through the cloudy fumes of pride, fall into the devil's judgment 1 
 He must be well thought of by his Pagan neighbours, that he may not fall 
 into disrepute, and the devil's snare which such loss of character involves. 2 
 
 Deacons, too, must be grave, straightforward, sober, not avaricious, sound 
 in faith, and pure of conscience ; and their freedom from reproach must be 
 tested before they are appointed.* 
 
 Deaconesses * must be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful. The domestic 
 relations of deacons and deaconesses must be irreproachable; for an 
 honourable diaconate secures an honourable position, 5 and boldness in the 
 faith.' 
 
 " These things I write to thee, though I hope to come to you unexpectedly 
 soon ; 7 but in order that, if I am delayed, thou mayest know how to bear thyself in 
 the house of God seeing that it is the Church of God as a pillar and basis of the 
 truth." 
 
 " And confessedly great is the mystery of godliness who was * 
 
 " Manifested in the flesh, 
 Justified in the Spirit, 
 Seen of angels, 
 Preached among the Gentiles. 
 Believed on in the world, 
 
 Taken up in glory." 18 
 
 1 These Epistles ore peculiar in the use of the word "devil." Elsewhere St. Paul 
 uses " Satan," except in Eph. iv. 27 ; vi. 11. It is impossible to say whether " the devil's 
 judgment " means " that which he has incurred " or " that which he inflicts." 
 
 5 ui. 1-7. 
 
 s iii. 8 10. Besides the " Seven," deacons properly so called may be referred to in 
 1 Cor. xii. 28 ; Rom. xii. 7 ; 1 Pet. iv. 11 ; as well as in Phil. i. 1. 
 
 4 rw<uK must mean "deaconesses" (Rom. xvi 1. "Aneillae quae ministrae dice- 
 bantur " Plin. ix. 27), because the wives of deacons were certainly not selected by the 
 Church. 
 
 5 iii. 1113. 
 
 6 KoAbs8a0/nbs can only mean "a fair standing-point," "an honourable position," from 
 which to discharge nobly his Christian duties. The notion that it means "earning 
 preferment " would be an immense anachronism. Cf. vi. 19 : K aXoi> Ocufaiov. 
 
 7 Taxiov an untranslatable ellipse. John xiii. 27 ; Heb. xiii. 23. 
 
 8 Apart from the awkwardness of the Church being, in the same verse, the house of 
 God and also a pillar and base of the truth, the expression is one of the most difficult and 
 surprising one of the least obviously Pauline in the whole Epistle. The separate 
 metaphors occur in Gal. ii. 9 and Eph. ii. 20, but only of persons. There is, therefore, 
 much to be said for attaching them to avaorpe^co&u, and making them apply to Timothy, 
 as I have done. (See Dean Stanley, Sermons on the Apostolic Age, p. 115.) The words 
 are applied to the martyr Attalus in the Epistle of the Church of Lyons, c. 5. Others 
 attach them to the next sentence which they would turn into a most awkward and 
 unnatural anti-climax. If, however, they are applied to the Church, the meaning is 
 clear enough namely, that apart from the Church the truth of the Gospel would be 
 without that earthly institution on which, by Christ's ordinance, its stability and perma- 
 nence depends. 
 
 9 "O? is read by N, A, 0, F, G. (The wading of A was once supposed to be ec, but 
 Bishop Ellicott testifies that the apparent line across the O was originally due to the 
 tagitta of the < in the word tvvepsiav on the other side of the page. See his Pastoral 
 Epistles, p. 103.) Besides this, it ii ao unquestionably supported by every canon of 
 criticism that it may now be regarded a a certain reading. 
 
 10 iiL 14 16. These last phrases are so rhythmic in their introverted parallelism 
 with the varied order of then- triple antitheses, that they have, with much probability, 
 been supposed (like Eph. v. 14) to belong to some ancient hymn or creed. Tke extreme 
 fcntiquity of Christian hymns is proved by Eph. v. 19, and by Plin. Epp. x. 97. " Juste-
 
 THE FIBST KPISTLE TO TIMOTHY. 655 
 
 The true doctrine again recalls him to the subject of the falsa teachers. 
 Beyond the present peril lies the prophecy of future apostasies, in which some 
 shall give heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of devils, by means of the 
 hypocrisy of liars, whose consciences have been seared. This apostasy, partly 
 present, partly future, is marked by dualistio tendencies. It hinders mar- 
 riage, 1 and commands abstinence from meats, 2 forgetting that thankfulness 
 and prayer sanctify everything. Another feature of the nascent heresy is a 
 fondness for profane and anile myths. A third is mere bodily asceticism. 
 This training may indeed have a partial advantage ; but better is the gymna- 
 sium which trains for godliness, since godliness is profitable both for this life 
 and the next (" faithful is the saying ") : for with a view to this because we 
 have hope in the living God, who is the Saviour of all, specially of the faith- 
 ful 3 w are enabled to endure both toil and struggle.* These truths Timothy 
 is to teach, showing himself an example to the faithful in speech, conversa- 
 tion, love, spirituality, faith, purity, so that none may despise his youth.* Till 
 St. Paul arrives he is bidden to occupy himself in reading, 8 exhortation, teach- 
 ing; securing progress by diligence, and not neglecting which possibly 
 Timothy, in his retiring character, was tempted to do the grace which was 
 solemnly bestowed on him at his ordination. 7 
 
 Then he is advised how to behave towards various orders in his Church. 
 He is not to use severe language to an elder, but to exhort them as fathers ; 
 the younger men as brothers ; the elder women as mothers, the younger as 
 sisters, in all purity. 1 Special directions are given about widows.' Those are 
 true widows who rightly train their children or grandchildren, who do their 
 duty to their parents, who devote themselves to constant prayer. But in a 
 widow, a prurient, frivolous character is a living death ; for, in a Christian, 
 neglect of domestic duties and relations is worse than heathenism. No widow 
 is therefore to be put on the list before sixty years of age, after one honour- 
 able marriage, 10 and after having acquired a character for motherliness, hospi- 
 
 fiod in the Spirit " means that Christ was manifested to be the Son of God (Root. i. by 
 the workings of His higher spiritual life ; " seen of angels " refers to the various ar^elia 
 witnesses of scenes of His earthly life. 
 
 Not yet " forbids," but somewhat " discourages," Of. JOB. B. J. II. 8, 2, and 13. 
 
 Cf. Rom. adv. 1 4 : 1 Cor. yiii. 8 ; x. 20. 
 
 The universalism of expression is here even more remarkable than in ii. 4. 
 
 Leg. iy<avi&n<8a, , A, F, C, G, K. 
 
 The sneers that Timothy "seems to have been endowed by Christian legend with 
 the gift of immortal youth " are very groundless. If he were converted in A.D. 45, at 
 the age of sixteen, he would now (A.D. 66) be only thirty-seven a very youthful age 
 for so responsible a position. The aged rector of one who has now become a very exalted 
 ecclesiastic, and is long past sixty, still says of his first curate, " I always told you that 
 young man was very ambitious ; " knd when M. Thiers was Prime Minister of France, 
 and called on his old schoolmaster, he found that he was only remembered as " the little 
 Adolphus who played tricks." 
 
 * Perhaps the earliest allusion to the duty of reading Scripture. 
 
 7 iv. 116. Acts xvi. 1, and 2 Tim. i. 6, where he receives a similar injunction. 
 
 * " Omnes puellas et virgines Christ! aut aequaliter ignora aut aequaliter dilige " (Jer. ). 
 But how inferior to the direction of St. Paul ! 
 
 * Actsil. 44; vi. 1. 
 
 1 Cf. Tit. i. 6. It Is a remarkable sign of the position of widows in the Church that
 
 65# THE LIFE AND WOBK OF 8*. PAtTL. 
 
 tality, kindly service, succour to the afflicted, and continuance !n every good 
 work. But Timothy is to have nothing to say to younger widows who want 
 to marry again when they begin to wax restive against the yoke of Christ 
 and so are convicted of setting at nought their first faith. 1 To avoid the 
 danger of gadding idleness and unseemly gossiping, it is better that such 
 should avoid all chance of creating scandal by quietly re-entering into mnr. 
 ried life. Heuce all younger widows must be supported by their own relations, 
 and not at the expense of the Church. 8 
 
 Keturning to the Presbyters, he quotes the passage of Deuteronomy, 
 " Thou shalt not muzzle a threshing ox," and adds the maxim, " The labourer 
 is worthy of his hire," 3 to support his rule that "double honour" be paid to 
 faithful and laborious pastors. 4 If they do wrong they must indeed be 
 rebuked, but never on ill-supported accusations. " I solemnly charge thee 
 before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, 6 to observe these 
 rules without prejudice, and without doing anything by favour." He is not 
 to ordain any one too hastily, lest he be involved in the responsibility for their 
 sins ; and this discrimination is the more necessary because there are flagrant 
 sins which marshal men to judgment, and hidden sins which stealthily follow 
 behind them ; just as also there are some good works which are openly mani- 
 fest, and others which are concealed, although ultimately all shall stand 
 revealed in their true light. 
 
 In the very midst of these wise and serious directions are introduced two 
 personal exhortations. One of them "Keep thyself pure" may naturally 
 have been suggested by the passing thought that he whose duty it was to 
 exorcise so careful an oversight over others must be specially watchful to be 
 himself free from every stain. The other, " Be no longer a water-drinker, but 
 use a little wine because of thy stomach, and thy frequent infirmities," 6 is so 
 casual that, though we see at once how it may have occurred to St. Paul's 
 
 I'olycarp calls them Ovo-iao-njpioj' 8eof>, " an altar of God " (ad Phil. 4). From the severity 
 of some of St. Paul's remarks, Benss thinks that he may have had in view the occasional 
 second marriage of Christian widows with Pagans, which would be a disgraceful pro- 
 ceeding after they had received assistance from the Church. They might be "dea- 
 conesses " earlier than sixty, but not " widows." 
 
 1 In their practical pledge not to marry again when they were placed on the official 
 list of widows. 
 
 3 v. 116. 
 
 8 1 Cor. ix. 9. Those who apply ^ ypafo to both clauses must admit that the Gospel of 
 St. Luke had been published, and had come to be regarded of Divine authority, before 
 this Epistle (Luke x. 7). But the inference is most precarious, for our Lord often 
 alluded ;to current proverbs, and ^ yp<J>>) may here only apply to the quotation from 
 Deut. xiv. 4. 
 
 4 SurXii TI/J is a perfectly general expression. The spirit of foolish literalism led 
 to double rations for the Presbyters at the Agapae. 
 
 5 See 1 Cor. xi. 10 ; 1 Pet. i. 12. It is not possible to explain the exact shade of 
 meaning in the word "elect." ,They are probably so called, as Calvin says, "excellentiae 
 causa." Cf. rove iepovs iyWAnvc 'm Agrippa's adjuration to the Jews not to rebel against 
 Rome (Jos. B. J. ii. 16, 4, and Tobit xii. 15). 
 
 6 These "frequent infirmities" perhaps explain the timidity of Timothy's character 
 (1 Cor. xvi. 10, 11), Some have seen a reflex of this in the reproaches addressed, in the 
 midst of praise. " to the angel of the Church of Ephesus,"
 
 THE FIBST EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY 657 
 
 thoughts since otherwise the former rule might have led to a self-denial still 
 more rigid, 1 and even injurious to health it is far too natural and spon- 
 taneous, too entirely disconnected from all that precedes and follows it, to hare 
 occurred to any imitator. An imitator, if capable of introducing the natural 
 play of thought to which the precept " Keep thyself pure " is due, would have 
 been far more likely to add and especially hi an Epistle which so scrupu- 
 lously forbids indulgence in wine to all Church officials " And, in order to 
 promote this purity, take as little wine as possible, or avoid it altogether." 2 
 
 He then passes to the duties of slaves. 3 Their conversion is not to be 
 made a plea for upsetting the social order, and giving any excuse for abusing 
 the Gospel. Christian masters are still to be treated as masters, and to be 
 served all the more heartily "because all who are partakers of this kindly 
 service are faithful and beloved." Here again he reverts to the false teachers 
 who had perhaps perverted the truth of Christian equality into the falsehood 
 of socialism to denounce their inflated ignorance and unwholesome loquacity 
 as the source of the jealousies and squabbles of corrupt men, who look on 
 religion as a source of gain. 4 A source of gain indeed it is when accompanied 
 with the contentment 6 arising from the sense of the nakedness of our birth 
 and death, and the fewness of our real needs, 6 whereas the desire of wealth 
 breeds the numerous forms of foolish desire which plunge men into destruc- 
 tion and perdition. For all evils spring from the root of covetousness, 7 which 
 has led many ito heresy as well as into manifold miseries. The Apostle 
 appeals to his son hi the faith to flee these things: to pursue 8 righteousness, 
 godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness ; to strive the good strife of faith ; 
 to grasp eternal life, " to which also thou wert called, and didst confess the 
 good confession before many witnesses." He most solemnly adjures him, by 
 Christ and His good confession before Pontius Pilate, 9 to keep the command- 
 ment without spot, without reproach, till the manifestation of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, which He shall show in His own seasons, who is the blessed and only 
 Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone hath immortality, 
 
 1 Rom. xiv. 2. Plutarch speaks of an ooiw Ayvia (De Isid. et Osvr, 6). 
 
 2 Ver. 1723. 
 
 8 Some have fancied, with very little probability, that the topic is suggested by the 
 mention of those whose good works cannot be finally hid, but are little likely to be noticed 
 in this world. 
 
 4 Gal. iii. 28. The recognition of the existing basis of society is found throughout 
 the Epistles (1 Cor. vii. 21 ; Col. iii. 22, &c.). 
 
 5 avTapia, self-sufficing independence (2 Cor. ix. 8 ; I'hil. iv. 11). Of. Prov. xiv. 14, 
 "The good man shall be satisfied from himself." 
 
 Phil. iv. 1113. 
 
 ^ pi'a need not be rendered "a root," for it is a word which does not require the 
 article ; but St. Paul does not, of course, mean that it is the only root from which all 
 evils spring, but the root from which all evils may spring. So Diogenes Laertius calls it 
 " the metropolis of all evils " (Vit. Diogen. vi. 50 ; and Kilo, De Spec. Legg. 346, calls it 
 
 op^TjTijpioi' irav-rtav iropavofujfxaTwi' (cf . Luke Xll. 15 21). J^ 
 
 8 timtt, EirtAaoG. 
 
 9 There is an obvious allusion in the KOXTJ opoXoyia of Christ to that of the previous 
 verse, but in the latter instance it seems to mean the faithful performance of the will of 
 God even to death. 
 
 22*
 
 658 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. FAUX, 
 
 dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man ever saw, or can see to 
 w)om honour and eternal strength. Amen. 1 
 
 With this majestic description of the Divine attributes it might well have 
 been thought that the Epistle would close. A forger might naturally desire a 
 climax; but St. Paul is never influenced by such considerations of style. 
 Filled with the thought of the perils of wealth in a city like wealthy Ephosus, 
 he once more, in a sort of postscript, 2 advises Timothy to warn the rich " not 
 to be high-minded, nor to fix their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on 
 the living God, who richly affords us all things for enjoyment," and to use 
 their riches wisely and generously, " treasuring up for themselves a fair founda- 
 tion for the future, that they may grasp that which is really life." 3 
 
 Then, with one parting reference to the false teachers, the Epistle ends : 
 
 " Timothy, guard the trust committed to thee, turning away from these pro- 
 fane babblings, and "antitheses" of the knowledge which usurps the name; which 
 some professing have gone astray as regards the faith. Grace be with thee." 4 
 
 The " Amen " 6 is probably a pious addition, and the various superscriptions 
 which tell us that the Epistle was written from Laodicea, "which is the 
 metropolis of Phyrgia Pacatiana," or "from Nicopolis," or "from Athens," 
 " by the hands of his disciple Titus," or " from Macedonia," are idle guesses, 
 of which the latter alone has any plausibility, though even this is only a pre- 
 carious inference from the verse which suggested it. 
 
 CHAPTER LIV. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO TITUS. 
 
 " Lord Jesus, I am weary in Thy work, but not of Thy work. Let me go and 
 speak for Thee once more . . . seal Thy truth, and then die." WHITEFIELD. 
 
 FROM St. Paul's message to Philemon we infer that as speedily as possible 
 after he was set free he visited Ephesus and the cities of the Lycus. Even if 
 ho deferred this visit till he had carried out his once-cherished plan of visiting 
 Spain, we know that the moment his destiny was decided he sent Timothy to 
 Philippi, with the intention of following him at no long interval. 6 Hence 
 when Timothy rejoined him, probably at Ephesus, he left him there, as we 
 have seen, to finish the task of setting the Church in order, and himself set oui 
 on his promised journey to Macedonia. It is not likely that he felt any desire 
 to revive the gloomy reminiscences of Jerusalem, and to incur a second risk 
 of being torn to pieces by infuriated Pharisees. In that unhappy city a fresh 
 outburst of the spirit of persecution had ended the year before (A.D. 63) in 
 
 i vL 118. Reuss, Lot Epttreg, ii 878. 
 
 Yi 1716. Lea. 6,*, A, D, E, F> G. 
 
 4 , 4, *", G, wad p*ff v/duv, as in 2 Tim. iv. 22 ; Tit. iii. 15. 
 
 Omitted bf , A, D, F, G, Phil. ii. 19-23.
 
 THE 1PISTUB TO TITOS. 659 
 
 the murder of James the Lord's brother. 1 Soon after the accession of Gessius 
 Floras to the post of Procurator, there were violent disturbances throughout 
 JndaBa. The war which culminated in the total destruction of the Jewish 
 polity did not indeed break out till A.D. 66, but the general spirit of 
 turbulence, the deeply-seated discontent with the government of Agrippa IL 
 and the threatening multiplication of the Sicarii, showed that everything 
 was ripening for the final revolt. 1 We may be sure that when the ship of 
 Adramyttium sailed from Tyre, St. Paul had seen his last of the Holy Land. 
 From Macedonia he doubtless went to Oorinth, and he may then have sailed 
 with Titus to Crete. 
 
 On the southern shores of that legendary island he had involuntarily 
 touched in the disastrous voyage from Myra, which ended in his shipwreck 
 at Malta. But a prisoner on his way to trial, in a crowded Alexandrian 
 corn- vessel which only awaited the earliest opportunity to sail, could have had 
 but little opportunity to preach the gospel even at the Fair Havens and Lasyea, 
 and we may at once reject the idle suggestion that the Church of Crete had 
 then first been founded. It is probable that the first tidings of Christianity 
 had been carried to the island by those Cretan Jews who had heard the 
 thrilling words of St. Peter at Pentecost ; and the insufficiency of knowledge 
 in these Churches may be accounted for in part by these limited opportunities, 
 as well as by the inherent defects of the Cretan character. The stormy shores 
 of Crete, and the evil [reputation of its inhabitants even from mythical days, 
 may well have tended to deter the evangelising visits of the early preachers 
 of Christianity; and the indication that the nascent faith of the converts 
 was largely tainted with Jewish superstition is exactly what we should have 
 expected. St. Paul's brief sojourn in the island with Titus was probably 
 the first serious effort to consolidate the young, struggling, and imperilled 
 Churches ; and we can easily imagine that it was the necessity of completing 
 an anxious work which reluctantly compelled the Apostle to leave his com- 
 panion behind him. The task could not have been left in wiser or firmer 
 hands than those of one who had already made his influence felt and his 
 authority respected among the prating and conceited sophists of turbulent 
 Corinth. Those who argue that, because Paul had but recently parted with 
 Titus, the advice contained in the letter would be superfluous, are starting a 
 purely imaginary difficulty, and one of which the futility is demonstrated by 
 the commonest experiences of daily life. Objections of this kind are simply 
 astonishing, and when we are told that the instructions given are too vague 
 and commonplace to render them of any value, and that " the pointlessness of 
 the directions must have made them all but worthless to an evangelist," 8 we 
 can only reply that the Christian Church in all ages, in spite of the incessant 
 tendency to exalt dogma above simple practice, has yet accepted the Pastoral 
 Epistles as a manual which has never been surpassed. 
 
 Jos. Antt. rx. 9, 1, 2 ; Acts xii. 111. f Jos. B. J. ii. 14, 2. 
 
 8 Davidson, Introd. ii. 129 ; Keuss, Lts Eptfres, ii. 333.
 
 660 THE LIPB AND WOKK OF 8!f. PAVt. 
 
 From Crete, St. Paul may have returned by Ephesns and Troas to Mace- 
 donia, and thence to Dalmatia and Illyriciun; 1 and we learn from the Epistle 
 to Titus that he was accompanied by several friends, for whom he found the 
 amplest employment in missions to various Churches. He intended to spend 
 the winter at Nicopolis, which, beyond all question, must be the well-known 
 and flourishing city of Epirus, built by Augustus to commemorate his victory 
 at Actium. When he wrote the Epistle to Titus, he was about to send 
 Arfcemas or Tychicus to him in Crete, to continue the work of organisation 
 there, while Titus is directed to join the Apostle at Nicopolis before the winter 
 conies on. 
 
 How little we really know about Titus will be best seen by the theories 
 which attempt to identify him with Titus (or, Titius) Justus (Acts xviii. 7), 
 with Silas, and even with Timothy ! Though he is not mentioned in the Acts 
 probably because he never happened to be a companion of the Apostle at 
 the same time that Luke was with him he seems to have been one of the 
 trustiest and most beloved members of the noble little band of St. Paul's 
 friends and disciples. As he was a Greek by birth, St. Paul, whose convert 
 he was, had chosen to take him to Jerusalem on that memorable visit, which 
 ended in the recognition of Gentile emancipation from the yoke of Mosaism. 2 
 If we were right in the conjecture that the generous self-sacrifice of Titus on 
 this occasion rescued Paul from a grievous struggle, if not from an immense 
 peril, we may imagine how close would have been the personal bond between 
 them. He had special connexions with Corinth, to which he had three times 
 been sent by the Apostle during the troubles of that distracted Church. 3 
 The warm terms hi which St. Paul always speaks of him as his brother, 
 and associate, and fellow-labourer, and the yearning anxiety which made him 
 utterly miserable when he failed to meet him in Troas, show that he was no 
 ordinary man ; and the absence from this Epistle of the personal warnings 
 and exhortations which are found in those to Timothy, lead us to believe that 
 Titus was the more deeply respected, even if Timothy were the more tenderly 
 beloved. The last notice of him is his visit to Dalmatia during the second 
 imprisonment, and we may feel the strongest confidence that this was under- 
 taken as a special duty, and that he did not voluntarily desert his friend and 
 teacher whom he had so long and faithfully served. The Epistle which St. 
 Paul addresses to him goes over much the same ground as that to Timothy, 
 but with additional particulars, and in a perfectly independent manner. It 
 excited the warm admiration of Luther, who says of it : " This is a short 
 Epistle, but yet such a quintessence of Christian doctrine, and composed in 
 such a masterly manner, that it contains all that is needful for Christian 
 knowledge and lif o." The subjects are touched upon in the same easy and 
 natural order as in the other Pastoral Epistles, and the incidental mention of 
 people so entirely unknown in the circle of the Apostle's friends as Artomas 
 and Zcnas, the lawyer, together with the marked variations in the initial and 
 
 Bom. xv. 19. 2 CW.il. 3; Tit. 1.4. 2 Cor. vii., Tfii
 
 EPISTLE TO TITtrS. 661 
 
 final salutations, are among the many incidental circumstances which powerfully 
 strengthen the argument in favour of its authenticity. 
 
 The greeting with which the Apostle opens is somewhat obscure and 
 involved, owing to the uncertainty of the exact meaning of the various 
 prepositions employed. It differs from all other salutations in the phrase " a 
 slave of God," instead of a " a slave of Jesus Christ," and it is marked by the 
 prominence of the title Saviour, which is applied throughout this Epistle both 
 to God and to Christ. 1 
 
 " Paul, a slave of God, but an Apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of the elect 
 of God and the full knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, (based) 
 on the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before eternal 
 times, but manifested His word in His own seasons in the preaching with which I 
 was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Saviour to Titus, my 
 true son after the common faith, grace and peace, from God our Father, and the 
 Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour." 
 
 After this solemn greeting he proceeds at once to the many practical 
 directions which are the object of his writing. He left Titus in Crete to 
 finish all necessary regulations, and especially to ordain presbyters in every 
 city, who are to be men of irreproachable character, and well-ordered domestic 
 positions, for a " bishop " must be blameless as God's steward, not self-willed, 
 not passionate, and with the other positive and negative qualifications which 
 he has already mentioned in the Epistle to Timothy with the addition that 
 he is to love what is good, and to hold fast the faithful word according to the 
 instruction he has received that he may be able to exhort with healthy teaching 
 and to refute the gainsayers. 3 
 
 These opponents are described as being disorderly, prating, and self- 
 deceiving Jewish Christians, who for the sake of filthy lucre turn whole 
 families upside down. To these, as to the Cretans in general, St. Paul applies 
 the stinging line of their fellow-countryman Epimenides 
 
 "The Cretans are always liars, evil wild beasts, lazy gluttons," ' 
 for which reason they must be sharply rebuked, that they may be healthy 
 
 1 If the idea of God the Father as a Saviour had not occurred both in the Old 
 Testament and elsewhere in St. Paul, the expression might fairly have been called 
 nn-Pauline. But the idea is distinctly found in 1 Cor. i. 21. 
 
 * i. 59. 
 
 The line is an hexameter from the poem on "Oracles" by Epimenides, the Cretan 
 poet and philosopher. It was quoted by Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, 8, and well known 
 in antiquity because it gave rise to the syllogistic catch known as "the Liar." 
 
 They were among the three very bad K's of antiquity. 
 
 Kp^Tts, KainraSoitai, KiAixet, Tpia tcoLirrra. xaxurra. 
 
 As for their lying, Kfn)Tlf*t.v meant " to tell lies ;" of their ferocity, gluttony, drunken- 
 ness, and sensuality, and above all of their greed, ample testimonies are quoted 
 "CretenseB epem peooniae secuti" (Liv. xliv. 45); TOI xfnf M<ri "> unrea ropiW pftirrat. 
 jrpc,<rXurapovvT (Plut, Paul. sEmil. 23) ; Polyb. vi. 46, &o., and a remarkable epigram of 
 Leonidea 
 
 Aiei A/>ji'<rra( xou oAi<f0<5poi ovrc dtjcatm 
 KpiJTtc ' rif Kpifriiv otic 
 
 (gee Meumus's Greta, and Wetsteln ad toff.)
 
 662 THE UFH AND WORK OV ST. PAU*. 
 
 in the faith, ceasing to heed Jewish myths and the commandments of men 
 who turn away from the truth. 1 Among these commandments there seem to 
 have been many distinctions between things clean and unclean, all of which 
 the Apostle sweeps aside in his clear decisive manner by the deep truth that 
 to the pure all things are pure ; whereas nothing is or can be pure to men of 
 defiled mind and conscience, such as these, who, professing knowledge of God, 
 in deeds denied Him, being detestable, and disobedient, and to every good 
 deed reprobate. 2 
 
 " But speak thou the things which become the healthy teaching." The 
 keynote of this wholesome teaching is sober-mindedness. Aged -men are to be 
 temperate, grave, sober-minded, sound in love, in faith, in endurance. Aged 
 woinen are to show a sacred decorum in demeanour, free from slander and 
 intemperance, 3 teachers of what is fair, that they may train the younger 
 women, too, to be sober-minded, ennobling the estimate of their Christian 
 profession by humble, diligent, submissive performance of their home duties. 
 Titus must also exhort young men to be sober-minded, and in all respects he 
 is to set them a pure example of dignity, and faithfulness to the truth. Slaves 
 are to "adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things," by silent 
 obedience and cheerful honesty. 
 
 "For God's grace was manifested bringing salvation to all men, training us to 
 the end that once for all rejecting impiety and all worldly desires, we should live', in 
 the present age soberly, and righteously, and godly, expecting the blessed hope and 
 manifestation of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, 4 who gave 
 Himself for us, that He might ransom us from all lawlessness, and purify for 
 Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. These things speak, and rebuke 
 and exhort with all authority. Let no man despise thee." s 
 
 After this swift and perfect summary of the Christian life, alike in its 
 earthly and spiritual aspects, he reverts to necessary subjects for practical 
 exhortation. Naturally turbulent, the Cretans are to be constantly reminded 
 of the duty of submission in all things right and good. Naturally ferocious, 
 they are to be exhorted to meekness of word and deed towards all men. For 
 even so God showed gentleness to us when we were living in foolish and 
 disobedient error, the slaves of various passions, in a bitter atmosphere of 
 
 1 Possibly Titus had tried to regard these " myths " as harmlesc. 
 
 a L 10-16. 
 
 J 1L 3, "Not enslaved by much wine." On the proverbial intemperance of women 
 among the ancients, see Antholoy, ri. 298 ; Aristoph. Thetur. 735 and f-assim ; Athen. 
 x. 57. 
 
 4 The question as to whether these words should be rendered as in the text, or 
 " our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ," is simply a critical question. The analogy 
 of other passages throughout these and other Epistles (1 Tim. i. 1 ; v. 21 ; vi. 13 ; and, 
 above all, ii. 35 ; 2 Peter i. 1 ; 2 Thess. L 12 ; Jude 4, &c.), and the certainty that this 
 translation is aot required either by the anarthrous Somjp, or by the word cn-e^an), show 
 that the view taken by our English Version, and the majority of Protestant and other 
 versions, as well as by many of tha ancient versions, is correct. 
 
 Which of ail the Fathers of tha ant or second century was in the smallest degree 
 capable of writing so masterly a formula of Christian doctrine and practice as these 
 verses (ii. 11 14), or the perfectly independent yet no less memorable presentation of 
 Qospel truth with a compleieaoM only ceo muy-ided for sects and parties in UL
 
 THE EPISTLE TO TITOS. 663 
 
 reciprocal hatred. "But when" and here follows anotne* concentrated 
 summary of Pauline doctrine unparalleled for beauty and completeness 
 
 " But when tha kindness and lore towards man of God our Saviour was mani- 
 fested, not in aonsequence of works of righteousness which we did, but according to 
 His mercy He saved us, by means of the laver of regeneration, and renewal by the 
 Holy Ghost, which He poured upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, 
 that being justified by His grace we might become heirs, according to hope, of 
 eternal life." 
 
 Faithful is the saying 1 and in accordance with it he desires Titus to 
 teach with due insistence, that all who have believed may live up to their pro- 
 fession. This teaching is fair and beneficent, but foolish speculations and 
 discussions, 2 and genealogies and legalist disputes are vain and useless. But 
 if, after one or two admonitions, a man would not give up his own depraved 
 and wilful perversities, then Titus is to have nothing more to say to him. 3 
 
 The brief letter closes with a few personal messages. Titus may soon ex- 
 pect the arrival of Artemas or Tychicus, 4 and on the arrival of either, to take up 
 his work, he is with all speed to join Paul at Nicopolis for the winter. He is 
 also asked to do anything he can to further the journey and meet the require- 
 ments of Zenas the jurist, 6 and Apollos. And St. Paul hopes that all our 
 
 5 7 ? Will any one produce from Clemens, or Hennas, or Justin Martyr, or Ignatius, 
 or Polycarp, or Irenseus will any one even produce from Tertullian, or Chrysostom, or 
 Basil, or Gregory of Nyssa any single passage comparable for terseness, insight, and 
 mastery to either of these ? Only the inspired wisdom of the greatest of the Apostles 
 could have traced so divine a summary with so unfaltering a hand. If the single chorus 
 of Sophokles was sufficient to acquit him of senility if the thin unerring line attested 
 the presence of Apelles if the flawless circle of Giotto, drawn with one single sweep of 
 his hand, was sufficient to authenticate his workmanship and prove his power surely 
 such passages as these ought to be more than adequate to defend the Pastoral Epistles 
 from the charge of vapidity. Would it not be somewhat strange if all the great 
 Christian Fathers of three centuries were so far surpassed in power and eloquence by the 
 supposed falsarii who wrote the Epistles of the First and Second Captivity of St. Paul? 
 
 1 n. o Xdyos here refers to what has gone before, and it is remarkable that this favourite 
 formula is generally applied, as here, to expressions which have something solemn and 
 almost rhythmic in the form of their expression (1 Tim. i. 15 ; iii. 1 ; 2 Tim. ii. 11 
 the analogous 1 Tim. iii. 16). Were the quotations from Lymus ? The contrast between the 
 regenerate present and the unregenerate past is common in St. Paul (1 Cor. vi. 11 ; Gal. 
 iv. 3 ; Eph. ii. &o.). If any one were asked to fix on two passages which contained the 
 essence of all Pauline theology he would surely select Bom. iii. 21 26 and Tit. iii. 5 
 7 ; and the latter, though less polemical, is in some respects more complete. Again I 
 ask, Would it not be strange if the briefest yet fullest statement of his complete message 
 should come from a spurious Epistle ? 
 
 2 St. Paul stigmatises these sophistic discussions as both KCVOI and ULo.rm.oi i.e., empty 
 in their nature, and void of all results. 
 
 3 aipVis only occurs in 1 Cor. xi. 19 ; Gal. v. 20, and means, not "heresies," but 
 1 ' ecclesiastical divisions. " 
 
 4 "Artemas or Tychicus." Who was Artemas, or Artemidorus ? That he, like Tro- 
 phimus and Tychicus (Acts xx. 4 ; xxi. 29), was an Ephesian, we may perhaps conjecture 
 from his name, and Paul may have met with him in his recent visit to Ephesus ; but 
 what could possibly have induced a forger to insert a totally unknown name like that of 
 Artemas ? or to imagine any uncertainty in the mind of Paul as to which of the two he 
 should send ? (On Tychicus, see Col. iv. 7 ; Eph. vi. 21.) 
 
 s Does this mean " a lawyer " in the same sense as vojuoStSaoxaAoe in Luke v. 17 ? Was 
 he a Jewish scribe, or a Greek or Roman legist ? It is quite impossible to say ; and who 
 was this Zenas, or Zenodorus ? What should put such a name and such an allusion into 
 a forger's mind ?
 
 664 THE LIFE AND WORK OF BT. PAUL, 
 
 people also will learn to follow the example of these kindly services to all who 
 require them, that they m*y not be unfruitful. " All who are with me salute 
 thee. Salute those who love us in the faith. God's grace with you all." 
 
 These last three greetings have several points of interest. They show us 
 that Paul, who was soon to be so sadly and unworthily deserted, was still 
 carrying on his manifold missionary activities as one in a band of devoted 
 friends. The fact that they differ in expression from every other closing 
 salutation is a mart of authenticity, because a forger would have been sure 
 to confine himself to a servile and unsuspicious repetition of one of the forms 
 which occur elsewhere. But what does St. Paul mean by the remarkable ex- 
 pression, "let our people also learn to be forward in good works "P It is 
 usually explained to mean " the other believers as well as thou ; " but this is 
 obviously unsatisfactory. On the other hand, we have no sufficient data to 
 interpret it of the existence of converts of Apollos forming a different body 
 from those of Paul. Its very obscurity is a sign that the allusion is to some 
 fact which was known to the correspondent, but is unknown to us. 
 
 Titus here disappears from Christian history. The rest of his biography 
 evaporates into the misty outlines of late ecclesiastical conjecture scarcely to 
 be dignified by the name of tradition. 
 
 CHAPTER LV. 
 
 THE CLOSING DAYS, 
 
 '* Christianus etfam extra carcerem saeoulo renuntiavit, in careers autem etiam 
 carceri. . . . Ipsam etiam conversationen saeculi et carceris comparemus, si 
 non plus in carcere spiritus acquirit, quam cai-o amittit." TERT. ad Mart. 2. 
 
 " In a free state Gaius would have found his way to Bedlam, and Nero to 
 Tyburn." FREEMAN, Essays, ii. 337. 
 
 SOME of those critics who have been most hostile to the genuineness of the 
 Pastoral Epistles have felt and expressed a certain reluctance to set down the 
 Second Epistle to Timothy as the work of a forger, and to rob the world of 
 this supremely noble and tender testament of the dying soldier of Christ. 
 And some who have rejected the two other Epistles have made an exception 
 in favour of this. For myself I can only express my astonishment that any 
 one who is sufficiently acquainted with the Christian literature of the first 
 two centuries to see how few writers there were who showed a power even 
 distantly capable of producing such a letter, can feel any hesitation as to its 
 having been written by the hand of Paul. The Tubingen critics argue that 
 the three Epistles must stand or fall together, and think that the First 
 Epistle to Timothy shows signs of spuriousness, which drags the other two 
 letters into the same condemnation. Accepting the close relationship which 
 binds the three letters together, and seeing sufficient grounds in the First 
 Epistle to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus to furnish at least a very strong
 
 THH CLOSING DATS. W 
 
 probability of their genuineness, it seems to me that the probability is raised 
 to certainty by the undoubted genuineness of the Second Epistle to Timothy. 
 If, indeed, St. Paul was never liberated from his first Roman imprisonment, 
 then the Pastoral Epistles must be forgeries ; for the attempts of Wieseler 
 and others to prove that they might have been -written during any part of the 
 period covered by the narrative of the Acts during the three years' stay at 
 Ephesus, for instance, or the stay of eighteen months at Corinth sink to the 
 ground not only under the weight of their own arbitrary hypotheses, but even 
 more from the state both of the Church and of the mind and circumstances of 
 the Apostle, which these letters so definitely manifest. But as the liberation 
 and second imprisonment of St. Paul are decidedly favoured by tradition, and 
 give a most easy and natural explanation to every allusion in these and in 
 earlier Epistles, and as no single valid objection can be urged against this belief, 
 I believe that there would never have been any attempt to disprove its possi- 
 bility except from the hardly-concealed desire to get rid of these letters and 
 the truths to which they bear emphatic witness. 
 
 The allusions in the Second Epistle, though too fragmentary and insig- 
 nificant to have been imagined by an imitator, are only allusions, and it is quite 
 possible that they may not supply us with sufficient data to enable us to 
 arrive at any continuous narrative of events in the Apostle's history between 
 his first and second imprisonment. To dwell on these events at any length 
 would therefore be misleading ; but it is perfectly allowable to construct an 
 hypothesis which is simple in itself, and which fits in with every circumstance 
 to which any reference is made. The probability of the hypothesis, and the 
 natural manner in which it suits the little details to which St. Paul refers, is 
 one more of the many indications that we are dealing here with genuine letters. 
 
 If, then, we piece together the personal notices of this Epistle, they enable 
 us to trace the further fortunes of St. Paul after the winter which he spent 
 at Nicopolis, in the society of Titus. At his age, and with his growing 
 infirmities conscious too, as he must have been, from those inward intima- 
 tions which are rarely wanting, that his life was drawing to a close it is most 
 unlikely that he should have entered on new missions, and it is certain that 
 he would have found more than sufficient scope for all his energies in the 
 consolidation of the many Greek and Eastern Churches which he had 
 founded, and in the endeavour to protect them from the subtle leaven of 
 spreading heresies. The main part of his work was accomplished. At 
 Jerusalem and at Antioch he had vindicated for ever the freedom of the 
 Gentile from the yoke of the Levitic Law. In his letters to the Romans and 
 Galatians he had proclaimed alike to Jew and Gentile that we are not under 
 the Law, but under grace. He had rescued Christianity from the peril of 
 dying away into a Jewish sect, only distinguishable from Judaism by the 
 accepted fulfilment of Messianic hopes. Labouring as no other Apostle had 
 laboured, he had preached the Gospel in the chief cities of the world, from 
 Jerusalem to Rome, and perhaps even as far as Spain. During the short 
 space of twenty years he had proclaimed Christ crucified to the simple
 
 666 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 Pagans of Lycaonia, the fickle fanatics of Galatia, the dreamy mystics of 
 Phrygia, the vigorous colonists of Macedonia, the superficial dilettanti of 
 Athens, the sensual and self-satisfied traders of Corinth, the semi-barbarous 
 natives of Dalmatia, the ill-reputed islanders of Crete, the slaves and 
 soldiers and seething multitudes of Borne. He had created the terminology, 
 he had formulated the truths of Christianity. It had been his rare blessedness 
 to serve the Gospel at once as an active missionary and as a profound thinker. 
 The main part of his work was done. There was no further danger to be 
 apprehended from " them of the circumcision," or from " certain who came 
 from James." New dangers were arising, but their worst developments lay 
 far in the f uture. 1 As Karl the Great burst into tears when, after a life spent 
 in subjugating Lombards and Saxons, he saw in the offing the barques of the 
 pirate Norsemen, and knew that they would never give much trouble in his 
 own days, but wept to think of the troubles which they would cause hereafter, 
 so Paul felt the presentiment of future perils from the Essenic elements 
 which were destined to ripen into Gnosticism, but he did not live to witness 
 their full development. His desire would be, not to attempt the foundation 
 of new Churches, but to forewarn and to strengthen the beloved Churches 
 which he had already founded. 
 
 And therefore, after he left Nicopolis, he would naturally travel back to 
 Bercea, Thessalonica, Philippi, and so by Neapolis to Troas, where he stayed 
 in the house of a disciple named Carpus. Here it was that the final crisis of 
 his fate seems to have overtaken him. It is at least a fair conjecture that he 
 would not have left at the house of Carpus his precious books, and the cloak 
 which was so necessary to him, unless his departure had been hasty and 
 perhaps involuntary. His work and his success in that town had been suffi- 
 ciently marked to attract general attention, and it was exactly the kind of 
 town in which he might have been liable to sudden arrest. Since Nero's 
 pei-secution of the Christians, they must have been more or less the objects 
 of hatred and suspicion throughout the Empire, and especially in the 
 provincial towns of Asia Minor, which were ever prone to flatter the Emperor, 
 because their prosperity, and sometimes almost their existence, depended on 
 his personal favour. Any officer eager to push himself into notice, any angry 
 Jew, any designing Oriental, might have been the cause of the Apostle's 
 arrest; and if it took place at Troas, especially if it were on some pretext 
 suggested by Alexander the coppersmith, or connected with St. Paul's long 
 and active work at Ephesus, he would, in the ordinary course of things, have 
 been sent under guard to Ephesus to be judged by the Proconsul. While 
 awaiting his trial there he would, of course, have been put in prison ; and the 
 fact that his place of imprisonment is still pointed out among the ruins of 
 Ephesus, although no imprisonment at Ephesus is directly mentioned in 
 Scripture, adds perhaps a slight additional probability to these conjectures. 
 It was here that he experienced at the hands of Onesiphorus the kindness 
 
 1 9 Tim. lii. 1, ireri
 
 THB CLOSING DATS. 667 
 
 which was continued to him at Borne, 1 and to which he alludes with a 
 gratitude all the more heartfelt^ because very shortly afterwards Onesiphoms 
 seems to have died. 
 
 From the trial at Ephesus, where his cause might have suffered from 
 local prejudices, he may once more have found it necessary to appeal to 
 Csesar. Barea Soranns, the then Proconsul, may have been glad, as Pliny 
 afterwards was in Bithynia, to refer the case to thefhighest tribunal. Timothy 
 would naturally desire to accompany him, but at that time the Apostle still 
 sanguine, still accompanied by other friends, still inclined to believe that his 
 life, which had long been valueless to himself, might be saved from human 
 violence, however near might be its natural close thought it necessary to 
 leave his friend at Ephesus to brave the dangers, and fulfil the duties of 
 that chief pastorate, respecting which he had recently received such 
 earnest instructions. It was natural that they should part with deep emotion 
 at a time so perilous and under circumstances so depressing. St. Paul, 
 sitting in his dreary and desolate confinement at Borne, recalls with gratitude 
 the streaming tears of that farewell, which proved how deeply his affection 
 was requited by the son of his heart. In all his wanderings, in all his 
 sickness, in all his persecutions, in all his imprisonments, in all his many and 
 bitter disappointment*, the one spot invariably bright, the one permanent 
 consolation, the one touch of earthly happiness, had been the gentle com- 
 panionship, the faithful attendance, the clinging affection of this Lycaonian 
 youth. For St. Paul's sake, for the Gospel's sake, he had left his mother, and 
 his home, and his father's friends, and had cheerfully accepted the trying life 
 of a despised and hunted missionary. By birth a Greek, he had thrown in 
 his lot by circumcision with the Jew, by faith with the Christian ; and his 
 high reward on earth had been, not the shadow of an immortal honour, but the 
 substance of lofty service in the cause of the truth which was to subdue the 
 world. The affection between him and the Apostle began in the spiritual 
 sonship of conversion, and was cemented by community of hopes and perila 
 until it had become one of the strongest ties in life. For troubled years they 
 had cheered each other's sorrows in the midst of painful toils. The very 
 difference in their age, the very dissimilarity of their characters, had but 
 made their lore for each other more sacred and more deep. The ardent, 
 impetuous, dominant character and intense purpose of the one, found its 
 complement and its repose in the timid, yielding, retiring, character of the 
 other. What Melancthon was to Luther, whom Luther felt that he could not 
 spare, and for whose life when all hope seemed over ho stormed heaven with 
 passionate and victorious supplication, 1 that and more than that was the 
 comparatively youthful Timothy to the more tried and lonely Paul. 
 
 1 2 Tim. i. 18, ova- if '^<t>t<r<f JtjvT)<r, " how many acts of service he rendered " to 
 Paul and others. Wieseler's inference that Oncsiphorua was a deacon is hardly sup- 
 ported by so general a verb. 
 
 s " AJlda musste mir unser Herr Gott herhalten. Denn Ich rleb Dun die Ohren mit 
 alien promissionibus exaudieudarum preeum." (Lather.)
 
 668 THE LIFE AND WORK OJ ST. PAUL, 
 
 We may hope that the Apostle, now once more a prisoner, was not alone 
 when he left Ephesus to cross the Mediterranean for the last time. Titus 
 and Tychicus 1 had probably accompanied him from Nicopolis; Demas may 
 have joined him at Thessalonica, Luke at Philippi ; and Trophimus, undo- 
 terred by his past dangers at Jerusalem, volunteered to accompany him from 
 the Ionian capital. But the kindly intentions of the latter were frustrated, 
 for he fell ill at Miletus, and there the sad little band of Christians had to 
 leave him when the vessel started. 2 Erastus, if he was with him at Ephesus, 
 stayed behind when they reached his native Corinth. 
 
 Of the particulars of the voyage we know nothing. It may very possibly 
 have been from Ephesus to Cenchreae, over the Biolkos to Lechaeum, and 
 then along the Gulf of Corinth and across the Adriatic to Brundisium, whence 
 the prisoner, his guards and his companions, would make their dreary way 
 along the great Appian road to Rome. This time no disciples met them at 
 the Appii Forum or the Three Taverns, nor could anything have well occurred 
 to make Paul thank God and take courage. The horrible Neronian persecu- 
 tion had depressed, scattered, and perhaps decimated the little Christian 
 community; and the Jews, who had received Paul at the time of his first 
 imprisonment with an ostentatiously indifferent neutrality, had been trans- 
 formed since then partly, no doubt, by the rumours disseminated by emissaries 
 from Jerusalem, and partly by the mutual recriminations after the fire of 
 Eome into the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemies. On the former 
 occasion, after a short detention in the Prsetorian camp, St. Paul had been 
 allowed to live in his own lodging ; and even if this had been in the humblest 
 purlieus of the Trastevere, among the Jewish vendors of sulphur matches and 
 cracked pottery, 3 it had still been his own, and had allowed him to continue, 
 in a sphere however restricted, his efforts at evangelisation. But Christianity 
 was now suspected of political designs, and was practically reduced to a religio 
 illicita. This time he had no kindly-disposed Lysias to say a good word for 
 him, no friendly testimonies of a Festus or an Agrippa to produce in his 
 favour. The government of Nero, bad almost from the first, had deteriorated 
 year by year with alarming rapidity, and at this moment it presented a spectacle 
 of awful cruelty and abysmal degradation such as has been rarely witnessed 
 by the civilised world. While an honest soldier like Burrns held the high 
 
 1 Hence we infer that Artemas, and not Tychicus, had been sent to replace Titus at 
 Crete ; and the mention of the name Artemas first in Tit. iii. 12 is yet another of the 
 numberless subtle traces of genuineness. 
 
 3 This incidental allusion (most unlike a forger) throws a valuable light, as also does 
 tbe almost fatal illness of Epaphroditus at Rome, on the limitation which the Apostles 
 put on the exercise of any supernatural gift of healing. It is, further, an insuperable 
 stumblingblock in the way of every possible theory which denies the second imprisonment. 
 Some have suggested a desperate alteration of the text to M/uYp, and Schrader is content 
 with the preposterous fiction of a Miletus in Crete 1 But why should St. Paul tell 
 Timothy that Trophimus was sick at Miletus ? For the same reason that a person writing 
 to London might, even in these days of rapid communication, tell a correspondent that 
 tbir common friend was ill at Soutbend. Miletus was more then thirty miles from 
 E'.-hesus, and Trophimus might be ill for months without Timothy knowing of i* 
 
 * Put roe nmra, p. 58<5.
 
 CLOSING OATS. 669 
 
 post of Prsatorian Praefect, a political prisoner was at least sure that he would 
 not be treated with wanton severity; but with a Tigellinus in that office a 
 Tigellinus whose foul hands were still dripping with Christian blood, and 
 whose foul life was stained through and through with every form of detestable 
 wickedness what could be expected ? We catch but one glance of this last 
 imprisonment before the curtain falls, but that glimpse suffices to show how 
 hard it was. Through the still blackened ruins of the city, and amid the 
 squalid misery of its inhabitants perhaps with many a fierce scowl turned 
 on the hated Christian Paul passed to his dungeon, and there, as the gate 
 clanged upon him, he sat down, chained night and day, without further hope 
 a doomed man. 
 
 To visit him now was 110 longer to visit a man against whom nothing 
 serious was charged, and who had produced a most favourable impression on 
 the minds of all who had been thrown into relation with him. It was to visit 
 the bearer of a name which the Emperor and his minions affected to detest ; 
 it was to visit the ringleader of those who were industriously maligned as the 
 authors of a calamity more deadly than any which had afflicted the city since 
 its destruction by the Gauls. Merely to be kind to such a man was regarded 
 as infamous. No one could do it without rendering himself liable to the 
 coarse insolence of the soldiers. 1 Nay, more, it was a service of direct political 
 danger. Rome swarmed with spies who were ready to accuse any one of 
 laesa majestas on the slightest possible occasion. Now who but a Christian 
 would visit a Christian? What could any respectable citizen have to do 
 with the most active propagandist of a faith which had at first been ignored 
 as contemptible, but which even calm and cultivated men were beginning to 
 regard as an outrage against humanity P 2 And if any Christian were charged 
 with being a Christian on the ground of his having visited St. Paul, how could 
 he deny the charge, and how, without denying it, could he be saved from 
 incurring the extremest danger P 
 
 Under these circumstances the condition of the Apostle was very different 
 from what it had been three years before. His friends had then the freest 
 access to him, and he could teach Christ Jesus with all boldness undisturbed. 
 Now there were few or no friends left to visit him; and to teach Jesus Christ 
 was death. He knew the human heart too well to be unaware how natural 
 it was that most men should blush to associate themselves with him and his 
 chain. One by one his Asiatic friends deserted him. 3 The first to leave 
 him were Phygellus and Hermogenes. 4 Then the temptations of the present 
 course of things, the charm of free and unimperilled life, were too much for 
 Demas, and he too though he had long been his associate now forsook him. 
 
 1 See Juv. Sat. xvi. 812. 
 
 * " Odio generis human! convicti sunt." (Tao, Ann. XT. 44 ; of. H. v. 5.) 
 
 2 Tim. i. 15. 
 
 4 Nothing whatever is known of these two. In later days the Christians, under the 
 stress of persecution, had learnt their lessons better, so that their tender faithfulness 
 to one another in distress excited the envious astonishment of Pagans (Lucian, De Morte 
 Pertgr. 13).
 
 670 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. 
 
 Crescens departed, perhaps on some necessary mission, to the Churches of 
 Galatia, and Titus to those of Dalmatia. He had dispatched Tychiens to 
 Ephesus shortly before he wrote this letter. One friend alone was with him 
 the beloved physician, the faithful, unobtrusive, cultivated Luke. 1 Of 
 hardship Paul recked nothing; he had spent a life of endless hardship, and 
 had learnt a complete independence of the outward elements of comfort ; but 
 to one situated as he was, and liable to constant pain, to be utterly companion* 
 less would have been a trial too hard to bear. 
 
 A single happy unexpected visit broke the continuity of his loneliness, and 
 cheered him amid the sense of desertion. The good-hearted Ephesian Onesi- 
 phorus, who had already made himself conspicuous among the Christians of 
 his native city by his active kindliness, came to Rome. He knew that St. 
 Paul was somewhere in that city as a prisoner, and he rose above the timid 
 selfishness of his fellow-countrymen. He set about searching for the captive 
 Jew. In a city thronged with prisoners, and under a government rife with 
 suspicions, upon which it acted with the most cynical unscrupulousness, it was 
 by no means a safe or pleasant task to find an obscure, aged, and deeply 
 implicated victim. Had Onesiphorus been less in earnest, it would have 
 been easy for him to make an excuse to other Christians, and to his own 
 conscience, that he had not known where Paul was, and that he had looked 
 for him but could not find him. But he would not abandon his earnest search 
 until it led him to the side of the Apostle. 8 Nor was he content with a single 
 visit. Glad to face the shame and scorn of befriending one whose condition 
 was now so abject, he came to the Apostle again and again, and refreshed his 
 soul with that very consolation the sense of human sympathy f or which most 
 of all it yearned. 8 Probably the death of this true and warm-hearted Ephesian 
 took place at Rome, for St. Paul utters a fervent wish that he may find mercy 
 of the Lord in the great day, and in writing to Timothy he sends a greeting to 
 his household, but not to him. 4 The tone of intense gratitude which breathes 
 through the few verses in which the Apostle alludes to him makes us feel that 
 the brave and loving friendliness of this true brother, contrasted as it was with 
 the cowardly defection of the other Asiatics, was the brightest gleam of light 
 which fell on the dense gloom of the second imprisonment. 
 
 At last the time came when the Apostle had to stand before the great 
 Roman tribunal. What was called in Roman law the prima aciio came on. 6 
 The Scriptures were written with other objects than to gratify our curiosity 
 with the details of historic scenes, however memorable or however important. 
 
 1 Where was Aristarchus (Acts xxvii. 2 ; Col. iv. 10 ; Phil. 24) ? We cannot tell ; but 
 his name would not have been omitted by an ingenious imitator. 
 
 * 2 Tim. i 17, <rirov&ai6rtpov e^jJTTjtre'p /j.e Kal eu(XK. 
 
 2 Tim. i. 16, iro\A<iias (* avt\ln> ev. * 2 Tim. iv. 19. 
 
 Such certainly seems to be the natural meaning of trpomj iiroXoyCa (2 Tim. iv. 16), 
 and it u not certain that this method of procedure and the ampliatio or comperendinatio 
 hud been entirely abandoned. In these matters the mere caprice of the Emperor was all 
 that had to be consulted. It is, however, possible that the iroun) an-oXoyia may refer to the 
 first count of the indictment, since Nero had introduced the custom of hearing every 
 count separately.
 
 THB CLOSING DJLT6. 671 
 
 That which God has revealed to us in Scripture is rather the ceconomy the 
 gradual unfolding and dispensation of His eternal scheme for the salvation 
 of mankind, than the full biography of those whose glory it was to be en- 
 trusted with the furtherance of His designs. Eagerly should we have desired 
 to know the details of that trial, but Si Paul only tells us a single particular. 
 His silence once more illustrates the immense difference between ancient and 
 modern correspondence. A modern, in writing to a dear friend, would have 
 been sure to give him some of the details, which could hardly fail to interest 
 him. It may be said that these details might have been supplied by the bearer 
 of the letter. It may be so ; but if we judge St. Paul by his own writings, 
 and by the analogy of other great and spiritually-minded men, we should 
 infer that personal matters of this kind had but little interest for him. 
 Accustomed to refer perpetually to his high spiritual privileges digressing 
 incessantly to the fact of his peculiar Apostolate he yet speaks but little, 
 and never in detail, of the outward incidents of his life. They did but belong 
 to the world's passing show, to the things which were seen and evanescent. 
 Two vivid touches alone reveal to us the nature of the occasion. One is the 
 deplorable fact that not a single friend had the courage to stand by his 
 side. He had to defend himself single-handed. No patronus would encourage 
 him, no advocatus plead his cause, no deprecator say a word in his favour. 
 " No man took his place by my side to help me ; all abandoned me ; God 
 forgive them." The other is that even at that supreme moment, with the 
 face of the threatening tyrant fixed loweringly upon him, and the axed fasces 
 of the lictors gleaming before his eyes, his courage did not quail. If man 
 forsook him, God strengthened him. If even Luke left him to face the 
 court alone, the Lord Himself stood by him. He spoke, and spoke in 
 a manner worthy of his cause. How much heathen literature would we 
 freely sacrifice for even a brief sketch of that speech such as Luke could 
 so well have given us had he only been present! How supreme would 
 have been the interest of a defence uttered by St. Paul in the Roman 
 forum, or -in a Roman basilica! Alas! the echoes of his words have died 
 away for ever. We only know what he who uttered it tells us of it. But he 
 was satisfied with it. He felt that the Lord had strengthened him in order 
 that, through his instrumentality, the preaching of the Gospel might be ful- 
 filled to the uttermost, and that all the Gentiles might hear it. And he was 
 successful successful, we cannot doubt, not merely that he might prolong his 
 days in useless and hopeless misery, but for some high design, and perhaps 
 among other reasons that he might leave us his last precious thoughts in the 
 Second Epistle to his dearest convert. But the danger had been imminent, 
 and the too-certain result was only postponed. " I was rescued," he says, 
 "out of the lion's mouth." Each juror received three voting tablets one 
 marked with A., for Absolvo ; another with C., for Condemno ; and a third with 
 N.L., for Non Hquet, or "not proven." The majority of votes had been of the 
 third description, and the result had been the ampliatio, or postponement of 
 the trial for the production of further evidence. But St. Paul was not deceived
 
 672 THB LIFE \AND WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 by any false hopes. " I was rescued out of the lion's mouth. The Lord shall 
 deliver me "not necessarily from, death or danger, but " from every evil 
 work, 1 and shall save mt> unto His heavenly kingdom." Death by martyrdom 
 was no such " evil work; " 2 from that he did not expect to be saved nay, he 
 knew, and probably even hoped, that through that narrow gate an entrance 
 might be ministered unto him abundantly into Christ's heavenly kingdom. 
 But he must have passed through perilous and exciting hours, or he would 
 have hardly used that metaphor of the lion's mouth, 3 prompted perhaps by a 
 reminiscence of the powerful image of the shepherd prophet, " As the shepherd 
 tears out of the motith of a lion two legs and the piece of an ear." 4 
 
 But who was the lion ? Was it Satan ? 6 or Helius the Prsef ect of the 
 city ? or Nero ? 6 or is the expression a merely general one ? Even if so, 
 it is not impossible that he may have pleaded his cause before Nero himself. 
 The power of deciding causes had been one which the Roman Emperors had 
 jealously kept in their own hands ; and if the trial took place in the spring of 
 A.D. 66, Nero had not yet started for Greece, and would have been almost 
 certain to give personal attention to the case of one who had done more than 
 any living man to spread the name of Christ. Nero had been intensely anxious 
 to fix on the innocent Christians the stigma of that horrible conflagration, 
 of which he himself had been dangerously suspected, and the mere suspicion 
 of which, until averted into another channel, had gone far to shake even his 
 imperial power. And now the greatest of the Christians the very coryphceus 
 of the hated sect stood chained before him. He to whom popularity, forfeited 
 in part by his enormous crimes, had become a matter of supreme importance, 
 saw how cheaply it could be won by sacrificing a sick, deserted, aged, fettered 
 prisoner, for whom no living soul would speak a word, and who was evidently 
 regarded with intense hatred by Gentiles from Asia, by the dense rabble of 
 the city, and by Jews from every quarter of the world. Cicero has preserved 
 for us a graphic picture of the way in which, nearly a century and a half 
 before this time, a screaming, scowling, gesticulating throng of Jews, unde- 
 terred by soldiers and lictors, surrounded with such threatening demonstrations 
 the tribunal before which their oppressor, Flaccus, was being tried, that he, 
 as his advocate, though he had been no less a person than a Roman Consul, 
 and " father of his country," was obliged to plead in low tones for fear of 
 their fury. If in B.C. 59 the Romish Jews could intimidate even a Cicero in 
 
 1 From all that can be really called irovqp6v. " Liberabit me ne quid agam " (and we 
 may add, ne quid patiar) " Christiano, ne quid Apostolo indignum (Grot.). 
 
 2 " Decollabitur ? liberabitur, liberante Domino "(Bengel). It would be difficult for 
 me to exaggerate my admiration for this truly great commentator. On the following 
 words, " to whom be glory for ever and ever," he remarks, "Doxologiam parit spes, 
 quanto majorem res." 
 
 3 2 Tim. iv. 17. 
 
 4 Amos iii. 12. Of. ivioiriw TOV Mot/rat, referring to Xerxes (Apocr. Esth. xiv. 13). 
 1 Pet. v. & 
 
 6 \tovra yap TOV Wpova <f>T)<ri 8to TO 0T)ptwS6 (Chrys.). re6vr)Kfv o AW (of the death of 
 Tiberius) (Jos. Antt. xviii. 6, 10) ; but here \eWos has no article. The metaphor i 
 probably general, aa in Ps. xxii. 21. Esther is said to have cried, " Save me from the 
 Bon's mouth," when sh went to Ahasuerus (Megittah, f. 15, 2).
 
 THE CLOSING DATS. 673 
 
 their hatred to a Flaccus, is it likely that they would have abstained from 
 hostile demonstrations against an enemy BO detested and so perfectly defence- 
 less as St. Paul f 
 
 Paul before Nero! if indeed it was so, what a contrast does the juxta- 
 position of two such characters suggest the one the vilest and most wicked, 
 the other the best and noblest of mankind ! Here, indeed, we see two racos, 
 two civilisations, two religions, two histories, two ceons brought face to face. 
 Nero summed up in his own person the might of legions apparently invincible; 
 Paul personified that more irresistible weakness which shook the world. The 
 one showed the very crown and flower of luxurious vice and guilty splendour; 
 the other the earthly misery of the happiest saints of God. In the one we see 
 the incarnate Nemesis of past degradation ; in the other the glorious prophecy 
 of Christian sainthood. The one was the deified autocrat of Paganism ; the 
 other the abject ambassador of Christ. The emperor's diadem was now con- 
 fronted for the first time by the Cross of the Victim before which, ere three 
 centuries were over, it was destined to succumb. 
 
 Nero, not yet thirty years of age, was stained through and through with 
 every possible crime, and steeped to the very lips in every nameless degrada- 
 tion. Of all the black and damning iniquities against which, as St. Paul had 
 often to remind his heathen converts, the wrath of God for ever burns, there 
 was scarcely one of which Nero had not been guilty. A wholesale robber, 
 a pitiless despot, an intriguer, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide, a liar, 
 a coward, a drunkard, a glutton, incestuous, unutterably depraved, his evil 
 and debased nature of which oven Pagans had spoken as " a mixture of 
 blood and mud " had sought abnormal outlets to weary, if it could not 
 sate, its insatiable proclivity to crime. He was that last worst specimen 
 of human wickedness a man who, not content with every existing form 
 of vice and sin in which the taint of human nature had found a vent, 
 had become "an inventor of evil things." He had usurped a throne; he 
 had poisoned, under guise of affection, the noble boy who was its legitimate 
 heir; he had married the sister of that boy, only to break her heart by his 
 brutality, and finally to order her assassination ; he had first planned the 
 murder, then ordered the execution, of his own mother, who, however deep 
 her guilt, had yet committed her many crimes for love of him; he had 
 treacherously sacrificed the one great general whose victories gave any 
 lustre to his reign ; among other murders, too numerous to count, he had 
 ordered the deaths of the brave soldier and the brilliant philosopher who 
 had striven to guide his wayward and intolerable heart ; he had disgraced 
 imperial authority with every form of sickening and monstrous folly ; he had 
 dragged the charm of youth and the natural dignity of manhood through the 
 very lowest mire ; he had killed by a kick the worthless but beautiful woman 
 whom he had torn from her own husband to be his second wife ; he had 
 reduced his own capital to ashes, and buffooned, and fiddled, and sung with 
 his cracked voice in public theatres, regardless of the misery and starvation 
 of thousands of its ruined citizens ; he had charged his incendiarism upon
 
 674 THE LIFfi AND WOBK OF ST. PAUL, 
 
 the innocent Christians, and tortared them to death by hundreds in hideous 
 martyrdoms ; he had done his best to render infamous his rank, his country, 
 his ancestors, the name of Roman. nay, even the very name of man. 
 
 And Paul had spent his whole life in the pursuit of truth and the practice 
 of holiness. Even from boyhood a grave and earnest student of the Law of 
 God, he surpassed in learning and faithfulness all the other " pupils of the 
 wise " in the school of the greatest Doctor of the Law ; and if the impetuous 
 ardour of his nature, and that commonest infirmity of even noble minds the 
 pride of erroneous conviction which will not suffer itself to be convinced of 
 error had for a time plunged him into a course of violent intolerance, 
 of which he afterwards repented Twith all the intensity of his nature, yet 
 even this sin had been due to the blind fury of misdirected zeal in a cause 
 which he took or for a time thought that he took to be the cause of God. 
 Who shall throw the first stone at him ? not even those learned and holy men 
 tviiose daily lives show how hard it is to abdicate the throne of infallible 
 ignorance, and after lives of stereotyped error to go back as humble learners 
 to the school of truth. But, if for a moment he erred, how grandly by what 
 a life of heroic self-sacrifice had he atoned for his fault ! Did ever man toil 
 like this man ? Did ever man rise to a nobler superiority over the vulgar 
 objects of human desire P Did ever man more fully and unmunnuringly 
 resign his whole life to God ? Has it ever been granted to any other man, 
 in spite of all trials, obstructions, persecutions, to force his way in the very 
 teeth of "clenched antagonisms" to so full an achievement of the divine 
 purpose which God had entrusted to his care ? Shrinking from hatred with 
 fche sensitive warmth of a nature that ever craved for human love, he had yet 
 braved hatreds of the most intense description the hatred not only of enemies, 
 but of friends; not only of individuals, but of entire factions; not only of 
 aliens, but of bis own countrymen ; not only of Jews, but even of those who 
 professed the same faith with himself. 1 Shrinking from pain with nervous 
 sensibility, he yet endured for twenty years together every form of agony 
 with a body weakened by incessant hardship. The many perils and miseries 
 which we have recounted are but a fragment of what he had suffered. And 
 what had he done P He had secured the triumph, he had established the 
 universality, he had created the language, he had co-ordinated the doctrines, 
 he had overthrown the obstacles of that Faith which is the one source of the 
 hope, the love, the moral elevation of the world. 
 
 And now these two men were brought face to face imperial power and 
 abject weakness ; youth cankered with guilt, and old age crowned with 
 holiness ; he whose whole life had consummated the degradation, and he 
 whose life had achieved the enfranchisement of mankind. They stood face to 
 face the representatives of two races the Semitic in its richest glory, the 
 Aryan in its extremest degradation : the representatives of two trainings 
 
 1 " They who hurt me most are my own dear children my brethren; fraterculi met, 
 ourci amiculimei," (Luther. CocfiUariv*, 146.)
 
 THE CLOSING DATS. 675 
 
 the life of utter self -(sacrifice, and the life of unfathomable self-indulgence : 
 the representatives of two religions Christianity in its dawning brightness, 
 Paganism in its effete despair : the representatives of two theories of life the 
 simplicity of self-denying endurance ready to give up life itself for the good 
 of others, the luxury of shameless Hedonism which valued no consideration 
 divine or human in comparison with a new sensation : the representatives of 
 two spiritual powers the slave of Christ and the incarnation of Antichrist. 
 And their respective positions showed how much, at this time, the course of 
 this world was under the control of the Prince of the Power of the Air for 
 incest and matricide were clothed in purple, and seated on the curule chair, 
 amid the ensigns of splendour without limit and power beyond control ; and 
 he whose life had exhibited all that was great and noble in the heart of 
 man stood in peril of execution, despised, hated, fettered, and in rags. 
 
 But Roman Law was still Roman Law, and, except where passions of 
 unusual intensity interfered, some respect was still paid to the forms of 
 justice. For the time, at any rate, Paul was rescued out of the lion's mouth. 
 There was some flaw in the indictment, some deficiency in the evidence ; and 
 though St. Paul well knew that it was but a respite which was permitted him, 
 for the time at any rate he was remanded to his prison. And Nero, if indeed 
 he were "the lion" before whom this first defence had been pleaded, had no 
 further door for repentance opened to him in this life. Had he too trembled, 
 as Paul reasoned before him of temperance, righteousness, and the judgment 
 to come ? Had he too listened in alarm as Herod Antipas had listened to 
 the Baptist P Had he too shown the hue of passing shame on those bloated 
 features so deformed by the furrows of evil passion as, at the Council of 
 Constance, the Emperor Sigismund blushed when John Huss upbraided him 
 with the breach of his pledged word P The Emperor, who stood nearest to 
 Nero in abysmal depravity, and who, like him, being himself unutterably 
 impure and bad, had the innermost conviction that all others were at heart 
 the same, used to address grave men with the most insulting questions, and 
 if the indignant blood mantled on their cheeks, he used to exclaim, " Erubuit, 
 salva res est." l " He blushed ; it is all right." But of Domitian we are 
 expressly told that he could not blush; that his flushed cheeks were an 
 impervious barrier against the access of any visible shame. 2 And in all 
 probability Nero was infinitely too far gone to blush. It is far more probable 
 that, like Gallic, he only listened to the defence of this worn and aged Jew 
 with ill-concealed impatience and profound disdain. He would have regarded 
 such a man as this as something more abject than the very dust beneath his 
 feet. He would have supposed that Paul regarded it as the proudest honour 
 of his life even to breathe the same atmosphere as the Emperor of Rome. 
 His chance of hearing the words of truth returned no more. ' About this time 
 he sailed on his frivolous expedition to Greece ; and after outraging to an 
 extent almost inconceivable the very name of Roman, by the public singings 
 
 i Heliogabalvu. * Tac. Aync. 45 ; Suet. Uwn, 18 ; JPiin. I'anqj- 48,
 
 676 THE LIFE ANB WORK OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 of his miserable doggrel, and the sham victories in which the supple and 
 shameless Greeks fooled him to the very top of his bent, he returned to find 
 that the revolt of Galba was making head, until he was forced to fly at night in 
 disguise from his palace, to quench his thirst with ditch-water, to display a 
 cowardice which made him contemptible to his meanest minions, and finally 
 to let his trembling hand be helped by a slave to force a dagger into his 
 throat. 
 
 But it is no wonder that when, over the ruins of streets which the fire had 
 laid in ashes, St. Paul returned to his lonely prison, there was one earthly 
 desire for the fulfilment of which he still yearned. It was once more to see 
 the dear friend of earlier years of those years in which, hard as were their 
 sufferings, the hope of Christ's second coming in glory to judge the world 
 seemed still so near, and in which the curtains of a neglected death and an 
 apparently total failure had not yet been drawn so closely around his head. 
 He yearned to see Timothy once more ; to be refreshed by the young man's 
 affectionate devotion ; to be cheered and comforted by the familiar attendance 
 of a true son in Christ, whose heart was wholly at one with his ; who shared 
 so fully in all his sympathies and hopes ; who had learnt by long and familiar 
 attendances how best to brighten his spirits and to supply his wants. It was 
 this which made him write that second letter to Timothy, which is, as it were, 
 his " cycnea oratio," and in which, amid many subjects of advice and exhorta- 
 tion, he urges his friend with reiterated earnestness to come, to come at once, 
 to come before winter, 1 to come ere it is too late, and see him, and heh) him, 
 and receive his blessing before he died. 
 
 CHAPTER LVI. 
 
 PAUL'S LAST LETTER. 
 HauAof K o rpwr/Aoxaptos TTJK KtjiaXriv </>tt iirtrjtijflj? 6 dyeJcSujyijTOf Mpovos. pg. 
 
 Orai. Enam. 
 
 " Testamentum Pauli et cycnea cantio eat haec Epistola." BENGBL. 
 
 11 Hoc praestat career Christiano, quod eremus Prophetis." TERT. ad Mart. 3. 
 
 " Mortem habebat Paulus ante oculos. . . . Quaecunque igitur hie legimus 
 de Ghristi regno, de spe vitae aetemae, de Christiana militia, de fiducia confessionis, 
 de certitudine doctrinao, non tanquam atramento scripta, sed ipsius Pauli sanguine 
 accipere convenit. . . . Proinde haec Epistola quasi solennis quaedam est sub- 
 scriptio Paulinas doctrinae, eaque ex repraesenti." CALVIN. 
 
 HE began much in his usual f orm 
 
 " Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, J according to the promise 
 of the life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy my beloved son, grace, mercy, and 
 
 2 Tim. iv. 9, 21. 
 
 8 ia fleX^aros. The attempt to deduce some very special and recondite inference from 
 the fact that he uses this phrase for the KO.T' 7riTayV of the First Epistle, seems to me as 
 arbitrary as Mack's argument that the use of iyajnjr<p for yn)(ri'v in the next verse is a siga 
 tbat this Epistle shows more affection but leas confidence.
 
 PAUL'S LAST LETTER. 677 
 
 peace, from God our Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I thank God, whom I serve 
 from my forefathers in a pure conscience as the remembrance which I have of thee 
 night and day in my supplications is incessant, longing earnestly to see thee re- 
 membering thy tears l that I may be filled with joy. 2 [I thank God, I say] on 
 being reminded 3 of the unfeigned faith which is in thee, which dwelt first in thy 
 grandmother Lois, and in thy mother Eunice ; yes, and I feel confident that it 
 dwells also in thee." 4 
 
 Perhaps the sadness of Timothy's heart the tears for his absent and im- 
 prisoned teacher had hindered the activity of his work, and plunged him in a 
 too indolent despondency ; and so Paul, remembering all the hopes which had 
 inaugurated his youthful ministry, continues 
 
 " For which cause * I remind thee to fan aflame the gift of God which is in thee 
 by the imposition of my hands ; for God gave us not the spirit of cowardice, but of 
 power and of love, and of moral influence. 6 Be not then ashamed of the testimony 
 of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but rather share my sufferings for the Gospel 
 in accordance with the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, 
 not according to our works, but according to His own plans and the grace given us 
 in Christ Jesus before eternal times, but now manifested by the appearing of our 
 Saviour Jesus Christ, who did away with death, and brought life and immortality 
 to light by the Gospel, whereunto I was appointed a herald, and an Apostle, and 
 teacher of the Gentiles, for which reason also I suffer these things ; but I am not 
 ashamed. For I know on whom I have believed, and I feel confident that he is 
 able to preserve the trust committed to me till that day." 7 
 
 Then having ended the double digression on the word Gospel, which 
 suggests to him first what that word implies (9, 10), and then recalls to him 
 his own mission he returns to his exhortation 
 
 "As a pattern of wholesome teachings, 8 take those which thou heardest froci 
 me, in faith and the love which is in Christ Jesus. That fair trust preserve, 
 through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us." 9 
 
 Then he touches for a moment on the melancholy circumstances of which 
 we have already spoken his abandonment by the Asiatic converts, 10 and the 
 
 1 Tears at parting. Of. Acts xx. 37. 
 
 8 Does not this involved sentence, with its tesselation of parenthetic thoughts, at 
 once indicate the hand of Paul ? 
 
 3 How reminded? "We do not know; but this is the proper meaning of vn-d^vnais- 
 
 OTOV TIV v<f>' cre'pov els ii.vrjii.rjv vpoa-X^fj- 
 
 4 L 1 5, Wireto-juot Se. To make the Se imply " notwithstanding appearances," as 
 Alford does, is too strong ; but the adversative force of Se, though unnoticed by most 
 commentators, and missed in many versions, does seem to imply that passing shade of 
 hesitation about the fervour of the faith of Timothy at any rate, as manifested in 
 vigorous action which I have tried to indicate in the " Yes, and I feel confident." 
 
 5 This phrase Si' f\v ahiav for Sib is peculiar to the Pastoral Epistles. 
 
 6 (ria<t>povi<ri*ov. The form of the word seems to imply not only " sobermindedness," 
 but the teaching others to be sober-minded. 
 
 7 i. 
 
 8 This seems to me the real meaning, though Alford has something to urge for his 
 view that it should be rendered, "Have (in what I have just said to you) a pattern 
 of sound words, which," &c. 
 
 9 i. 13, 14. 
 
 10 The expression oJ / TJ} *A<ri<x irdvrcs, " all those in Asia," is difficult. It seems to imply 
 that they had abandoned St. Paul in Rome, and had now returned to Asia, so that they 
 would be " in Asia " by the time this letter arrived.
 
 678 THE MFE AND WORST OF ST. PA.UL. 
 
 zealous refreshing kindness of Onesiphorus, for whom he breathes an earnest 
 prayer. 1 
 
 " Thou therefore, my child, be strengthened in the grace which is in Christ 
 Jesus, and the things which thou heardest from me in the presence of many witnesses, 
 these things extend to faithful men who shall he adequate also to teach others. Share 
 my sufferings as a fair soldier of Christ Jesus." * 
 
 The conditions of this soldiership he illustrates by three similes, drawn 
 from the life of the soldier, the athlete, and the labourer, and doubtless meant 
 to suggest to Timothy the qualities of which at that depressed period he stood 
 most in need. The soldier must abandon all business entanglements, and 
 strive to please his captain. The athlete, if he wants the crown, must keep 
 the rules. The toiling husbandman has the first claim to a share of the 
 harvest. 3 It was a delicate way of suggesting to Timothy the duties of in- 
 creased single-heartedness, attention to the conditions of the Christian life, 
 and strenuous labour; and that he might not miss the bearing of these simili- 
 tudes he adds, "Consider what I say, for the Lord will give you 4 understanding 
 in all things." By the example of his own sufferings he reminds him that 
 the cardinal truths of the Gospel are ample to inspire toil and endurance. 
 
 " Bear in mind," he says, " Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, of the seed of 
 David, according to my Gospel in the cause of which I suffer even to chains as a 
 malefactor : hut the word of God has not been chained. For thia reason, for the 
 sake of the elect, I am enduring all things, that they too may obtain the salvation 
 which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. Faithful is the saying 
 
 'If we died with, we shall also live with Him;' 
 If we endure, we shall also reign with Him ; /- 
 If we dny, He also will deny us. , 
 If we are faithless, He abideth faithful, 
 For He is not able to deny Himself.' " ' 
 
 " These things call to their remembrance ; " and from this Terse to the end 
 of the chapter he reverts to the false teachers among whom Timothy is labour- 
 ing, and against whom he has warned him in the First Epistle, testifying to 
 them before the Lord not to fight about " views " a thing entirely useless 
 to the subversion of the hearers. 7 "Strive to present thyself approved to 
 God, a workman unshamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 8 He is to 
 shun the vain babblings of men like Hymeuseus and Philetus,' with their 
 
 i i. 1518. 
 
 * The distinction between woAb? and ayaOfc can only be kept up by the old English 
 word "fair," as in Tennyson's 
 
 " So that ye trust to our fair Father, Christ." 
 
 ii. 16. 4 ii. 7, leg. 8<i(m. 
 
 Of. 1 Cor. xv. 81; 2 Cor. iv. 18 ; Bom. vi. 8. 
 
 6 ii. 713. The last words are rhythmical, perhaps liturgical. 
 
 7 ii. 14. Logomachy is a sure mark of Sophistic teaching, and there IB a resemblance 
 of the Gnostics to the Sophists in several particulars. 
 
 8 bpdorofLovvra, "rightly cutting," or "cutting straight." " Nihil praetermittere, nil 
 adiicere, nil mutOare, discerpere, torquere " (Beza). But it is not clear whether the 
 metaphor is from cutting roads, or victims, or furrows, or bread, or carpentry. It is 
 better to regard it as general, " rightly handling," just as muvoroiittv came to mean merely 
 "Unovating." In patristic language bpeoroula became another word for "orthodoxy." 
 
 9 Nothing is known of them (1 Tim. i. 20).
 
 PAUL'S LAST LETTKB. 679 
 
 ever-advancing impiety and the spreading canoer of their doctrine, which 
 identified the resurrection with spiritual deliverance from the death of sin, 
 and denied that there was any other resurrection, 1 to the ruinous uusettlemeut 
 of some. Fruitlessly, however, for God's firm foundation stands impregnable 
 with the double inscription on it, a " The Lord knoweth them that are His," 
 and " Let every one who nameth the name of Christ stand aloof from un- 
 righteousness." * Yet there should be no surprise that such errors spring up 
 in the visible Church. It is like a great house in which are vessels of wood 
 and earth, as well as of gold and silver, and alike for honourable and mean 
 purposes. What each one had to do then was to purge himself from polluting 
 connexion with the mean and vile vessels, and strive to be "a vessel for 
 honour, sanctified, serviceable to the master, prepared for every good pur- 
 pose." * He is therefore to " fly " from the desires of youth, 6 and in union 
 with all who call on the Lord with a pure heart to pursue righteousness, faith, 
 love, peace, having nothing to do with those foolish and illiterate questions 
 which only breed strifes unworthy of the gentle, enduring meekness of a 
 slave of the Lord, whose aim it should be to train opponents with all mildness, 6 
 in the hope that God may grant them repentance, so that they may come to 
 full knowledge of the truth, and " awake to soberness out of the snare of the 
 devil, after having been taken alive by him to do God's will." 7 
 
 The third chapter continues to speak of these evil teachers and their 
 future developments in the hard times to come. A stern sad picture is drawn 
 of what men shall then be in their selfishness, greed, conceit, ingratitude, 
 lovelessness, treachery, besotted atheism, and reckless love of pleasure. He 
 bids Timothy turn away from such teachers with their sham religion, their 
 creeping intrigues, their prurient influence, their feminine conquests, 8 
 resisting the truth just as the old Egyptian sorcerers Jannes and Jambres ' 
 
 1 Sinui there is a trace of exactly the same heresy in 1 Cor. xv. 12, it is idle of Baur 
 to assume any allusion to Marcion here. St. Paul's warning against thus making the 
 resurrection a mere metaphor was all the more needful, because it was a distortion of hia 
 own expressions (Rom. vi. 4; Col. ii. 12, &c.). 
 
 * Cf. Kev. xxi. 14. See Numb. xvi. 5, 26. 
 
 4 2 Tim. ii. 21. The general meaning of the passage is clear, though it is indistinctly 
 expressed; on fKKaOapy Melancthon remarks, "Haec mundatio non est desertio congre- 
 gationig, sed conversio ad Deum." 
 
 6 eiri0vfA<at> not exclusively sensual passions. 6 See Matt. xii. 19, 20. 
 
 7 ii. 14 26. The devil has taken the mcaptive in a snare while they were drunk ; 
 awaking, they use their recovered soberness (iva.vitf>ta, crapulam excutio) to break the 
 snare, arid return to obedience to God's will, airov probably refers to Satan, iiwiVou to 
 God, although this explanation is not absolutely necessary. 
 
 8 Baur (Pastwalbriefe, p. 36) sees an allusion to the Gnostic prophetesses, Prisca, 
 Maximilla, Quintilla, &c., and quotes Epiphan. Haer. xxvi. 11. But, on the one hand, 
 these certainly did not deserve to be stigmatised as yvvoucopia (see Tert.), and on the 
 other it is absurd to suppose that women would be any less susceptible to every phase of 
 religious influence in the Apostle's days than they have been in all ages (cf. Jos. Antt. 
 xvii. 2, 4). Such a ywaiKdptov was Helena whom Simon Magus took about with him 
 (Justin, Apol, i. 26 ; Iren. c. Haer. i. 23). When Jerome speaks with such scorn and 
 slander of Nicolas of Antipch (chores duxit femineos), Marcion and his female adherent, 
 Apelles and Philumena, Arius and his sister, Donatus and Lucilla, Epidius and Agape, 
 Priscillian and Galla, had he forgotten certain ladies called Paulla and Eustochium ? 
 
 Jannes and Jambres are mentioned by Origen, and even by Pliny (H, N, xxx. 1),
 
 680 THE LIFE AND WOBK OP ST. PATH* 
 
 did, and destined to have their emptiness equally exposed. 1 But Timothy 
 who has followed all that Paul has been iu the teaching, the purpose, and the 
 sufferings of his life, and well knows how the Lord saved him out of many 
 trials and persecutions in his first journey 2 must expect persecution, and be 
 brave and faithful, making his life a contrast to that of these deceived 
 deceivers, in accordance with that training which from a babe he had received 
 in the Holy Scriptures, which were able to make him wise unto salvation 
 through faith in Jesus Christ : since " every Scripture inspired by God ia 
 also profitable for teaching, 3 for reproof, for correction, for training in 
 righteousness, that the mail of God may be perfect, thoroughly equipped for 
 every good work." * 
 
 The fourth chapter begins with a solemn appeal to him to do his duty as 
 a pastor " in season, out of season," & because the time would soon come 
 when men would turn away from truth to the fantastic doctrines of teachers 
 who would answer them according to their own lusts. 
 
 " Do thott then be sober in all things, endure sufferings. Do the work of an 
 evangelist, fulfil thy ministry. For / am being already poured in libation, and the 
 time of iny departure 6 is close at hand. I have striven the good strife, I have finished 
 my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of 
 righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me in that day ; and 
 not to me only, but also to all who have loved His appearing." 7 
 
 That is practically St. Paul's last word. The remainder of the letter is 
 occupied with personal information, given in the natural, loose, accidental 
 order of a letter, mingled with earnest entreaty to him that he would come at 
 
 who calls them Jaimes and Jotapes, and Numenius (Orig. c. Cela. iv. 199). The names 
 belong to the cycle of Jewish Hagadoth. They are mentioned in the Targum of 
 Jonathan on Ex.. vii. 11, aiid were said to be sons of Balaam. 
 
 1 This is said to contradict ii. 16 and iii. 13. It only does so to an unintelligent 
 literalism. Error will succeed, but its very success will end in its exposure. "Non 
 proficient amplius, quamquam ipsi et eoruin similes proficiant in ejus (Bengel); or, 
 
 &S ChrySOStom remarks, K&V irportpov av9rj<rjj TO. rijs nAai/qs eis re\ot ov Sioftevei. 
 
 2 It has been asked why he refers especially to these. Perhaps because they had 
 come most heavily upon him, and affected him most severely as being the first of the 
 kind which he had endured. Perhaps because Timothy was a Lycaonian, and Paul's 
 memory of those old days is vividly awaked. 
 
 3 This is almost certainly the true translation. It was so understood by Origen, 
 Theodoret, by Erasmus and Grotius, by Whitby and Hammond, by Alford and Ellicott ; 
 is so translated in the Arabic, the Syriac, the Vulgate, Luther, the Dutch, and the 
 Rhenish, and in the versions of Wiclif, Tyndale, Coverdale, and Cranmer. For the 
 introduction of the predicate by ** see Gal. iv. 7, Luke i. 36, Rom. viii. 29, &c. 
 
 4 iii. 117. 
 
 5 iv. 2, fi>Ko.iptas, aieatpws : "opportune", importune" " (Aug.). The smallest element of 
 literary sense is sufficient to save the verse from the fanatical abuse which has perverted 
 o many passages of Scripture. If any antidote to its abuse is required, see Matt. vii. G. 
 
 8 apoAvo-Ewf, "departure," not " dissolution " (Phil. i. 23). ayoAusiy is "to set sail." 
 7 iv. 1 8. "There is nothing better," says Chrysostom, "than this strife. There 
 
 110 end to this crown. It is not a crown of piice, nor is it assigned by any earthly 
 , nor are men spectators of its bestowal ; the theatre is filled with angel- witnesses. " 
 
 arbiter 
 
 It is useless to argue with those who see a spirit of boasting here which contradicts 1 
 Cor. iv. 3 ; Phil. iii. 12 ; 1 Tim. i. 16. "Distingue tempora et coucordabit Scrip tura." 
 The same man may, at different moments, in different moods, and from different stand- 
 point*, say, "I am the chief of sinners," and " I have striven the good strife."
 
 PAUL'S LAST LETTER. M 1 
 
 once. " l)o your best to come to me quickly." Demas, Grescens, Titus, are 
 all absent from him ; Erastus did not come with him farther than Corinth ; 
 Trophimus was taken ill at Miletus ; Luke only is left. Mark is useful to 
 him for service perhaps because he knew Latin and therefore Timothy is 
 to take him up somewhere on the way, and bring him. 1 Tychicus is already 
 on the way to Ephesus, 2 so that he can take Timothy's place when he arrives. 
 Timothy is to be on his guard against the pronounced hostility of Alexander 
 the coppersmith. 3 Then follows the touching allusion to his first trial and 
 deliverance, on which we have already dwelt. Greetings are sent to Priaca, 
 Aquila, and the house of Ouesiphorns. Once more, " Do your best to come 
 before winter ; " if he comes after that time he may be too late. " Eubulus 
 greets thee, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren. The 
 Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit. Grace be with you." * 
 
 I have purposely omitted the one simple, touching message, introduced so 
 incidentally, and with such inimitable naturalness. " When you come, bring 
 with you the cloke that I left at Troas, at Carpus' house, and the books, 
 especially the parchments." 6 The verse has been criticised as trivial, as 
 
 1 Mark had been attached of late to the ministry of Peter. Perhaps but all ia here 
 uncertain St. Peter may have been already martyred. It is, at any rate, deeply 
 interesting to observe how completely St. Mark had regained that high estimation in the 
 mind of the Apostle which he had weakened by his early defection (Acts xv. 38). 
 
 2 aircVreiAa. It is made a difficulty that St. Paul should mention this to Timothy, 
 who is supposed to have been at Ephesus. But even if airrriAa cannot be an epistolary 
 acrist, and so equivalent to "I am sending," Paul could not be sure that Timothy might 
 not be visiting some of the neighbouring churches ; and Tychicus may have gone by 
 some longer route. Even apart from this, nothing is more common in letters than the 
 mention of facts which must be perfectly well known to the person addressed ; and, in 
 any case, since Timothy could hardly leave without resigning his charge for a time into 
 the hands of Tychicus, he might be glad of a personal assurance from Paul that he had 
 sent him. 
 
 3 The meaning of n-oAXa u.ot xaxa vS'ifaTo ia not certain, but is probably nothing more 
 than "exhibited very mischievous conduct towards me." The following words, "The 
 Lord shall reward him (<"ro&i<m, M, A, 0, D, E, F, G), according to his works," have been 
 rebuked as a malediction. But the t"i <*UTO AoyKrtew) of verse 16 is sufficient to show that 
 
 this was not the mood of Paul ; and it is no malediction to say of an enemy, " I must 
 leave God to deal with him," since God ia infinitely more merciful than man. 
 
 4 iv. 922. Linus may be the traditional first Bishop of Home (Iren. c. Hacr. iii. 
 33; Euseb. H. E. iii. 4); but I am surprised that any one should accept the ingenious 
 attempt to identify Pudens with the dissolute centurion of Martial's epigrams (iv. 13 ; 
 xi. 53) and the Pudens who built a temple at Chiohester to Neptune and Minerva ; and 
 Claudia with the British Claudia Rufina, whom he married, and with the daughter of 
 the British king Cogidubuus or of Caraotacus. The grounds of the identification were 
 suggested by Archdeacon Williams in a pamphlet on Pudens and Claudia. No doubt the 
 Pudens of Martial may be the Pudens of the Chiohester inscription, since he married a 
 British lady ; and this Claudia may have been a daughter of Cogidubnus, and may have 
 been sent to Rome as a hostage, or for education, and may have taken the name 
 Rufina, because she may have been entrusted to the charge of Pomponia, the wife of 
 Aulus Plautus, who had been a commander in Britain, and in whose family was a branch 
 called Rufi. And it is possible that Pomponia may have been secretly a Christian (Tao. 
 Ann. xiiL 32), and so this Claudia Rufina may have become a Christian too ; but even 
 if we grant the possibility of all these hypotheses, still nothing whatever remains to 
 identify the Pudens and Claudia here separated from each other by another name with 
 the Pudens and Claudia of whom we have been speaking. Claudia was the commonest 
 of names, and the whole theory is an elaborate rope of sand. 
 
 ' That <**\6njs, if that be the true reading, means a cloak, seems to be nearly certain^ 
 23
 
 682 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PATTIi. 
 
 unworthy the dignity of inspiration. But men mast take their notions of 
 inspiration from facts, and not try to square the facts to their own theories 
 Even on these grounds the verse has its own value for all who would nut 
 obscure divine inspiration, nor obliterate the true meaning and saoredness of 
 Scripture by substituting a dictated infallibility for the free play of human 
 emotions in souls deeply stirred by the Holy Spirit of God. But even on 
 other grounds how little could we spare this verse ! What a light does it 
 throw on the last sad days of the persecuted Apostle ! The fact that these 
 necessary possessions perhaps the whole that the Apostle could call his own 
 in this world had been left at the house of Carpus, may, as we have seen, 
 indicate his sudden arrest, either at Troas or on his way to it. A prisoner 
 who is being hurried from place to place by unsympathising keepers is 
 little able to look after his property. But now the Apostle is settled 
 again, though his home is but a prison, and he feels that it will be his 
 home for life. Winter is coming on, and winter in a Roman prieon, as 
 he knows by experience, may be very cold. He wants to get back his rough 
 travelling cloak. It was one of those large sleeveless garments which we 
 should call an " overall " or " dreadnought." Perhaps St. Paul had woven 
 it himself of the black goat's hair of his native province. And, doubtless 
 for he was a poor man it was an old companion wetted many a time in 
 the water-torrents of Asia, whitened with the dust of .Roman roads, stained 
 with the brine of shipwreck when Euroaquilo was driving the Adriatic into 
 foam. Ho may have slept in its warm shelter on the chill Phrygian 
 uplands, under the canopy of stars, or it may have covered his bruised 
 and trembling limbs in the dungeon of Philippi. It is of little value; 
 but now that the old man sits shivering in some gloomy cell under the 
 palace or on the rocky floor of the Tullianum, and the winter nights are 
 coming on, he bethinks him of the old cloak in the house of Carpus, and asks 
 Timothy to bring it with him. " The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, 
 bring with thee." "And the books, but especially the parchments.'* 1 The 
 
 It was the opinion of the Greek Fathers, who only mention alternatively the meaning 
 yk<a<r<roKoiu>v, oi book-case. But had this been meant it would have been mentioned after 
 the books, not before them. We may assume that the word is a transliteration of the 
 Latin poewula, and meant a long thick cloak. The form of the transliteration might 
 surprise us, but it is another incidental mark of genuineness, for it comes from the form 
 which the work took in Syriac, ]V"?D. Even if jvto be pallium, we see that in Syriac D re- 
 presents rr. Modern ingenuity sees in it a sacrificial vestment a chasuble ! 
 
 1 Many will recall the striking and pathetic parallel to this request in the letter 
 written by the martyr William Tyndale, from the damp cells of Vilvorde, in the winter 
 before his death, asking, for Jesus' sake, for a warmer cap, and something to patc\i hia 
 leggings, and a woollen shirt, and, above all, his Hebrew Bible, Grammar, and Dictionary : 
 " Quamobrem tuam dominationem rogatum habeo, idque per Dominum Jesum, ut si 
 mihi per hiernen hio manendum sit, solicites apud dominum comuiissarium, si forte 
 dignari velit, de rebus meis quas habet mittere calidiorem birethum. Frigus enirn patior 
 in capite nimiuin . . . calidiorem quoque tunicam, nam haec, quam habeo, admodum 
 tenuis est. Item pannum ad caligas deficiendas. Duplois (sic) detrita eat, oaniiseae 
 detritao aunt etiam. Camiseam laneam habet si mittere velit. . . . Mnxinie autein 
 omnium tuam clementiam rogo atque obsecro tit ex animo agere relit apud dominum 
 oojnmigsarjvua tjuatcuub dignari mini velit Sill. Helraicam, Gmmaiaticam
 
 GREAT MOSQUE AT TARSUS. 
 
 (From a .SfceicTi by Rev. E. J. Davis.)
 
 PAUI/8 LAST IJBTTKB. 688 
 
 ttiZia the papyrus books few we may b rare, but old friends. Perhaps 
 he had bonght them when he was a student in the school of Gamaliel at 
 Jerusalem; or they may have been given him by his wealthier converts. 1 
 The papyrus books, then, let Timothy bring, but especially the parchments 
 the vellum rolls. What were these ? Perhaps among them was the diploma 
 of his Roman franchise ; or were they precious rolls of Isaiah and the Psalms, 
 and the lesser Prophets, which father or mother had given him as a life-long 
 treasure in the far-off happy days when, little dreaming of all that would 
 befall him, he played, a happy boy, in the dear old Tarsian home ? Dreary 
 and long are the days the evenings longer and drearier still in that Roman 
 dungeon ; and it will be a deep joy to read once more how David and Isaiah, 
 in their deep troubles, learnt, as he had learnt, to suffer and be strong. A 
 simple message, then, about an old cloak and some books, but very touching. 
 They may add a little comfort, a little relief, to the long-drawn tedium of 
 these last dreary days. Perhaps he thinks that he would like to give them, 
 as his parting bequest, to Timothy himself, or to the modest and faithful 
 Luke, that their true hearts may remember him when the sea of life flows 
 smooth once more over the nameless grave. It would be like that sheepskin 
 cloak which centuries afterwards the hermit Anthony bequeathed to the 
 Archbishop Athanasius a small gift, but all he had. Poor inventory of a 
 saint's possessions ! not worth a hundredth part of what a buffoon would get 
 for one jest in Caesar's palace, or an acrobat for a feat in the amphitheatre ; 
 but would he have exchanged them for the jewels of the adventurer Agrippa, 
 or the purple of the unspeakable Nero P No, he is much more than content. 
 His soul is joyful in God. If he has the cloak to keep him warm, and the 
 books and parchments to teach and encourage him, and Mark to help him in 
 various ways, and if, above all, Timothy will come himself, then life will have 
 shed on him its last rays of sunshine ; and in lesser things, as well as in all 
 greater, he will wait with thankfulness, even with exultation, the pouring out 
 in libation of those last few drops of his heart's blood, of which the rich full 
 stream has for these long years been flowing forth upon God's altar in willing 
 sacrifice. 8 
 
 But there are no complaints, no murmurs there is nothing querulous or 
 depressed in these last words of St. Paul. If the Pastoral Epistles, and above 
 all this one, were not genuine, they must have been written by one who not 
 only possessed the most perfect literary skill, but who had also entered with 
 consummate insight into the character and heart of Paul ; of Paul, but not 
 of ordinary men, even of ordinary great men. The characteristic of waning 
 life is disenchantment, a sense of inexorable weariness, a sense of inevitable 
 
 et Vooabularivm H&raicum, ut eo studio tempus conteram . . . "W. Tindalus " (Life, 
 by Demaufl, p. 475). 
 
 1 See Ewald, Gcech. iv. 626 ; vi. 891. Paul seems to have been a student all his life, 
 as far as circumstances permitted. Acts xxvi. 24, -.a. n-oAAa <rt ypaf^xara jjuwtav trpTpr. 
 
 * Of. PhiL ii. 17. Seneca, when dying, sprinkled the bystanders with his blood, 
 Kiying, " Libare se liquorem ilium Jovi Liberator! " (Tao. Ann, xv. 64). So, too^ Thrasea, 
 "Libetmi*, iuquit, Jovi Liberator!" (Id. rvi. 35).
 
 684 THE LITE AND WORK OF St. 
 
 disappointment. We trace it in Elijah and John the Baptist ; we trace it in 
 Marcus Aurelius ; we trace it in Francis of Assisi ; we trace it in Roger 
 Bacon ; we trace it in Luther. All is vain ! We have lived, humanly speaking, 
 to little or no purpose. " We are not better than our fathers." " Art thou He 
 that should come, or do we look for another ? " "I shall die, and people will 
 say, ' We are gkd to get rid of this schoolmaster.' " " My order is more 
 than I can manage." " Men are not worth the trouble I have taken for them." 
 " We must take men as we find them, and cannot change their nature." To 
 some such effect have all these great men, and many others, spoken. They 
 have been utterly disillusioned ; they have been inclined rather to check the 
 zeal, to curb the enthusiasm, to darken with the shadows of experience the 
 radiant hopes of their younger followers. If in any man such a sense of 
 disappointment such a conviction that life is too hard for us, and that we 
 cannot shake off the crushing weight of its destinies could have ever been 
 excusable, it would have been so in St. Paul. What visible success had he 
 achieved? the founding of a few Churches of which the majority were 
 already cold to him ; in which he saw his efforts being slowly undermined by 
 heretical teachers ; which were being subjected to the fiery ordeal of terrible 
 persecutions. To the faith of Christ he saw that the world was utterly 
 hostile. It was arraying against the Cross all its intellect and all its power. 
 The Christ returned not ; and what could His doves do among serpents, His 
 sheep among wolves ? The very name " Christian " had now come to be 
 regarded as synonymous with criminal ; and Jew and Pagan like " water 
 with fire in ruin reconciled." amid some great storm were united in common 
 hostility to the truths he preached. And what had he personally gained P 
 Wealth ? He is absolutely dependent on the chance gifts of others. Power ? 
 At his worst need there had not been one friend to stand by his side. 
 Love ? He had learnt by bitter experience how few there were who were not 
 ashamed even to own him in his misery. And now after all after all that 
 he had suffered, after all that he had done what was his condition? He was 
 a lonely prisoner, awaiting a malefactor's end. What was the sum-total of 
 earthly goods that the long disease, and the long labour of his life, had 
 brought him in ? An old cloak and some books. And yet in what spirit does 
 he write to Timothy ? Does he complain of his hardships ? Does he regret 
 his life ? Does he damp the courage of his younger friend by telling him that 
 almost every earthly hope is doomed to failure, and that to struggle against 
 human wickedness is a fruitless fight P Not so. His last letter is far more 
 of a pcean than a miserere. For himself the battle is over, the race run, the 
 treasure safely guarded. The day's work in the Master's vineyard is well- 
 nigh over now. When it is quite finished, when he has entered the Master's 
 presence, then and there not here or now shall he receive the crown of 
 righteousness and the unspeakable reward. And so his letter to Timothy is 
 all joy and encouragement, even in the midst of natural sadness. It is the 
 young man's heart, not the old man's, that has failed. It is Timotheus, not 
 Paul, who is in danger of yielding to languor and timidity, and forgetting
 
 THK END. 685 
 
 that the Spirit which God gave was one not of fear, but of power, and of love, 
 and of a sound mind. " Bear, then, afflictions with me. Be strong in the 
 grace of Jesus Christ. Fan np the flame in those whitening embers of zeal 
 and courage. Be a good soldier, a true athlete, a diligent toiler. Do you 
 think of my chains and of my hardships ? They are nothing, not worth a 
 word or a thought. Be brave. Be not ashamed. We are weak, and may be 
 defeated; but nevertheless God's foundation-stone stands sure with the 
 double legend upon it one of comfort, one of exhortation. Be thou strong 
 and faithful, my sou Timothy, even unto death." So does he hand to the 
 dear but timid racer the torch of truth which in his own grasp, through the 
 long torch-race of his life, no cowardice had hidden, no carelessness had 
 dimmed, no storm had quenched. " Glorious Apostle ! would that every 
 leader's voice could burst, as he falls, into such a trumpet-sound, thrilling 
 the young hearts that pant in the good fight, and must never despair of final 
 victory." 1 Yes, even so : 
 
 " Hopes have precarious life ; 
 
 They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off 
 
 In vigorous youth, and turned to rottenness ; 
 
 ut faithfulness can feed on suffering t 
 
 And knows no disappointment" s 
 
 CHAPTER LVIL 
 
 THE END. 
 
 " Bonum agonem subituri estis, in quo agonothetee Deus vivus eat, xystarchea 
 Spiritus Sanctus, corona aeternitatis, bravium angelicae substantiae, politia in coelis, 
 gloria in saecula saeculorum.' 1 TEKT. ad Mart. 3. 
 
 " Qui desiderat dissolvi et ease cum Christo, patienter vivit et deleotabiliter 
 moritur." AUG. 
 
 " Lieblich wie der Iris Farbenf euer 
 Auf der Donnerwolke duft'gem Thau 
 Schimmert durch der Wehmuth diistern Schleier 
 Hier der Euhe heitres Blau." SCHJXLEH. 
 
 DID Paul ever get that cloak, and the papyri and the vellum rolls P Did 
 Timothy ever reach him p 3 None can tell us. With the last verse of the 
 Second Epistle to Timothy we have heaud Paul's last word. In some Roman 
 basilica, perhaps before Helius, the Emperor's freedman, in the presence of 
 some dense, curious, hostile crowd of Jews and Pagans, he must have been 
 heard once more, in his second defence, or on the second count of the indict- 
 ment against him ; and on this occasion the majority of the assessors must 
 have dropped the tablet the tablet of condemnation into the voting urn, 
 and the presiding judge must have pronounced sentence of decapitation on 
 
 i Martinean, Hours of Thought, p. 89. * "Spanish Gypsy." 
 
 3 That he did is a reasonable conjecture, and it not improbably led to that imprison- 
 ment the liberation from whioh is mentioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews (xiii. 23)
 
 686 THE LIFB AND "WOBK OV ST. PATTL. 
 
 one who, though condemned of holding a dangerous and illegal superstition, 
 was still a Roman citizen. Was he alone at his second trial as at his first ? 
 Did the Gentiles again hear of Jesus and the Resurrection P Did he to them, 
 as to the Athenians, prove that the God whose Gospel he had been commissioned 
 to proclaim was the same God after whom their fathers had ignorantly groped, 
 if haply they might find him, in the permitted ages of ignorance, before yet, 
 in the dispensation of the times, the shadow on the dial-plate of eternity had 
 marked that the appointed hour had come ? All such questions are asked in 
 vain. Of this alone we may feel convinced that he heard the sentence pro- 
 nounced upon him with a feeling akin to joy 
 
 " For sure, no gladlier does the stranded wreck 
 See, through the grey skirts of a lifting squall, 
 The boat that bears the kope of life approach 
 To save the lif e despaired of, than he saw 
 Death dawning on him, and the end of all." 
 
 But neither respecting his bearing nor his fate do we possess any particulars. 
 If any timid, disheartened, secret Christians stood listening in the crowded 
 court if through the ruined areas which marked the sites of what had once 
 been shops and palaces before the conflagration had swept like a raging storm 
 through the narrow ill-built streets if from the poorest purlieus of the Tras- 
 tevere or the gloomy haunts of the catacomb any converted slave or struggling 
 Asiatic who believed in Jesus had ventured among the throng, no one has left 
 a record, no one even told the story to his fellows so clearly as to leave behind 
 him a floating tradition. We know nothing more. The last word has been 
 spoken. The curtain has fallen on one of the noblest of human lives. 
 
 They who will may follow him in imagination to the possible scene of his 
 martyrdom, but every detail must be borrowed from imagination alone. It 
 may be that the legendary is also the real scene of his death. If so, accom- 
 panied by the centurion and the soldiers who were to see him executed, 
 he left Rome by the gate now called by his name. Near that gate, 
 close beside the English cemetery, stands the pyramid of C. Cestius, and 
 under its shadow lie buried the mortal remains of Keats and Shelley, and of 
 many who have left behind them beloved or famous names. Yet even amid 
 those touching memorials the traveller will turn with deeper interest to the 
 old pyramid, because it was one of the last objects on which rested the eyes 
 of Paul. For nearly three miles the sad procession walked ; and doubtless 
 the dregs of the populace, who always delight in a scene of horror, gathered 
 round them. About three miles from Rome, not far from the Ostian road, 
 is a green and level spot, with low hills around it, known anciently as Aquae 
 Salviae, and now as Tre Fontane. There the word of command to halt was 
 given; the prisoner knelt down; the sword flashed, and the life of the greatest 
 of the Apostles was shorn away. 1 
 
 1 1 have Dot thought it desirable to trouble the reader with Medieval legends of St. 
 Paul's death, which may be seen, by those who list, in Fabrioius, Cod. Apocr. iii. 632 ; 
 Ordwietw Yltaii*. ii. 2,
 
 THE EITD. 687 
 
 * Dulce sonat sethere vox 
 Hiems tranfriit, occidit nor, 
 Imber abiit moeetaque crux, 
 Lucet io perpetna lux." BALDH. 
 
 Earthly favour could hardly have seemed more absolute. No blaze of 
 glory shone on his last hours. No multitudes of admiring and almost ador- 
 ing brethren surrounded his last days "with the halo of martyrdom. Near 
 the spot where he was martyred it is probable that they laid him in some 
 nameless grave in some spot remembered only by the one or two who knew 
 and loved him. How little did they know, how little did even he understand, 
 that the apparent earthly failure would in reality be the most infinite success ! 
 Who that watched that obscure and miserable end could have dreamed that 
 Borne itself would not only adopt the Gospel of that poor outcast, but even 
 derive from his martyrdom, and that of his fellow Apostle, her chief sanctity 
 and glory in the eyes of a Christian world ; that over his supposed remains 
 should rise a church more splendid than any ancient basilica ; and that over 
 a greater city than Home the golden cross should shine on the dome of a 
 mighty oathedral dedicated to his name ? 
 
 How little did men recognise his greatness ! Here was one to whom no 
 single man that has ever lived, before or since, can furnish a perfect parallel. 
 If we look at him only as a writer, how immensely does he surpass, in his 
 most casual Epistles, the greatest authors, whether Pagan or Christian, of 
 his own and succeeding epochs. The younger Pliny was famous as a letter- 
 writer, yet the younger Pliny never produced any letter so exquisite as that 
 to Philemon. Seneca, as a moralist, stood almost unrivalled, yet not only is 
 clay largely mixed with his gold, but even his finest moral aphorisms are 
 inferior in breadth and intensity to the most casual of St. Paul's. Epictetus 
 and Marcus Aurelins furnish us with the purest and noblest specimens of 
 Stoic loftiness of thought, yet St. Paul's chapter on charity is worth more 
 than all they ever wrote. If we look at the Christian world, the very greatest 
 worker in each realm of Christian service does but present an inferior aspect 
 of one phase only of Paul's many-sided pre-eminence. As a theologian, as 
 one who formulated the doctrines of Christianity, we may compare him with 
 St. Augustine or St. Thomas of Aqninum ; yet how should we be shocked to 
 find in him the fanciful rhetoric and dogmatic bitterness of the one, or the 
 scholastic aridity of the other ! If we look at him as a moral reformer, we 
 may compare him with Savonarola ; but in his practical control of even the 
 most thrilling spiritual impulses in making the spirit of the prophet subject 
 to the prophet how grand an exemplar might he not have furnished to the 
 impassioned Florentine ! If we consider him as a preacher we may compare 
 him with St. Bernard ; yet St. Paul would have been incapable of the 
 unnatural ascetism and heresy- hunting hardness of the great Abbot of 
 Clairvaux. As a reformer who altered the entire course of human history, 
 Luther alone resembles him ; yet how incomparably is the Apostle superior 
 to Luther in insight, in courtesy, in humility, in dignity, in self-control ! As
 
 688 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAWL. 
 
 a missionary we might compare him to Xavier, as a practical organiser to St. 
 Gregory, as a fervent lover of souls to Whitefield, and to many other saints 
 of God in many other of his endowments ; but no saint of God has ever 
 attained the same heights in so many capacities, or received the gifts of the 
 Spirit in so rich an outpouring, or borne in his mortal body such evident 
 brand-marks of the Lord. In his lifetime he was no whit behind the very 
 chiefest of the Apostles, and he towers above the very greatest of all the 
 saints who have since striven to follow the example of his devotion to his 
 Lord. 
 
 " God buries his workmen, but carries on their work." It is not for any 
 earthly rewards that God'a heroes have sought not even for the reward of 
 hoping in the posthumous success of the cause to which they have sacrificed 
 their lives. All questions of success or failure they have been content to leave 
 in the hands of God. Their one desire has been to be utterly true to the best 
 that they have known ; their prayers have all been simplified to this alone 
 " Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God ; let 
 Thy loving Spirit lead me into the land of righteousness." That God has 
 seemed to be careless of their individual happiness they would be the last to 
 complain ; though He slay them, yet do they trust in Him. Failure was to 
 St. Paul a word unknown. He knew that to fail or seem to fail in the 
 cause of God, was to succeed beyond the dreams of earthly ambition. 
 
 His faith had never wavered amid life's severest trials, nor his hope grown 
 dim amid its most bitter disappointments ; and when he passed from the 
 dungeon and the martyrdom to his crown of righteousness, he left the life 
 which ho had sown to be quickened by the power of God in the soil of the 
 world's history, where it shall continue to bear fruit until the end of time, 
 amid the ever-deepening gratitude of generations yet unborn. One who had 
 lived with him, and knew his thoughts and hopes, and had himself preached 
 the faith of Christ in days when to bo a Christian was to suffer as a Christian, 
 has written of God's heroes in words which St. Paul would have endorsed, 
 and in which he would have delighted, " These all died in faith, not having 
 received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded 
 of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and 
 pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they 
 seek a country ; and truly, if they had been mindful of that country whence 
 they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now 
 they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly ; wherefore God is not 
 ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city."
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 EXCUKSUS I (p. 16). 
 THB STYLE or ST. PAUL AS ILLUSTBATIVB 01- HIS OHABAOTEB, 
 
 THE reader may be interested to see collected a very few of the varying estimates of the 
 style of the great Apostle : 
 
 LONQINUS [Paul as master of the dogmatic style] 
 
 Kopwyis <rr<i> Adyov froirbs tal ^potTJfioTos 
 'EAAqvucoO Ai)fios#JT;S,/t. T. A. rrpbs TOVTOIS IlauXos 6 Tap<revs 
 oiru'a /ecu TTpwrdv <#")/ii TrpotOTafievoi' Soy/xaros awfrofiet'icTOV. 
 
 ST. CHBYBOSTOM [Paul a champion, and his Epistles a wall of adamant round the 
 Church} 
 
 utnrep yap m^os e( aSa.uarros (tarourKtvao^iv oyru TO* 
 iravrayov TTJS oiKOViienn KxA))<ri'a5 TO, rovrov TeiX'C" Ypafifxara' xat 
 xdBarrep ri; apiorni; yvfai6TaTo larqxc, K. r. X. (quoting 2 Cor. z. 5). 
 
 De Sacerdotio, 1, iv. 7. 
 
 ST. JEBOME [Paul's words thunders]. " Paulum proferam quem quotiescunque lego, 
 video mihi non verba audire sed tonitrua . . . Videntur quidem verba simplicis et 
 quasi innocentis hominis et rusticani et qui nee facere nee declinare noverit insidias, 
 sed quocunque respexeris fulmina sunt. Haeret in causS. ; capit omne quod tetigerit ; 
 tergum vertit ut superet ; fugam simulat ut occidat " (Ep. ad Pammach. 68, 18). 
 DANTE 
 
 " Vidi due vecchi in abito dispari 
 
 Ma pari hi atto, ognuno onesto e sodo. 
 L'un 1 si monstrava alcun de famigliari 
 Di quel sommo Ippocrate, che natura 
 Agli animali f e' ch' ella ha piu oari. 
 
 Monstrava 1' altro 2 la contraria cura 
 Con una spada lucida ed acuta * 
 Tal che di qua del rio mi fe' paura. 
 
 Purgatorio.. xxix. 184. 
 
 Andowi poi lo Vat d' elezwne * 
 Per recarne conf orto a quella Fede 
 Ch' d principio alia via di salvazione. 
 
 Inferno, tt. 2& 
 
 LUTHER. "PauluB meras flammas loquitur tamque vehementer ardet ut incipiat 
 etiam quasi Angelis maledicere " (in Gal. L). 
 
 "In S. Paulo und Johanne ist eine sonderliche furtrenliche Gewissheit und Plero- 
 phoria; sie reden davon als sey es schon allbereit vor Augen" (Tisch'reden, iv. 399; ed. 
 Forstemann). 
 
 Bishop HEBBERT DE LOSINGA. " Certe, fratres, verba Pauli, non verba hominis, sed 
 aeiheris tonitrua esse videntur " (Life and Sermons, ii. 309). 
 
 EBASMUS [Paul's style like a thunderstorm]. " Non est cujusvis hominis Paulinum 
 pectus effingere ; tonat, fulgurat, meras flammas loquitur Paulua " (ad Col. iv. 10). 
 
 i St. Luke, "the beloved physician." St. Paul. s The Eiiistlea 
 
 oxevos Aoy^ (Acts ix. 15). For other allusions see Farad. zviiL 181, xxi. 119. 
 
 23*
 
 690 APPENDIX. 
 
 And again [Paul's rhetorical skill like the course of a stream] "Sudatur ab 
 eruditissimis viris in oxplicandis poetarum ac rhetorum consiliis, at in hoc rhetore longe 
 plus sudoris est ut deprehendas quid agat, quo tendat, quid velit; adeo stropharum 
 plenus est undique, absit invidia verbis. Tanta vafrities est, non credas eundem 
 hominem loqui. Nunc ut turbidus quidam fons sensim ebullit, mox torrentis in morem 
 ingenti fragore devolvitur, multa obiter secum rapiens, nunc placide leniterque fluit, 
 nunc late velut in lacum diffusus exspatiatur. Rursum alicubi se condit ac diverse loco 
 subitus emicat; cum visum est miris maeandris nuno has nunc illas lambit ripaa, 
 aliquoties procul digressus, reciprocate flexu in sese redit " (Id. Paraph. Dedicat.). 
 
 CASAUBON. "Ille solus ex omnibus scriptoribus non mihi videtur digitis, calamo, et 
 atramento scripsisse, verum ipso corde, ipso affectu, et denudatis visceribus " (Adver- 
 saria, ap. Wolf., p. 135). 
 
 On the other hand, CALVIN, after alluding to his anakolutha, ellipses, &c., adds 
 "Quae suiit quidem orationis vitia sed quibus nihil majestati decedit caelestis sapientiae 
 quae nobis per apostolum traditur. Quin potius singulari Dei providentia factum est, ut 
 sub contemptibtti verborum humilitate altissima haec mysteria nobis traderentur, ut non 
 humanae eloquentiae potentia, sed sola spiritus efficaci& niteretur nostra fides." 
 
 HEMSTKRHUSIUS [Character of St. Paul's flowers of speech]. "Eloquentia ejus non 
 in nosculis verborum et rationin calamistratae pigmentis . . . sed indolis excelsae notis 
 et pondere rerum. ... In ejus epistolis nullae non exstant oratorum figurae, non illae 
 quidem e rhetorum loculis et myrotheciis depromptae . . . Verum affectus animi 
 coelesti ardore inflammatus haec scriptionis lumina sponte sub manum praevenientia 
 pergignebat." 1 
 
 REUSS. " Ordinairement il d6bute par des phrases on ne peut plus embarrassees. . . . 
 Mais dds qu'il a trouvS la bonne veine, combien son style n'est il pas le fiddle miroir de 
 son individuality J n n'est ni correct, ni classique ; il lui manque la cadence sonore. Des 
 antitheses paradoxales, des gradations pleines d'effet, des questions pressantes, des 
 exclamations passioimees, des ironies qui terrassent 1'opposition, une vivacite, enfin, qui 
 ne permet aucun repos au lecteur, tout cela alterne avec des epanchements naifs et 
 touchants, qui achevent de gagner 1 coeur " (TMol. Chrdt. ii. 11). 
 
 R. H. HUTTOS. " Who that has studied St. Paul at all has not noticed the bold 
 soaring dialectic with which he rises from the forms of our finite and earthly thought to 
 the infinite and the spiritual life embodied in them? What ease and swiftness and 
 power of wing in this indignant upward flight from the petty conflicts of the Corinthian 
 Church; the upward flight which does not cease till the poor subjects of contention, 
 though he himself was one of them, seem lost like grains of sand beneath the bending 
 sky ! . . . The all but reckless prodigality of nature which made St. Paul now and then 
 use a stratagem, and now and then launch a thunderbolt, in the fervour of his preaching, 
 is the spring of all his finest touches, as when he wishes himself accursed from Christ if 
 it could save his Jewish brethren " (Essays, 321 330). 
 
 The AUTHOR of "Saul of Tarsus." "If he staggers under the greatness of his 
 subject, if he is distracted by the infinity of the interests which he treats, if every word 
 which rises to his lips suggests a host of profound and large associations, if the care of all 
 the Churches, gives all the facts a varied but a real significance. . . . Human speech 
 must be blamed for its poverty ; human experience, which has developed speech, for its 
 narrowness. His life was ever in his hand, his heart was on his lips. The heart was 
 often too great for the speech " (p. 229). 
 
 MAKTINEAU. "What can be more free and buoyant, with all their variety, than his 
 writings? Brilliant, broken, impetuous as the mountain torrent freshly filled, never 
 smooth and calm but on the eve of some bold leap, never vehement but to fill some 
 receptacle of clearest peace, they present everywhere the image of a vigorous Joy. 
 
 1 See next Excursus.
 
 TflB STYJhiC OK ST. PAUL. 691 
 
 Beneath the forms of their theosophic reasonings, and their hints of deep philosophy, 
 there may be heard a secret lyric strain of glorious praise, bursting at times into open 
 utterance, and asking others to join the chorus. . . . THs life was a battle from which 
 in intervals of the good fight, his words arose as the song of victory " (Hours of Thought, 
 p. 15G). 
 
 PBOF. JOWETT speaks of him as teaching his great doctrines "in broken words and 
 hesitating form of speech, with no beauty or comeliness of style." 
 
 BATJB, after pointing out how the style is filled to overflowing with the forms and 
 elements of thought, and that thoughts not only follow hard on thoughts, but tfeat those 
 thoughts succeed each other as determinations and memento of some one conception that 
 is greater than all of them, so that the thought unfolds itself, as it were, out of its own 
 depths, and determines itself by taking up its own momenta, adds: "Hence the peculiar 
 stamp of the Apostle's language : it is distinguished on the one hand for precision and 
 compression; on the other hand it is marked by a harshness and roughness which 
 suggests that the thought is far too weighty for the language, and can scarcely find fit 
 form for the superabundant matter it would fairly express " (Pa/ul. ii. 281). 
 
 HAUSRATH. "Es ist schwer diese Individualitat zu charakterisiren in der sich 
 christliche Liebesfiille, rabbinischer Scharfsinn, und antike Willenskraft so wunderbar 
 mischen. Wie wogt stromt, drangt alles in seinen Briefen. "Welch ein Wechsel 
 gluhender Ergusse und spitzer Beweisfuhrungeii 1 Hier iiberwindet er das Heidenthum 
 mit der Liebesfiille Jesu. Dort knebelt er das Judenthum, mit dessen eigenen Gurtel 
 rabbinischer Schriftbeweise. Am wenigsten hat die Phantasie Antheil an seiner inneru 
 Welt. Die Sprache ist oft hart und herb well nur die Gedanke sie geboren hat. Die 
 Bilder die er braucht sind meistens farblos. , . . Das ist die Schranke seines 
 Geisteslebens. Darin blieb er stets ein Rabbi " (Der Ajtostel Paulug, 502). 
 
 RENAN [Paul's style like a conversation]. "Le style epistokire do Paul est le plus 
 personnel qu'il y ait jamais eu ; la langue y est, si j'ose le dire, broyee ; pas une phrase 
 suivie. n est impossible de violer plus audacieusement, je ne dis pas le genie de la 
 langue grecque, mais la logique du langage humain ; on dirait une rapide conversation 
 st6nographiee et reproduite sans corrections. . . . Un mot 1'obsede. ... Ce n'est pas 
 de la sterilit6; c'cst de la contention de 1'esprit et une complete insouciance de la 
 correction du style " (St. Paul, p. 232). 
 
 The less favourable of the above estimates shelter themselves in part under the asser- 
 tion that St. Paul recognised the popular and vulgar character of his own style. But 
 such passages as 2 Cor. xi. 6 do not bear out these remarks. His language was not 
 indeed of a class which would have gained applause from pedantic purists and Atticising 
 professors ; it bears about the same relation to the Greek of Plato as the Latin of Milton 
 does to that of Cicero. But this fact constitutes its very life. It is a style far too vivid, 
 far too swayed and penetrated by personal emotion, to have admitted of being polished 
 into conformity with the artificial standards and accuracies of the schools. It more 
 closely resembles the style of Thucydides than that of any other great writer of anti- 
 quity. 1 That many defects in it can b pointed out is certain ; but then in one 
 important point of view these defects are better than any beauties, because they are due 
 to Paul's individuality. In whole sections of his Epistles his very want of style is his 
 style. His style, like that of every great man, has the defects of it* qualities. " Le 
 style," said Buffon, not (as he is usually quoted) cfest Vhornme, but "o'est de I'homme." 8 
 
 Bee some good remarks of Banr : "Bach passages as 1 Cor. Iv. 12, 13 ; vlL 2931 ; 9 Cor. 
 vl. 9, 10, have the true ring of Thucydides, not only hi expression, but in the style of the thought. 
 The genuine dialectic spirit appears in both, in the low of antithesis and contrast, rising not un- 
 frcquently to paradox. . . . With both these men the ties of national particularism give way before 
 the generalising tendency of their thought, and cosmopolitanism takes the place of nationalism" 
 (Paul. ii. 281). He refers to Bauer's Philelogfa ThiMydideo-Paulvna, 1778, which 1 have not seen. 
 
 * D'Alembert, (Suvret, vL 18. The "de " in Buffon'g phrase occurs in later edition*.
 
 692 APPENDIX. 
 
 He has, as every great writer has, " le style de an. yensee :" he has the style of genius, a 
 he has not the genius of style. 1 
 
 After quoting such remarkable and varied testimonies, it Is needless for me to write 
 an essay on the Apostle's style. That he could when he chose wield a style of remark- 
 able finish and eloquence without diminishing his natural intensity, is proved by the 
 incessant assonances and balances of clauses and expressions (parechesis, parisosis, paro- 
 moiosis) in such passages as 2 Oor. vi. 3 11. And yet such is his noble carelessness of 
 outward graces of style, and his complete subordination of mere elegance of expression 
 to the purpose of expressing his exact thought, that he never shrinks, even in his grandest 
 outbursts of rhythmic eloquence, from the use of a word, however colloquial, which 
 expresses his exact shade of meaning. 3 
 
 All that has been written of the peculiarities of St. Paul's style may, I think, be 
 summed up in two words Intense Individuality. His style is himself. His natural 
 temperament, and the circumstances under which that temperament found its daily 
 sphere of action ; his training, both Judaic and Hellenistic ; his conversion and sanctin- 
 cation, permeating his whole life and thoughts these united make up the Paul we know. 
 And each of these has exercised a marked influence on his style. 
 
 1. The absorption in the one thought before him, which makes him state without any 
 qualification truths which, taken in the whole extent of his words, seem mutually 
 irreconcilable ; the dramatic, rapid, overwhelming series 0f questions, which show that 
 in his controversial passages he is always mentally face to face with an objection ; s the 
 centrifugal force of mental activity, which drives him into incessant digressions and 
 goings off at a word, due to his vivid power of realisation ; the centripetal force of 
 imagination, which keeps all these digressions under the control of one dominaut 
 thought; 4 the grand confusions of metaphor; 5 the vehemence which makes him love 
 the most emphatic compounds; 6 the irony 7 and sarcasm; 8 the chivalrously delicate 
 courtesy; 9 the overflowing sympathy with the Jew, the Pagan, the barbarian with 
 saint and sinner, king and slave, man and woman, young and old ; 10 the passion, which 
 now makes his voice ring with indignation 11 and now break with sobs ; 13 the accumula- 
 tion and variation of words, from a desire to set forth the truths which he is proclaiming 
 In every possible light ; 1S the emotional emphasis and personal references of his style ; M 
 the depressed humility passing into boundless exultation; 15 all these are due to his 
 natural temperament, and the atmosphere of controversy and opposition on the one hand, 
 and deep affection on the other, in which he worked. 
 
 2. The rhetorical figures, play of words, assonances, oxymora, antitheses, of his style, 
 which are fully examined in the next Excursus ; the constant widening of his horizon ; 16 
 the traceable influence of cities, and even of personal companions, upon his vocabulary ; 17 
 the references to Hellenic life ; 18 the method of quoting Scripture ; the Rabbinic style of 
 exegesis, which have been already examined w these are due to his training at Tarsus and 
 Jerusalem, his life at Corinth, Ephesus, and Borne. 
 
 3. The daring faith which never dreads a difficulty ; x the unsolved antinomies, which, 
 though unsolved, do not trouble him ; Jl " the bold soaring dialectics with which he rises 
 
 1 Grimm, Corretp., 1788. 
 
 * E.g., ij/co(Ai<rio and irtpmpevtT<u in 1 Cor. xiii. 8, 4 ; Ka.revaf>KT\cra, 2 Cor. xi. 8 ; airoKoifiotrcu. 
 Gal v. 12. * Rom. x. ; 2 Cor. vi., zL and pass-im. 
 
 * 2 Cor. ii. 1416 ; xii. 13, 1216 ; Eph. iv. 811 ; v. 1215 ; and Paley, Hor. Paulinae, 
 vi. 8. 2 Cor. iii. 1 ; Col. ii. 6. ' Especially compounds in vircp. Supra, p. 844. 
 
 i 1 Cor. iv. 8 ; 2 Cor. xi. 1620, and passim. Phil. iii. 2 ; Gal. iv. 17 ; v. 12, and passim. 
 
 1 Cor. i iii. ; Philem. and Phil, passim ; Acts xxvi. 29, &c. 
 
 10 Bom. i., iv., and all the Epistles passim. u Galatians, Corinthians, Phil., 2 Tim., passim. 
 M All the Epistles passim. ls All the Epistles passim. lt All the Epistles passim 
 
 2 Cor. U. 14 ; Rom. vii. 25, &c. 
 
 18 "Eo (ordine Epistolarum chronologico) constitute . . . inerementum Apostoli spirituale 
 cogiioseitur^ (Bengel, ad Bom. L 1). 17 V. sworn, pp. 2?3, 691. 
 
 18 Bee Excursus III. w See Excursus IV. *> Bee Ep. to Romans, pawn. 
 
 a See Excursus XXI., " Th Antinomies of St. Paul"
 
 BHETOBIO 0V ST. PAUL. 
 
 from the forma of one finite and earthly thought to the infinite and spiritual life em- 
 bodied in them;" the "language of ecstasy," which was to him, as he meant it to be to 
 his converts, the language of the work-day world ; that "transcendental-absurd," as it 
 seems to the world, which was the very life both of his conscience and intellect, and made 
 him what he was ; the way in which, as with one powerful sweep of the wing, he passes 
 from the pettiest earthly contentions to the spiritual and the infinite ; the " shrinking 
 Infirmity and self-contempt, hidden in a sort of aureole of revelation, abundant beyond 
 measure " ' this was due to the fact that his citizenship was in heaven, his life bid with 
 Christ in God. 
 
 EXCURSUS H. (p. 15). 
 
 BHETOBIO OF ST. PATH. 
 
 M. KENAN, in describing the Greek of St. Paul as Hellenistic Greek charged with Hebra- 
 isms and Syriacisms which would be scarcely intelligible to a cultivated reader of that 
 period, says that if the Apostle had ever received even elementary lessons in grammar or 
 rhetoric at Tarsus, it is inconceivable that he would have written in the bizarre, incorrect, 
 and non-Hellenic style of his letters. 
 
 Now, I do not think that St. Paul would have made about his own knowledge of 
 Greek the same remarks as Josephus does, who tells us that he had taken great pains to 
 master the learning of the Greeks and the elements of the Greek language. St. Paul had 
 picked up Greek quite naturally in a Greek city, and I think that I have decisively proved 
 that he could not have possessed more than a partial and superficial acquaintance with 
 Greek literature. But I have little doubt that he, like Josephus, would have said that 
 he had so long accustomed himself to speak Syriac that he could not pronounce Greek 
 with sufficient exactness, and that the Jews did not encourage the careful endeavour to 
 obtain a polished Greek style, which they looked on as an accomplishment of slaves and 
 freedmen.* Yet, after reading the subjoined list of specimens from the syntaxis ornata 
 of St. Paul, few, I think, will be able to resist the conviction that he had attended, while 
 at Tarsus, some elementary class of Greek rhetoric. I will here content myself with brief 
 references ; if the reader should feel interested in the subject, I have gone further into it 
 in the Expositor for 1879. 
 
 Figures (ox 1 ?!"""^) are divided by Greek and Latin rhetoricians into Figures of Language 
 (figurae verborum, elocutions, A.|e<as), and Figures of Thought (sententiae, fitavow). They 
 drew this distinction between them that figures of language disappear, for the most 
 part, when the words and their order are changed ; whereas figures of thought still sur- 
 vive. 8 The distinction is superficial and unsatisfactory, and it would perhaps be more 
 to the point to divide figures into : 1. Those of colour, dependent on the imagination ; 
 as metaphor, simile, allegory, personifications, metonyms, catachresis, &c. 2. Those of 
 form, ranging over an immense field, from the natural expression of passions, such as 
 irony, aposiopesis, erotesis, &c., down to mere elegancies of verbal ornament, and varia- 
 tions of style (such as zeugma, &c.) or of order (such as chiasmos, hysteron-proteron, &c.). 
 3. Those of sound, dependent on analogies of words, resemblance of sounds, unconscious 
 associations of ideas, &c., such as alliteration, parisoais, paromoiosis, parechesis, parono- 
 masia, oxymoron, plays on names, &c. 
 
 1. On figures of Colour I have already touched. 4 Ax specimens of the two other 
 classes in St. Paul's Epistles we may take the following referring to my Brief Greek 
 Syntax, or to other books, for an explanation of the technical terms : 
 
 1 See 2 Cor. r, xiii. passim, and some excellent remarks in Button's Eaofus, i. 825 880. 
 Jos. Antt. xx. 11, 2. 
 
 * So Aquila, Rutilius, &c., following Cic. Dt Oral. S. See Voss, Instt. Oral r. 1 ; Glaaa 
 Pkilologia Sacra, p. 963, Ac. Supra, pp. 1018.
 
 694 APPENDIX. 
 
 2. Figures of Form, 
 
 Chiasmus a crosswise arrangement of words or clauses, as in Rom. iL 6, 10. (Thia 
 figure is much more common in the Epistle to the Hebrews.) A good instance is 
 
 1 Cor. iii. 17, '* Tt * T v **""' T0 " o <j>deCpfi, <j>6tpel O.VTOV o Stos. 
 
 1 Cor. V. 1, 2, X e W i . 4 TO ((TfOV TOVTO TTOlTJOOf . 
 
 2 Cor. vii. 11, ev irpay^aTi. 
 
 1 Thess. iv. 6, supra, p. 334. 
 Litotes. 
 
 Rom. L 28. irately TO. fiij xafiijKotra. 
 
 Eph. V. 4, Ttt OVK arrj/covra. 
 
 1 Cor. xi. 22, eircwwrw ifias v TOU'TU ; OIIK T<UM> 
 
 Fhilem. 18, W n ^Sucrj 
 
 Philem. 11, TOV ITOTS o-ot 
 Afeioszs. 1 Rom. iii. 9, ov iravrcos (comp. 1 Cor. xvi 12). 
 
 1 Cor. i. 29, OTTWS fti) Kaux^OTjrai ira<7a aapf . 
 
 Rom. iii. 20, *f ipytav vo^ov ov $ucaiw0ij<reTai iroflra <rop{. 
 
 Antithesis, Parisosis, Paro)noiosis, y Paradox, Alliteration, Erottsis, Epexergasia all 
 exhibited in such passages of deep emotion as 2 Cor. vi. & 16 ; xi. 2228 ; 1 Cor. iv. 
 8 11. 
 
 Phil. iv. 8, 5<rci . . . ova. . . . . T. X. I TW, . r. A. 
 
 Phil. ii. 1, tl TIS . . . el TI . . K. T. A. 
 
 2 Cor. vii. 11, aAAo . . . oAAA . . . . T. A. 
 Aposiopesis. 
 
 2 Thess. ii., ride supra, p. 346. 
 Proparaitesis, Protherapeia, Captatio, Benevolmtiac, &o. 
 
 The Thanksgiving at the beginning of every Epistle except the " Galatiana." 
 
 Rom. ix. 15. 
 
 Acts rriv. 10 (before Felix), and xxvi. 2, 3, before Agripp*. 
 Paraldpsis (praeterita). 
 
 Philem. 19, ^va. /tij \yo> <roi. 
 
 1 Thess. iv. 9, ov xP e ' at< x v.aii' Ypaiecretu (cf. v. 1 ; 2 Cor. ix, 1). 
 Intentional Andkoluthon* 
 
 Gal. ii. 6, a>ro Se Tiv 5o(covvro>v tlval n. . . . 
 
 2 Thess. ii. 3, on sav ti.it eMy q a.no&Ta.O'Ca. npuiror . . 
 2 Thess. iL 7, MoVoi o Kcae\<av opri . . . 
 
 (The Anakolutha of mere inadvertence, due to the eager rapidity of thought, are 
 incessant in St. Paul, as in Rom. ii. 17 21 ; xvi. 25 27, &c., <fec.) 
 Climax. 
 
 Rom. v. 35. 
 Rom. viii. 29, 30. 
 Rom. x. 14, 15, &o. 
 Zeugma. 
 
 1 Cor. iii. 2, yoAa v^as nroVura KOI ov pptan*.. 
 
 1 Tim. iv. 3, Kia\.vovruv ymuiv, inrf\to$<n ^pw^aTur. 
 Oxymoron. 
 
 2 Cor. vL 9, Savarov/ievoi oi iSoii fifttv (being slain, yet behold we live). 
 1 Tim. v. 6, fuo-o reffvriKtv (living she ia dead). 
 
 Rom. i. 20, TO iopara avroO . . . KajBopaTtu (TTig unseen things are clearly seen). 
 Rom. xii. 11, r nrov5jj (A) oxinjpol (in Acwfc not sluggish). 
 
 i Thctw UKagw are, however, idiomatic (Wiur, f 36). See Arist. RM. UI. 9, 9.
 
 RHETORIC OP ST. PAUL. 695 
 
 1 Thess. iv. 11, <#>cXoT4ju.et<rtat ij9vxaeti> (be ambitious to be quiet), 
 1 Thess. i. 6, iv exfyei iroXAjj jiera xp (joyous affliction). 
 
 1 Cor. viii. 10, ouco8o|ui}fcj<reTai (ruinous edification). 
 Rom. L 22, $>awtor elvo* <rooi i(uapa.vdr)<Ta.v. 
 
 Eph. vi. 15, Gospel of peace part of panoply of war. 
 
 2 Cor. viii. 2, deep poverty abounding to wealth of liberality. 
 2 Cor. xii. 10, " When I am weak, then I am strong." 
 
 It will be sufficient to make the merest reference to Anadiplosis (Bom. be. 30; Phil. 
 Q. 8); Epanodos (GaL ii. 16); Epanorthosis (Rom. viii. 34; Gal ii. 20; iii. 4, &c.); 
 Asyndeton (1 Cor. xv. 43 ; 1 Tim. i. 17 ; 2 Tim. iii. 25, 10, 11, &c.) ; Antiptosis (Col. iv. 
 17 ; Gal. vi. 1 ; iv. 11) ; Hyperbaton (2 Thess. ii. 5, &o.) ; Alliteration (1 Cor. ii. 13 ; 
 2 Cor. viii. 22 ; ix. 8, &c.) ; Constructio praegnans (2 Thess. ii. 4, &o.) ; and many minor 
 figures. 
 
 3. Coming to figure* of the third division Sound we find that St. Paul makes 
 most remarkable and frequent nee of paronomasia. 
 
 E.g. (a) Paronomasia, dependent on the change of one or two letter! l : 
 Horn. L 29, iropvfi* irovyptq . . . <}>66vov, <j>6vov, 
 Rom. L 30, twrtverovs, aa-vvStrovs, 
 Rom. xi. 17, WS '"?*' K^iiSuv s<,\ao"J7)cra>', 
 Cf . Heb. V. 8, fwi9e <!<' S>v iiraOtv. 
 
 (03 Paronomasia, dependent on a play of words of similar sound or derivation.* Thin 
 is St. Paul's most frequent rhetorical figure : 
 
 2 Cor. iiL 2, ytvaxneo/tei'i) KOI a.v ayiyuoxo/ue'i'ij. * 
 
 Rom. i. 28, OVK Soafia<rav (they refused) . . . Wtfioi vovv (g. refute mind). 
 Phil. iii. 2, 3, (tararofiij (concision) . . , wtpiTo^J) (circumcision). 
 
 Rom. ii. 1, icptVew . . . KaTcucpiVas. 
 
 I Cor. xL 29, teq., 8iouepr . . . upC^a. , , , Kartucpi/ta. 
 
 Rom. xii. 3, "Not to be high-minded (virp4>povtv) above what we ought to be 
 minded (<povelv), but to be minded so as to be sober-minded" (fna^povtlv). Of. 
 
 Thuc. ii. 62, ov <f>pov>jfiTi ftovov oAAa icol coereu^povi)|xaTi. 
 
 1 Cor. vii. 31, xpw^evoi . . . (taraxp<ij*evoi, 
 
 2 Cor. vi. 10, s\vr<x . . . OT'XOVTS. 
 
 2 Cor. iv. 8, an-opovjievo* , , , ifcwropovf/.i'Oi. 
 
 2 Tim. iii. 4, <J>tXij8ovoi . . . ^tAdSsot. 
 
 2 Thess. iii. 11, not busy (epyafojwovs) but busybodies (wpi tpyofojtA'ow).* 
 
 1 Tim. v. 13, ow jxdi'OK 8c apyai, o\\a xal repttpyoi (female toilers in the school of 
 
 idleness). 
 
 Cornelius a Lapide and others have imagined a latent paronomasia in 1 Cor. 1. 23, 
 24. If St. Paul thought in Syriac it might be "To the Jews a micsol, and to the Greeks 
 a mashcal, but to those that are called Christ the secel of God." But this is probably a 
 mere ingenious fancy.* 
 
 (y) A third class of paronomasias consists in plays on names, of which we find three in 
 St. Paul : 
 
 Philem. 11, 'Oiojo-i^w . . . oxp>j<"W' i 
 
 Philem. 20, Not, y<6 ami o^otfiqv. 
 
 i See Cic. De Orat. ii. 68 ; Auot ad Hermin, Iv. S4 ; Qotot Imtt. Orat. Ix 3, 9, &C. An 
 
 instance in our Prayer Book is " among all the changes and chances of this mortal life." 
 
 * A curious instance occurs In our E. V. of James 1. C, " He that toavereth is like a wave of the 
 sea," where it does not occur in the original. 
 
 1 Compare Acts viii. 80, and Basil's remark to the Emperor Julian, oWyv*x ov* fyvws , i yap 
 ?yuo- OVK ax xareyvuf . 
 
 * So Domitius Afer, " No^i agentes sed satagentes " (Quint, vl. 8, M). 
 Qlas^PhUolog. Sacra, p. 959. 
 
 * F. supra, ad foe., where I have noticed the possible second paronomasia in axpnvror,
 
 696 APPENDIX. 
 
 PhiL iv. 8, 2vfvy~yvij<rt, "yoke-fellow by name and yoke-fellow by nature," 1 
 St. Jerome imagines another in Gal. i. 6, where he thinks that "ye are being removed" 
 (u'ia.Tidc<rOe) is a play on the name Galatse and the Hebrew Galal, " to roll." 
 
 Since, then, we find upwards of fifty specimens of upwards of thirty Greek rhetorical 
 figures in St. Paul, and since they are far more abundant in his Epistles than in 
 other parts of the New Testament, and some are found in him alone, may we not con- 
 clude that as a boy in Tarsus he had attended some elementary class in Greek rhetoric, 
 perhaps as a part of his education in the grammatical knowledge of the language ? Pro- 
 fessional rhetoricians abounded in Tarsus, and if Paul's father, seeing the brilliant 
 capacity of his son, meant him for the school of Gamaliel, he may have thought that an 
 elementary initiation into Greek rhetoric might help to pave the way for his future dis- 
 tinction among the Hillelites of Jerusalem ; since, as we see from the Talmud, this kind 
 of knowledge opened to some Babbis a career of ambition. If so, the lessons which the 
 young Saul learnt were not thrown away, though they were turned to very different 
 objects than had been dreamt of by one who intended his boy to be, like himself, a 
 Pharisee of Pharisees and a Hebrew of Hebrews. 
 
 EXCURSUS HI. (p. 23). 
 THE CLASSIC QUOTATIONS AND ALLUSIONS OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 L THOSE who maintain the advanced classic culture of St. Paul, rely on the fact that he 
 quotes from and alludes to Greek and Roman writers. 
 
 Three quotations are incessantly adduced. One is the hexameter written by the 
 Cretan poet Epimenides in such stern and contemptuous depreciation of the character of 
 his own countrymen 
 
 KpvjTe; atl /VOT<u, Kaxa Bripla., yaorepe? apyai'. 3 
 
 (" Liars the Cretans aye, ill monsters, gluttonous idlers.") 
 
 Another is the half -hexameter in which he reminds his audience, in the speech on the 
 Areopagus, that certain also of their native poets had said 
 
 Tov yap KOU, yw>? eo>iev.* 
 (" For we are also his offspring.") 
 
 A third is the moral warning to the Corinthians 
 
 QStipovonv TJOjj xP1<rra o/xiXiou Kajtai * 
 (" Evil communications corrupt good manners ; ") 
 
 or it may, perhaps, be more correctly rendered, " Evil associations destroy excellent 
 characters." 
 
 Now, if we look a little closer at these quotations, we shall see how very little proof 
 they furnish of anything more than the most superficial acquaintance with Greek writers. 
 The first of them is just such a current national characterisation 5 as might pass every- 
 where from mouth to mouth, and which St. Paul might very well repeat without having 
 read a line of the poem of Epimenides on Oracles, or Callimachus's Hymn to Zeus, in 
 both of which it occurs. 6 The second is a recognised commonplace of heathen insight, to 
 which many parallels might be quoted, but which is found in Oleauthos," nearly in the 
 form in which St. Paul quotes it. The actual quotation is from one of those tedious 
 
 1 r. tupra,ad Joe. * Tit L 12. Acts xvii 2a * 1 Cor. xv. 33. 
 
 * See. as to the Cretans, Leonidas, Anthol. iii., p. 369 ; Polyb. vL 47 ; Diod. Sic. xxii. Fr. ; 
 Wetst ad loc. 
 
 6 Callim. Hymn, in Jov. 8. KptfrT an \f/0crrou, xal yap, rafyov c* iva. <mo Kpijres irnfTfjvavro, 
 See Chrysostom and Jerome ad Tit. i. 12. Moraow, the line had originated one of the commonest 
 syllogistic puzzles, called "the Liars." "Epimenides said that the Cretans were liars; but 
 Epimenidei was a Cretan ; therefore Epimenides was a liar ; therefore the Cretans were not liars ; 
 therefore Epimenides was not a liar," &o. &c. (Diog. Laert ii. 108.) It was invented by Eubulides; 
 cf. Clc. Civ. ii 4, " mentions." * Gleanthes, Hymn, in Jov. 6.
 
 CLASSIC QUOTATIONS OF ST. PATTL. 607 
 
 poems which wore most in vogue at this period, the Phenomena of AratuB. 1 With the 
 writings of this poet St. Paul may have become acquainted, both because they are 
 entirely harmless which Is more than can be said of almost any other Pagan production 
 which was popular at that time and because Aratus was a Cilician, and very probably & 
 Tarsian. 2 The third was one of those common sententious pieces of morality which had 
 passed into a proverb, and which in all probability Menander, in his Thais, had 
 appropriated from some lost tragedy of Euripides. St. Paul is far more likely to have 
 heard it used in common parlance, or to have seen it inscribed on one of the Hermse at 
 Tarsus or Athens, than to have read it in Menander, or even as Socrates 3 and 
 Chrysostom seem to think in one of the Greek tragedians. It is further remarkable 
 about these quotations, first, that all three of them were so current, they are found in at 
 least two poets each ; and next, that two of them occur at the very beginning of Hymna 
 to Zeus. If any collection of Hymns to Zeus was to be found on any bookstall at Athens, 
 it is exactly the kind of book into which St. Paul's human sympathies may have induced 
 him to dip in support of his liberal and enlightened view that God had revealed Himself 
 even to the heathen, to a degree sufficient for their happiness and their salvation, had 
 they chosen to make use of the light they had. 4 A third very remarkable point is that 
 In the quotation from Menander or Euripides, whichever it may have been, the great 
 majority of the best MSS. read xpi<"-a, not X/"?"*' 5 a reading which may therefore be 
 regarded as certainly genuine, since no one would have dreamt of altering the correct 
 metre, if it had been given in the original manuscript. Now if such be the case, it seems 
 to indicate that the ear of St. Paul was unfamiliar with or, which comes to the same 
 thing, was indifferent to even so common a rhythm as that of the iambic verse. Our 
 conclusion, therefore, is that St. Paul's isolated quotations no more prove a study of 
 Greek literature than the quotation of such a national epigram as 
 
 " Inglese italianato, Dlavolo incarnate," 
 
 r of such a line M 
 
 " Lasciate ognl speranza voi ch' entrate," 
 
 would necessarily prove that an English writer was a proficient in the literature of Italy, 
 or had read the poems of Dante. St. Paul was a man of remarkable receptivity, and, as 
 we have seen, an habitual quoter. Except in Epistles intended for readers to whom Old 
 Testament quotations would have been unintelligible, he can hardly write five sentences 
 in succession without a Biblical reference. The utter absence of any similar use of even 
 the noblest of the classic writers, is a proof either that he had intentionally neglected 
 them, or that, at any rate, they had left little or no mark on an intellect so sensitive to 
 every cognate influence. For that it was not only the Scriptures of the Jewish canon 
 which thus clung to his retentive memory, is apparent from the free use which he makes 
 of the Book of "Wisdom, and perhaps of other books of the Jewish Apocrypha.' It is also 
 
 1 Aratus flourished about B.C. 270. His poems, considering that they only bear a sort of dull 
 resemblance to Thomson's Seasons, acquired astonishing popularity. They were translated, among 
 others, by Cicero, and by Cesar Germanicus. 
 
 * Buhle, Aratus, ii. 429. Hist. Etc. iil 16. Acts xiv. 17 ; xvii. 27 ; Rom. i. 30. 
 
 4 H, A, B, D, E, F, G, &c., IOPE<'W rpayiKif. Clem. Alex. Strom. L 14, 69 ; Meineke, Fr. Com., 
 p. 75. 
 
 8 See llansmth, p. 23. He compares 1 Cor. vi. 2 with Wisd. iil. 8, the image of the Christian 
 armour with Wisd. v. 17, the metaphor of the potter making one vessel to honour and another to 
 dishonour with Wisd. xy. 7. The memorable thrice-repeated saying, " Neither circumcision is any- 
 thing, nor aucircuBiciBion " (QaL v. 6 ; vi. 15 ; 1 Cor. vii. 19), ia by Photius, Syncellus, and others 
 said to be a quotation from " Revelation of Moses." Dr. Lightfoot (on GaL vi. 17) shows that there 
 Is some reason to doubt this, and says that " a sentiment which is the very foundation of St. Paul's 
 teaching was most unlikely to have been expressed in any earlier Jewish writing ; and if it really 
 occurred in the apocryphal work in question, this work must have been either written or inter- 
 polated after St. Paul's time (See Liicke, 0/enb. d. JoJian. i., p. 232)." The same must be said of th 
 Book of Wisdom on the ingenious hypothesis that it was written by Apollos (Plumptre, Eaaxwitor. 
 L 432. *a.).
 
 698 
 
 traceable in the extent to which he is constantly haunted by a word, 1 and in the new 
 and often rare expressions which are found hi every one of the Epistles, 3 and which show 
 us a mind keenly susceptible to impressions derived from the circumstances around him, 
 and from the intercourse of those among whom he was habitually thrown. 
 
 2. But though the Greek culture of Tarsus had little or no influence on the current of 
 the Apostle's thoughts, it would be a mistake to suppose that it produced no influence 
 at all on his life or on his style. Besides the direct quotations, there is more than one 
 isolated passage which may be the distant echo of classical reminiscences. Such, for 
 instance, is the apologue of the self-asserting members in 1 Cor. xii., which reminds us 
 at once of the ingenious fable of Menenius Agrippa; 3 and the fearful metaphor of 
 Rom. vii. 24, which has less probably been held to refer to a true story of the family of 
 Regulus. 4 And it is far from improbable that it was in some " class of rhetoric " at 
 Tarsus that the Apostle acquired the germs, at any rate, of that argumentative habit 
 of mind, that gift of ready extempore utterance, and that fondness for chiasmus, 
 paronomasia, paraleipsis, oxymoron, litotes, and other rhetorical figures, which charac- 
 terise his style.* It was there, too, that he may have learnt that ready versatility, that 
 social courtesy, that large comprehensiveness, that wide experience and capacity for 
 dealing with varied interests and intricate matters of business, which made him, in the 
 high and good sense of the word, a true gentleman, a Christian man of the world. He 
 was, in heart and feeling, an ideal specimen of what the Greeks call the *<>*te icayofldj 
 " fair and good " and his intercourse with polished Greeks may have tended to brighten 
 that spirit of "entirely genuine Attio urbanity" 6 a spirit more flexible and more 
 charming than natural Semitic dignity which breathes in every line of the Epistle to 
 Philemon. 
 
 3. It is a remarkable proof of this natural liberality that, in spite of the burning 
 hatred of idolatry which we have already noticed, he is yet capable of looking with 
 sympathy, and even admiration, on some of those nobler and more innocent aspects of 
 heathen life which his countrymen indiscriminately condemned.? The hallowing of 
 heathen symbols, the use of metaphors derived from heathen life for the illustration of 
 Christian truths and Christian duties, is a very remarkable feature of the style of St. 
 Paul. There were few of the crimes of Herod which the strict Pharisees had regarded 
 with more undisguised horror and hatred than his construction of a theatre at Caesarea ; 
 yet St. Paul quite freely, and without misgiving, adopting a metaphor which would have 
 caused a shudder to any Palestinian Pharisee, compares the transient fashion of the world 
 to the passing scene of a theatrical display, and in other places turns the whole Universe 
 into a theatre, on the stage of which were displayed the sufferings of the Apostles as a 
 spectacle to angels and to men. 8 "We recognise, too, the more liberal son of the Disper- 
 
 vyii)S in the Pastoral Epistles, Ac. 
 
 Liv. ii. 82. There is also a remarkable parallel In Sen. Z> IT&, 1L 31. 
 
 4 The if is against this supposed reference. On the other hand, the " ptrikatharmata" and 
 peripsema of 1 Cor. iv. 13 may be an allusion to ancient piacular offerings (v. supra, ad loc.). 
 
 * E.g., Chiasmm, Rom. 1L 7 10; Paronomasia, 2 Thess. iii. 11 (supra, ad loc.) ; Potraleipsi*, 
 1 Thsss. iv. 9, r. 1 ; Oxymoron, Rom. i. 20, Philem. 11 ; Litotes, 1 Cor. xi. 22, &c. (See Excursus II., 
 " The Rhetoric of St. Paul." 
 
 * Krenkel. p. 12. See Arist if. MOT. ii. 9, 2. 
 
 i The Talmud abounds in passages which utter nothing but unmixed scorn of the Gentiles, 
 even of their very virtues. In Batoha Bathra, f. 10, 2, there is a notable discussion on Prov. xiv. 84. 
 It Is rendered, " Righteousness exalteth a nation, and the goodness of nations is tin." R. Eleazar 
 explained it to mean. "Righteousness exalts Israel ; but the goodness of other nations Is sin, being 
 only due to their self-exaltation." Rabban Gamaliel said, "They were only good in order to heap 
 reproach on the shortcomings of Israel ;" and Rabbi Nechunya Ben Hakanah punctuated the verse, 
 "Righteousness exalteth a nation (Israel) and goodness: but the nations, a sin-offering." This 
 explanation was adopted by Rabban Johanan Ben Zakkai. 
 
 * 1 Cor. viL 81, wtLpmyn ri V^^M. TOW wfcrftov. 1 Cor. ir. 6, Wco-por eyjp^jj/ie'. (Of. Hob. x. 33,
 
 OLA.IMIG QtJOTATlOWfi * ST. 
 
 eior. the man whose thoughts have been enlarged by travel and by intercourse with men 
 of other training and other race In the apparently vivid sympathy with which St. Paul 
 draws some of his favourite metaphors from the vigorous contests of the Grecian games. 1 
 Those games constituted the brightest, the most innocently attractive feature of Hellenio 
 life. During his long stay at Ephesus and at Corinth he had doubtless witnessed those 
 wrestling bouts, those highly-skilled encounters of pugilism, those swift races to win the 
 fading garlands of laurel or pine, which, for some of his heathen converts, and particularly 
 for the younger among them, could not at once have lost their charm. "We can well 
 imagine how some young Ephesian or Corinthian might have pressed St. Paul to come 
 with him and see the struggle and the race ; and how, for one whose sympathies were 
 BO vividly human, there would have been a thrilling interest in the spectacle of those 
 many myriads assembled in the vast stadium in the straining eyes and eager countenances 
 and beating hearts in the breathless hush with which they listened to the proclamations 
 of the herald in the wild-eyed charioteers bending over their steeds, with the hair blown 
 back from their glowing faces in the resounding acclamations with which they greeted 
 the youthful victor as he stepped forward with a blush to receive his prize. Would 
 these fair youths do so much, and suffer so much, to win a poor withering chaplet of 
 pine and parsley, whose greenness had faded before the sun had set, and would they use 
 no effort, make no struggle, to win a crown of amaranth, a crown of righteousness which 
 could not fade away ? And that, too, when here the victory of one was the shame and 
 disappointment of all the rest, while, in that other contest, each and all might equally 
 be victors, and the victory of each be a fresh glory to all who were striving for the same 
 high prize. 2 And as such thoughts passed through his mind there was no Judaic nar- 
 rowness, but a genial sympathy in his soul, and a readiness to admire whatever was 
 innocent and beautiful in human customs, when he wrote to his converts of Corinth 
 " Know ye not that they which run in a stadium run all, but one receiveth the prize ? 
 So run that ye may grasp.* Now every one that strive th is temperate in all things ; 
 they, however, that they may receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. 
 I, then, so run, not as uncertainly ; so box I, as one who beateth not the air ; but I 
 bruise my body with blows and enslave it, lest perchance, after making proclamation to 
 others, I myself should prove to be a rejected combatant." 4 
 
 4. But it was not only with Greek customs that St. Paul became familiar during his 
 residence at Tarsus. It is clear that he must also have possessed some knowledge of 
 Roman law. His thoughts often have a juridical form. He speaks of the "earnest- 
 money " of the Spirit ; of the laws of inheritance ; of legal minority ; of the rights of 
 wives and daughters. 6 The privileges and the prestige conferred upon him by his rights 
 of Civitas would have inevitably turned his thoughts in this direction. The Laws of the 
 Twelve Tables had defined the authority which might be exercised by fathers over sons 
 even after they have come of age (patria potcstas) in a manner which Gaius tells us was 
 peculiar to Roman jurisprudence, with the single exception that it also existed among 
 the Gfalatce. If this means the Galatians it would give peculiar significance to the 
 illustration in Gal. iv. 1, which in any case proves St. Paul's familiarity with Roman 
 institutions which had no existence among the Jc/ws. So, too, we are told by Sir H. Maine 
 that " a true power of test at ion " was nowhere provided for in the Jewish Code of Laws, 
 and that the Romans " invented the will." Yet to the rules of testamentary bequests, 
 and their irrevocability in certain cases, St. Paul seems to make an express allusion (Gal. 
 
 i 1 GOT. ix 24 ; PhiL iii. 14 ; 1 Tim. vL 12 ; 2 Tim. tv. 8 ; tt. 5 ; 1 Theaa it IS. 
 
 * See a close parallel in Sen. Ep. If or. Ixxviii. 16. 
 
 * KaToXaftrfre. Cf. Phil. iii. 12 14, Kara ffxoirbv . . . iiri rb flpafielov. 
 
 * 1 Cor. ix. 2427. oJoxifiof, vocabulum agonislicwn, (Beng. ; Philo, de Cherub. 22). On the 
 temperate training of competitors, see Hor. A. P. 412 ; Bpict. EncMr. 35 ; Dissert, iii. 15 : Tert. ad 
 Mart. 3. ae'pa Stpeiv is to tight a oxia/aiaxta (i.e., make mere feints), (Eustuth, ail II. xx. 446 ; Athen. 
 154, A, 4e. ; Viig. &n. v. 376). Ki)pt<u> perhaps "heralding the laws of the contest (JEsch. 
 EVM. 566). Gal. iii. 17, 18 ; iv, 1, 2 ; Bom. viL 2, tc.
 
 700 APPHVDIX. 
 
 ill. 15). Again, he gives prominence to the Roman idea of artificial "adoption," even to 
 the extent of making an apparent reference to the fact that a son, fully adopted, aban- 
 doned the domestic rites (sacra) of his own family, and attached himself to those of his 
 new parent (Gal. iv. 5 ; Eph. i. 6). 1 
 
 5. "We may select one more passage though in this case it involves no admiration or 
 sympathy to show how accurately the customs of the Pagan life had been observed by 
 St. Paul in that varied experience which made him, in the best sense, a citizen of the 
 world. It is a passage which, from the absence of this knowledge, has often been entirely 
 misunderstood. It occurs in 2 Cor. ii. 14 16 : " Now thanks be to God, who always 
 leadeth us everywhere in triumph 2 in Christ, and who by us maketh manifest the odour 
 of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are to God a sweet odour of Christ 
 among those who are being saved, and among those who are perishing. To the latter we 
 are an odour of death to death, to the former an odour of life to life." 
 
 Here, though the details of the metaphor are intricately involved, the general con- 
 ception which was in the thoughts of the Apostle, and swayed his expression, is derived 
 from the customs of a Roman triumph. It was one main feature of such "insulting 
 vanities " that the chief captives were paraded before the victor's path, and sweet odours 
 were burnt in the streets while his car climbed the Capitol. 3 But when he reached the 
 foot of the Capitoline hill there was a fatal halt, which, in the utter deadness of all 
 sense of pity, might be a moment of fresh exultation to the conqueror, but which was 
 death to the captive ; for at that spot the captives ceased to form any part of the pro- 
 cession, but were led aside into the rocky vaults of the Tullianum, and strangled by the 
 executioner in those black and fetid depths. And thus the sweet odours, which to the 
 victor a Marius or a Julius Caesar and to the spectators were a symbol of glory and 
 success and happiness, were to the wretched victims a Jugurtha or a Vercingetorix 
 an odour of death. Reminded of this by his use of the words " leadeth us in triumph," 
 St. Paul for an instant fancies himself a captive before the chariot of God a captive in 
 connection with Christ ; and then another passing fancy strikes him. The preachers of 
 Christ are like that burning incense whose perfume filled the triumphant streets, 4 but 
 they were not an odour of life and hope to all. As light is light yet pains the diseased 
 eye, as honey is honey yet palls on the sated taste, 5 so the odour retained its natural 
 fragrance, although to many through their own sins and wilfulness it might only 
 breathe of death. The tidings of salvation were glad tidings, but to the guiltily hardened 
 and the wilfully impenitent they might prove to be tidings of wrath and doom. 6 
 
 Little, perhaps, did it occur to St. Paul as he wrote those words, that the triumph of 
 God, in which he was being led along from place to place as a willing victim, might end 
 for him also in the vaults of that very TuUianum 7 the description of which must have 
 
 1 These instances are pointed out by Dean Merivale, Boyle Lectures, and in St. Paul at Rome, pp. 
 172 180. The passages of Gaius referred to are Instt. i. 55 (cf. Caesar, B. G. vi. 19) and 189 ; Digests, 
 xxvi. 3 ; but I cannot pretend to say that the conclusions formed are indisputable. 
 
 * The rendering of the E. V., " which always causes u* to triumph in Christ," is both philologi- 
 cally impossible (cf. Col. ii. 15), and confuses the metaphor to such an extent as to render it entirely 
 unintelligible. St. Paul may well have heard of the famous triumph of Claudius over the Britons a 
 few years before (A.D. 51), in which Caractacus had walked as * prisoner (0piopj3cvdci$), but "had 
 passed from the ranks of the 'lost' to those of the 'saved'" (Tac. Ann. xiii. 36). (See Dr. 
 Plumptre, ad loc.) Cleopatra had proudly said, ov 0piofij3ev0>;cr3fuu. 
 
 Dion CasB. hndv. ; Her. Od. IV. ii. 60 ; Plut. JEmil. p. 272. 
 
 * St. Paul rises superior to the vulgar prejudice of the Rabbis, who said that "a man is a sinner 
 who while walking in a part of a town inhabited by idolaters inhales purposely the odour of 
 incense oflered up by them " (BeracMth, t. 53, 1). 
 
 5 See Theophyl. ad loc. 
 
 * Similarly the Kabbis spoke of the law as an " aroma of life " to those who walk on the right, 
 an "aroma of death" to those on the left (ShaVbath, f. 88, 2). 
 
 i The Tullianum Is, according to old tradition, the scene of the last imprisonment, before 
 martyrdom, both of St. Peter and St. Paul. It was the rock-hewn lower dungeon added by Serving 
 Tullius to the career of Ancus Martins. Excavations within the last few months prove that It wa 
 much larger than has been hitherto supposed.
 
 ST. PAUL A HAGADIST. 701 
 
 been mingled In his thoughts with the other details of the Roman pomp and that if not 
 from the Mamertine, yet from some other Roman prison he would only be dragged 
 forth to die. 
 
 EXCURSUS IV. (p. 83). 
 ST. PAUL A HAQADIST : ST. PAUL AND PHILO. 
 
 THERE are two large divisions of Rabbinic lore, which may be classed under the heads 
 of Hagadoth, or unrecorded legends, and Halachoth, or rules and precedents in explana- 
 tion of dubious or undefined points of legal observance. 1 It is natural that there should 
 be but few traces of the latter in the writings of one whose express object it was to 
 deliver the Gentiles from the intolerable burden of legal Judaism. But though there is 
 little trace of them in his writings, he himself expressly tells us that he had once been 
 enthusiastic in their observance. 2 "I was making," he says to the Galatians, "con- 
 tinuous advance in Judaism above many who were my equals in age in my own race, 
 being very exceedingly a zealot for the traditions handed down from my fathers." 8 And 
 there are in the Epistles abundant signs that with the Hagadoth he was extremely 
 familiar, and that he constantly refers to them in thought. Thus in 2 Tim. iii. 8 he 
 traditionally names Jannes and Jambres, two of the Egyptian magicians who withstood 
 Moses. He adopted the current Jewish chronologies in Acts iii. 20, 21. He alludes to 
 the notion that the Adam of Gen. i. is the ideal or spiritual, the Adam of Gen. ii. the 
 concrete and sinful Adam. 4 The conception of the last trumpet, 5 of the giving of the 
 Law at Sinai by angels, 6 of Satan as the god of this world and the prince of the power 
 of the air, 7 and of the celestial and infernal hierarchies, 8 are all recurrent in Talmudio 
 writings. When, in 1 Cor. xi. 10, he says that " a woman ought to have a veil 9 on her 
 head because of the angels," there can, I think, be no shadow of doubt in the unpre- 
 judiced mind of any reader who is familiar with thrsa Jewish views of the subject in 
 which St. Paul had been trained, that he is referring to the common Rabbinic interpre- 
 tations of Gen. vi. 2 (LXX. Cod. A, " the angels "), where the Targum, and, indeed, all 
 Jewish authorities down to the author of the Book of Enoch (quoted in the Epistle of 
 Jude), 10 attribute the Fall of the Angels to their guilty love for earthly women. St. 
 Paul could not have been unaware of a notion which for many ages seems to have been 
 engrained in the Jewish mind 1] a notion which is found over and over again in the 
 
 I I have tried fully to explain the nature of the Halachah and the Hagadah In the Expositor, 
 October, 1877. The former dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the latter with the Hagiographa. 
 Dr. Deutsch (Smith's Diet. s. y. " Versions ") says, " If the Halachah used the Scriptural word as a 
 last and most awful resort against which there was no further appeal, the Hagadah used it as the 
 golden nail on which to hang its gorgeous tapestry. If the former was the irou bulwark round the 
 nationality of Israel, the latter was a maze of flowery walks within those fortress walls." 
 
 Gal L 14. 
 
 The n-opoSoTif did not mean the written Law, but the Oral Law, the irdrpta Iffy of which 
 Josephus speaks so much ; the germ, in fact, of the HalacMth of the Mishna and Gomara. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 47. This is also found in Philo, De Opif. Mima. L 82. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 52 ; 1 Thess. iv. 16. Gal. iii. 19. * Epn, 11. 8. 
 
 Eph. i. 21 ; iii. 10 ; vi. 12 ; Col. 1. 16 ; li. 15. 
 
 Such, however arrived at, or whatever be the special shade of thought about the use of the 
 word which may be a mere provincialism is the obvious meaning of efouo-ux in 1 Cor. xL 10. St. 
 Paul gives three reasons for this rule (1) our instinctive sense that an uncovered head, like a 
 shaven head, is a dishonour to a woman, whose hair is a glory to her ; (2) the fact that woman's 
 hair indicates her subordinate position towards man, as man's covered head denotes his subordina- 
 tion to God ; (8) " because of the angels." 10 2 Pet ii. 4 ; Jude 6, 14. 
 
 II The argument that oi ayyeAoi is never used in the New Testament except for good angels la 
 quite valueless, for the fallen angels were supposed to have been good angels until they fell, and, if 
 they had fallen thus, there was nothing to show the impossibility that othel-s might similarly fall 
 This interpretation is given quite unhesitatingly by Tertullian, de Virg. Vtl. 7, " propter angelos, 
 scilicet quos legimus a Deo et coelo excidisse ob coneupiscentiam feminanun." I have thoroughly 
 examined this point in a paper in the Homiletic Quarterly of 1878, and quoted many Rabbinic illus- 
 trations. (TaMhuma, f. 61, 4 ; Abhoth of Babbi Nathan, c. 84.)
 
 702 A.PPKITDIX. 
 
 Talmud, and which IB still so prevalent among Oriental Jews, as also among Moham- 
 medans, 1 that they never allow their women to be unveiled in public lest the Shedim, or 
 evil spirits, should injure them and others. 2 To this very day, for this very reason, 
 Jewish women in some Eastern cities wear an inconceivably hideous headdress, called 
 the khalebt, so managed as to entirely conceal the hair. It exposes them to derision and 
 inconvenience, but is worn as a religious duty, " because of the spirits." 
 
 Again, in Rom. iv. 5, 13, Paul evidently accepts the tradition, also referred to by St. 
 Stephen, that Abraham had been an uncircumcised idolater when he first obeyed the call 
 of God, and that he then received a promise unknown to the text of Scripture " that 
 he should be the heir of the world." 3 In Bom. ix. 9 it has been supposed, from the form 
 of his quotation, that he is alluding to the Rabbinic notion that Isaac was created in the 
 womb by a fiat of God ; in Gal. iv. 29 to the Hagadah that Ishmael not only laughed, 
 but jeered, insulted, and mis-treated Isaac ; 4 and in 2 Cor. xL 14 to the notion that the 
 angel who wrestled with Jacob was an evil angel assuming the semblance of an Angel of 
 Light. These three latter instances are slight and dubious ; but there is a remarkable 
 allusion to the smitten rock in the wilderness, which in 1 Cor. x. 4 is called " a spiritual 
 following rock." The expression can have but one meaning. Among the many marvel- 
 lous fancies which have been evolved from the thoughts of Jewish teachers, occupied for 
 centuries in the adoring and exclusive study of their sacred books, was one to which they 
 repeatedly recur, that the rock, from which the water flowed, was round and like & 
 swarm of bees, and rolled itself up and went with them in their journeys. "When the 
 Tabernacle was pitched, the rock came and settled in its vestibule. Then came the 
 princes, and standing near it exclaimed, "Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it," 5 and it 
 sprang up. How are we to regard these strange legends ? Can we suppose that wise and 
 sensible Rabbis like Hillel and Gamaliel took them literally? There is no ground what- 
 ever for supposing indeed, it is essentially impossible that any one could have accepted, 
 au pied de la Icttre, all the fables of the Talmud, which are in many instances both 
 senseless and contradictory. Many of them were doubtless regarded as mere plays of 
 pious fancy mere ingenious exercises of loving inference. Others were only an Oriental 
 way of suggesting mystic truths were, in fact, intentional allegories. Others, in their 
 broad outlines, were national traditions, which may often have corresponded with fact, 
 and which, at any rate, had passed into general and unquestioned credence in ages little 
 troubled by the spirit of historical criticism. 6 Though St. Paul might quite naturally 
 glance at, allude to, or even make use of some of these latter, it would be an utter 
 mistake to assume that he necessarily attached to them any objective importance. If he 
 alludes to the simplest and most reasonable of them, he does so ornamentally, inci- 
 dentally, illustratively, and might in all probability have attributed to them no value 
 
 1 Bee the very remarkable story of Khadijah, who discovers that it is really Gabriel who has 
 appeared to Mohammed by his flying away directly she takes off her veil, " knowing from Wai-oka 
 that a good angel must fly before the face of an unveiled woman" (Weil, Mahomed, 48). (See Dean 
 Stanley's exhaustive note, Cor. p. 187.) 
 
 3 See BeracMth, t. 6, 1 : " Abba Benjamin says that if we had been suffered to see them, no one 
 would stand before the hurtful demons. Rav Huna that each of us has 1,000 at his left aud 10,000 
 at his right hand (Ps. xcl 7),"&c. &c. The reason why Solomon's bed was guarded by sixty valiant 
 men with drawn swords was " because of fear in the night " (Cant iii 7, 8). " Walk not alone at 
 night, because Egrath, daughter of Machlath, walks about she and 180,000 destroying angels, and 
 every one of them individually has pel-mission to destroy " (Pesachtm, 112, 2). They are called 
 ruchM, shedim, l-ilin, tiharim,, ftc. (Hamburger, .. " Gespenster "). The only other view of the 
 passage which seems to me even possible (historically) is that of St Chrysostom, " because good 
 angels present at Christian worship rejoice to see all thiugs done decently and in good order." 
 
 Rom. iv. :18. Of. Josh. xxiv. 15. * Sanhedr. t 89, 2. s Num. xxL 17. 
 
 s The Rabbis themselves draw a distinction between passages which are to be accepted literally 
 in 'Db) and those which are meant to be " hyperbolical," in ordinary Oriental fashion ('Nin Vf> 
 .nd, Antt. Hebr., p. 140). It must further be remembered that much of the Talmud consists of 
 cryptographs which designedly concealed meanings ^wravra ovvtrofcrtr from "persecutors" aud 
 heretics." Space prevents any further treatment of these subjects hew, but I may refer those who 
 are interested in them to my papers on the Halaclm and the Hagada, Talmudic cryptographs, &c., in 
 the Sxpofitor for 1877.
 
 ST. PAUL A HAQADIST. 703 
 
 beyond their connexion with loving reminiscences of the things wliioh he h*d learnt in 
 the lecture-hall of Gamaliel, or in his old paternal home. In this very passage of the 
 Corinthians the word "following" (oKoAou'floi/aijs) is only a graceful allusion to the least 
 fantastic element of a legend capable of a spiritual meaning ; and St. Paul, in the instant 
 addition of the words " and this rock was Christ," shows how slight and casual is the 
 reference to the purely Hagadistic elements which, in the national consciousness, had got 
 mingled up with the great story of the wanderings in the wilderness. 1 Meanwhile since 
 it is the spiritual and not the material rock which is prominent in the thoughts of St. 
 Paul is there any one who holds so slavish and unseriptural a view of inspiration as to 
 think that such a transient allusion either demands our literal acceptance of the fact 
 alluded to, or, if we reject it, weakens the weight of apostolic authority ? If a modern 
 religious writer glanced allusively at some current legend of our own or of ancient history, 
 would it be at once assumed that he meant to support its historical certainty ? If he 
 quotes Milton's line about Aaron's breastplate "ardent with gems oracular," is he held 
 to pledge himself to the Rabbinic theory of the light which moved upon them? Does any 
 one think himself bound to a literal belief in seven heavens, because St. Paul, in direct 
 accordance with Jewish notions, tells us that he was caught up into Paradise as far as the 
 third? 2 
 
 There is one respect in which these traces of Judaic training are specially interesting. 
 They show the masterly good sense of the Apostle, and they show his inspired superiority 
 to the influences of his training. That he should sometimes resort to allegory is reason- 
 able and interesting; but when we study the use which he makes of the allegorising 
 method in the case of Sarah and Hagar, we see at once its immense superiority to the 
 fantastic handling of the same facts by the learned Philo. How much more soberly does 
 St. Paul deal with the human and historic elements of the story ; and how far more 
 simple and natural are the conclusions which he derives from it I Again, when he alludes 
 to the legends and traditions of his nation, how rational and how purely incidental is his 
 way of treating them ! Compare St. Paul with Philo, with the Taliuudists, with any of 
 the Fathers in the first three centuries, and we can then more clearly recognise the chasm 
 which separates the Apostle from the very greatest writers both of his own nation and of 
 the early Christian Church. 
 
 The question as to whether St. Paul had or had not read Philo is not easy to 
 answer. Gfrorer's work on Philo might seem a decisive proof that he had done so. 
 Undoubtedly many passages may be adduced from the voluminous pamphlets of the 
 eloquent Alexandrian which might lead us to repeat the old remark that " either Paul 
 Philonises, or Philo is a Christian." Philo, like St. Paul, speaks of the Word of God as 
 the antitype of the manna, and the smitten rock, and the pillar of cloud and fire ; and 
 as a Mediator, and as begotten before the worlds, and as the Heavenly Man. He speaks 
 of the strife between the fleshly and the rational soul ; of the assisting grace of God ; of 
 the milk of doctrine ; of seeing God as through a mirror; of the true riches ; and of the 
 faith of Abraham. And, besides agreement in isolated phrases, Philo resembles St. Paul 
 in his appeal to overwhelming revelations, 3 in modes of citing and interpreting Scripture, 
 in his use of allegory, in the importance which he attaches to the spiritual over the 
 carnal meaning of ordinances, and in many other particulars. But when we look closer 
 we see that many of these expressions and points of view were not peculiar to Philo. 
 They were, so to speak, in the air. They fall under the same category as the resem- 
 blances to Christian sentiments which may be adduced from the writings of Seneca, 
 
 i Seven- such current national traditions are alluded to in St. Stephen's speech. (See supra, 
 p. 92.) 
 
 1 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4 ; Eph. iv. 10. Many other passages and expressions of St. Paul find their 
 Dluatralion from the Talmud e.g, t 1 Cor. xv. 87, 45, yvjivw K&K.K.W ; Eph. 1L 14 (the Chel) ; 1 Cor. 
 T. 2 (ctrdtetth, " other lands ") ; 2 Cor. II. 16, &O-/M) Savarov ; 2 Cor. v. 2, iitevl><T<ur8iu,, So. (So* 
 Meyer on tbcso passages.) * DC Cherubim, i. 448.
 
 704 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, and may therefore be explained as having been due 
 rather to the prevalent currents of moral and religioua sentiment, than to any imitation 
 or conscious interchange of thought. And side by side with these resemblances, the 
 differences between Paul and Philo are immense. The cardinal conception of Philo is 
 that of the Logos, and it is one which, in this sense, is never used by St. Paul. St. Paul 
 makes but one or two distant and slighting allusions to the ancient Greek philosophy, 
 which Philo regarded as of transcendent importance. St. Paul makes but the most 
 subordinate use of the allegoric method, which with Philo is all in all. To Philo the 
 Patriarchs become mere idealised virtues ; to St. Paul they are living men. Philo 
 addresses his esoteric eclecticism to the illuminated few ; St. Paul regards all alike as 
 the equal children of a God who is no respecter of persons. Philo clings to the Jewish 
 ritualisms, though he gives them a mystic significance ; St. Paul regards them as abro- 
 gated for Gentiles, and non-essential even for Jews. Philo still holds to the absolute 
 superiority of the Jew over the Gentile ; St. Paul teaches that in Christ Jesus there ia 
 neither Jew nor Gentile. In Philo we see the impotence of Hellenising rationalism ; in 
 St. Paul the power of spiritual truth. Philo explains and philosophises in every direc- 
 tion ; St. Paul never recoils before a paradox, and leaves antinomies unsolved side by 
 side. Philo, like St. Paul, speaks much of faith ; but the "faith" of Philo is something 
 far short of a transforming principle, 1 while that of St. Paul is a regeneration of the 
 whole nature through mystic union with Christ. The writings of Philo are a collection 
 of cold abstractions, those of St. Paul a living spring of spiritual wisdom. "Philo," 
 says Professor Jowett, "was a Jew, St. Paul a Christian. Philo an eclectic, St. Paul 
 spoke as the Spirit gave him utterance. Philo was an Eastern mystic, St. Paul preached 
 the resurrection of the body. Philo was an idealiser, St. Paul a spiritualiser of the 
 Old Testament. Philo was a philosopher, St. Paul a preacher ; the one taught a system 
 for the Jews, the other a universal religion. The one may have guided a few more 
 solitaries to the rocks of the Nile, the other has changed the world. The one is a dead, 
 unmeaning literature, lingering amid the progress of mankind ; the other has been a 
 principle of life to the intellect as well as to the heart. While the one has ceased to 
 exist, the other has survived, without decay, the changes in government and the revolu- 
 tions in thought of 1,800 years." 2 
 
 Of the Apocryphal books there was one at least with which St. Paul was almost 
 certainly acquainted namely, the Book of Wisdom. No one, I think, will question this 
 who compares his views of idolatry, and the manner in which he expresses them, with the 
 chapters in which that eloquent book pursues the worship of heathenism with a concen- 
 trated scorn hardly inferior to that of Isaiah ; or who will compare together the passages 
 to which I have referred in a former note. If the books for which St. Paul wrote from 
 his last imprisonment were any but sacred books, we may feel a tolerable confidence that 
 the Book of Wisdom was among their number. 8 
 
 EXCURSUS V. (p. 64). 
 GAMALIEL AND THE SCHOOL OF TUBINQEN. 
 
 I SHALL not often turn aside to meet what seem to me to be baseless objections ; but as 
 the name of Gamaliel will always be associated with that of St. Paul, it may be worth 
 while to do so for a moment in this instance. It seems, then, to me that this accusation 
 
 1 Philo's highest definition of faith is " a bettering in all things of the soul, which has cast 
 Itself for support on the Author of all things " (Z> Abraham, ii. 89). * Rmw.ns, i. 416. 
 
 Comp. Bom. v. 12 ; xi. 82 ; 1 Coi. vi. 2 ; 2 Cor. v. 4, &c., respectivelv. with Wisd. ii. 84; 
 L 8326 ; iii. 8 ; U. 16, &c. But see supra, p. 007.
 
 GAMALIEL AND THE SCHOOL OF TtJBINGEST. 70S 
 
 of St. Luke ia founded on a mass of errors. 1 Gamaliel, like St. Paul, was a Pharisee, the 
 son of Pharisees, and it was doubtless Ms nobleness and candour of disposition which 
 Impressed the Apostle with the better elements of Pharisaism. The fiery zeal of a 
 youthful Tarsian may have led him for a time to adopt the more violent tone of the 
 school of Sharamai, and yet might have been very far from obliterating the effects of 
 previous teaching. But, in point of fact, even a Hillel and a Gamaliel, in spite of their 
 general mildness, would have described themselves without hesitation as " exceedingly 
 zealous for the traditions of the fathers." Their concessions to expediency were either 
 concessions in their conduct to the heathen, or concessions to necessity and the general 
 interest. 2 The difference between the two Pharisaic schools was not nearly so wide as 
 that between the two great Jewish sects. The Pharisees were beyond all question allied 
 to the Zealots in political sympathies, while the Sadducees had natural affinities with 
 the Herodians. In what we know of Gamaliel, we trace a spirit, a tone, a point of view, 
 which eminently resembles that of his far greater pupil. His decision that soldiers in 
 war time, and all people engaged in works of mercy, duty, or necessity, might be 
 exempted from the more stringent Sabbatical traditions; his concession of rights of 
 gleaning to the poorer brethren; 8 his direction that the "Peace be with you" 
 should be addressed even to pagans on then- feast days 4 are all exactly analogous to the 
 known sentiments of the Apostle ; while the just, humane, and liberal regulations which 
 he laid down to prevent the unfairness of husbands towards divorced wives, and of dis- 
 obedient children towards their mothers, are identical in spirit to those which St. Paul 
 applies to similar subjects. The story that he bathed in a bath at Ptolemais which was 
 adorned with a statue of Aphrodite, and answered the reproaches of a min with the 
 remark that the statue had evidently been made for the bath, and not the bath for the 
 statue, belongs not to him but to his grandson, with whom he is perpetually con- 
 fused. 5 To the latter is also due the wise and kindly rule of burying the dead in 
 simple white linen, instead of in costly robes. Yet so close was the unity of 
 doctrine which bound together the successive hereditary presidents of the school of 
 Hillel, that we may look on any anecdote of the younger Gamaliel as fairly illustrative 
 of the views of the elder; and the ai-gument of Gamaliel II., that, if he were to 
 be excluded from the enjoyment of every place which had been defiled by the 
 rights of idolatry, he would not be able to find any place to live in at all, reminds 
 us of more than one passage in St. Paul's argument about meats offered to idols. 
 We may therefore regard it as a significant fact that, in spite of these liberal 
 principles, Gamaliel of Jabue sanctioned the use of the "curse against heretics," 6 
 
 1 The precept, of Gamaliel, " Get thee a teacher, eschew that which is doubtful, and do not 
 multiply uncertain tithes " (Pirke Abh6tJi,l,lS\, might have emanated from Shammai himself. In 
 fact, the difference between the two schools existed far more in infinitesimal details than in 
 fundamental principles. 
 
 * nViyn pjrn ^sm f or the good order of the world," Gittin, v. 5. (Derenbourg, Palestine, p. 
 189.) It is difficult, however, to account for Gamaliel I. having a figure engraved on his seal if that 
 story belongs to him. 
 
 3 Sse Dr. Ginsburg, s. v., in Kltto's Cyd., and Gratz, Gesck. d. Juden, ill. 274, sq. ; Jost, Gesck. 
 d. Judenthums, i. 281 ; Frankel, Hodegsttea in MiscJinam, 67 ; Derenbourg, Palestine, 239, sq. 
 
 * In Jer. Btracli6th, ix. (Schwab, p. 159), there is a story that meeting a beautiful Pagan woman 
 he uttered to her the ShalOm, alaikh. " Is it possible ? " is the amazed remark of the Gemara. " Did 
 not E. Zeira say, on the authority of R. Jos6 bar E. Hanina, and B. Ba or R. Hiya, on the authority 
 of E. Jochanan, that one ought not to express admiration for Pagans 1 " (a rule based on a sort of 
 jeu des mots derived from Deut. rii. 3). The answer is that Gamaliel only admired her as he might 
 have admired a beautiful horse or camel, exclaiming that Jehovah had made beautiful things in the 
 universe. The Talmudist then proceeds to excuse Gamaliel for the enormity of looking at a woman, 
 on the ground that it could only have been unexpectedly in a narrow street. 
 
 5 Abhdda Zara, f. 44, 2. Conybeare and Howsoa, Krenkel, Lewin, and others, confuse the 
 anecdotes of this Gamaliel (Borzaken, or " the Elder ") and Gamaliel II., as also does Otho, Lex, 
 Rabb., a. v. (Etheridge, Hebr. Lit., p. 45). 
 
 6 O'yon roil Berachdth, f. 28, 2. Its first sentence is, " Let there be no hope to them that 
 apostatize from the true religion ; and let heretics (minim), how many soever they be, all perish xa 
 la a moment." The actual author of this prayer was Samuel the Little (Ha-faWn). (Gratz, iv. 105
 
 706 APPEWDIX. 
 
 which fa given twelfth hi order in the Shemone Eere.* It in probable that his grand- 
 father, who was equally liberal in many of his sentiments, would yet have been 
 perfectly willing to authorise a similar prayer. His sense of expediency was so little 
 identical with any indifference to pure Mosaism, that when he died It was said that the 
 purity and righteousness of Pharisaism was removed, and the glory of the Law ceased. 8 
 Neither, then, in St. Paul's original zeal for the oral and written Law, nor in the liber- 
 ality of hia subsequent views and decisions about Mosaic observances, do we find any 
 reason whatever to doubt the statement of his relation to Gamaliel, but on the contrary 
 we find it confirmed by many minute and, at first sight, counter indications. And as far 
 as the speech of Gamaliel is concerned, it seems probable that his toleration would have 
 had decided limits. As it is by no means clear that he did not afterwa/rds sanction the 
 attempt to suppress the Christians, so it is by no means improbable that up to this time 
 even Saul of Tarsus, had he been present at the debate, might have coincided with the 
 half-tolerant, but also half-contemptuous, views of his great teacher. Although the 
 Pharisees, in their deadly opposition to the Sadducees, were always ready to look with 
 satisfaction on that one part of Christianity which rested on the belief in the Resurrec- 
 tion, the events of the next few months greatly altered the general relations of the 
 Church, not only towards them, but also towards the entire body of the Jewish people, 
 of whom, up to this time, a great multitude had welcomed its early manifestations with 
 astonishment and joy. 
 
 EXCURSUS VL (p, 93). 
 CAPITAI. PUNISHMENTS : THE STONIHQ o* ST. STKPHEW. 
 
 GENERALLY speaking the Sanhedrin were not a sanguinary tribunal. They shuddered 
 at the necessity of bloodshed, and tried to obviate its necessity by innumerable regula- 
 tions. So great was their horror at putting an Israelite to death, that any means of 
 avoiding it seemed desirable. Simeon Ben Shatach is the only conspicuous Rabbi who, 
 for his cruelty in deciding causes, is said " to have had hot hands." Josephus expressly 
 marks it as disgraceful to the Sadducees that, unlike the rest of their nation, they were 
 savage in their punishments. "We are told that if even once in seven years Rabbi 
 Eleazar Ben Azariah went so far as to say that if once hi seventy years a Sanhedrin 
 inflicted capital punishment it deserved the opprobrious title of "sanguinary." 1 The 
 migration of the Sanhedrin forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, from their 
 
 434.) The notion that this Samuel the Less (for his name is, perhaps, given to distinguish him from 
 the prophet Samnel : cf. o ntyas, as the title of Herod, Life of Christ, i., p. 48, n.) has anything to 
 do with Saul (Shaftl being a contraction of Shamnel, and Paulas being supposed to mean the little ; 
 Alting, Schilo, iv. 28 ; Basnage, Bk. III. 1., pp. 12, 13) is an absurdity hardly worthy of passing 
 notice. (Eisenmeng. Entd. JuAenth., 1L 107 ; Buxtorf, Lex. Talm., 1,201, 2,662 ; Wolf, Bibl. Hebr., 
 i. 1,119.) 
 
 1 In point of fact, there Is a considerable amount of obscurity about this prayer. The Shemone- 
 eert or cimida is a prayer recited alter the Shema. It is named from the "eighteen blessings," or 
 sections, of which it is composed, and is recited three times a day, or oftener on feast days. It 
 actually contains nineteen sections, the 12th, which is numbered 11 bit, being the celebrated iirfcotA 
 %0-Afinfm, or prayer against the minim, or heretics. Now, in Jtr. BeraeMth, ch. iv., 8, we are 
 expressly told that this prayer was added to the Amida at Jabne, and therefor* by Gamaliel II. in 
 the second century, long after the destruction of Jerusalem (Cahen, Hist, de la Priere, p. 30, sq. ; 
 and Megittah, f. 17, 2)i How this can be reconciled with the ascerted death of Samuel the Little, 
 before the destruction of Jerusalem, is only one of the confusions and contradictions which meet us 
 in every stage of Talmndic literature. Hallel (quoted by Schwab) says that the prayer is sometimes 
 called the Messing (by euphemism) of the BadduceeB," and is intended as a protest of the Pharisees 
 against the mixture of temporising and severity by which the Sadducees ruined their country. 
 Chronology shows this to bo futile. 
 
 SotaA, f. 49, 1. He, or bin grandson, are cited with high respect for various minute decisions 
 la the BeracMth. (See Schwab's TraiU des BeraeMth, pp. 1, 11, 12, Ac.) 
 X oenoft, t 7, 1 ; Derenbourg, p. 901.
 
 POWER Of THE SANHEDRIN. 707 
 
 " Hall of Squares," which was beside the great Court of the Temple to th Chamijdth or 
 "shops" which were under two cedars on the Mount of Olives, is expressly stated to 
 have been due to their desire to get to a greater distance from the sacred precincts, in 
 order that they might not feel it so sternly incumbent upon them to inflict the strict 
 punishmentB of the Law.i But if, after strict and solemn voting, a man was condemned 
 to any of the four capital punishments, the utmost care was taken to remove from the 
 punishment all semblance of vindictive haste. In the case of a convicted blasphemer 
 the death assigned by the Law was stoning, and in Leviticus it is ordained that the 
 witnesses should lay their hands upon his head, and all the congregation should stone 
 him. 2 In Deuteronomy we read the further regulations that the hand of the witnesses 
 was first to be upon him 3 and this horrible duty was one of the deterrents from false 
 or frivolous accusation. But if we may accept the authority of the Mishna, the process 
 was an elaborate one. On pronunciation of the sentence the condemned was handed 
 over to the Shotertm or Lictors of the Sanhedrin, and led to the place of execution. An 
 official stood at the door of the Judgment Hall 4 holding in hia hand a handkerchief ; a 
 second on horseback was stationed just in sight of the first, and if, even at the last 
 moment, any witness could testify to the innocence of the condemned, the first 
 shook his handkerchief, and the second galloped at full speed to bring back the 
 accused, who was himself allowed to be led back as many as four or five times if' 
 he could adduce a single solid proof in his own favour. Failing this he was led on 
 with a herald preceding him, who proclaimed his name, his crime, and the witnesses on, 
 whose testimony he had been condemned. At ten paces' distance from the place of 
 death he was bidden to confess, because Jewish no less than Roman law valued the 
 certainty derived from the "confitentem reum," and the Jews deduced from the story 
 of Achan that hia punishment would be, as regards the future world, a sufficiently 
 complete expiation of his crime. * A bitter draught containing a grain of frankincense 
 was then given him to stupefy his senses and take away the edge of terror. At four 
 cubits' distance from the fatal spot he was stripped bare of bis upper garments, and 
 according to the older and simpler plan of procedure was then stoned, the witnesses 
 simultaneously hurling the first stones. 6 But the later custom seems to have been more 
 elaborate. The place of execution 7 was twelve feet high, and one of the witnesses flung 
 the criminal down, back foremost, from the top, the other immediately hurling a heavy 
 stone upon his chest. If this failed to produce death, all who were present joined in 
 stoning him, and his body was subsequently hung by the hands on a tree until the fall of 
 evening. 8 
 
 "We may be quite sure that none of these elaborate prescriptions were followed in the 
 martyrdom of Stephen. He was murdered in one of those sudden outbiirsts of fury to 
 which on more than one occasion the life of our Lord had been nearly sacrificed. 
 
 EXCURSUS VIL (p. 94). 
 
 THE POWEB THB SANHBDBTJf TO INTLIOT DEATH. 
 
 A QTJBSTIOW has often been raised how the Sanhedrin at this time had the power of 
 inflicting death at all T The well-known passage of St. John, " It is not lawful for us 
 
 * The ZMnt Kenasdth or punitive decisions (AVMda Zara, 18, 2 ; Shabbath, t 15, 1). Rashi 
 Inferred from Dent. xvii. 10, that minor Sanhedrins outside Jerusalem could bot pronounce capital 
 wntences (IHnt NepJiatMth) unless the greater Sanhedrin was seated on the Temple Mount. 
 
 Lev. xxiv. 14. Deut. xvii. 7. 
 
 * All these particulars, except when otherwise stated, I derive from the tract Sanhedrin of th 
 Mishna, cap. vi. (Surenhus. ii., p. 234, scqq.) 
 
 * Ta.nchv.inn, t. 39, 3 ; Sehottg. Her. H&r. ad Acts vtt. 58. 
 
 * TcHKhwmo, M mpr. ; Deut. xvii 7. Called rfrpon lt> Deut, xxl. M, 8J.
 
 708 APPENDIX. 
 
 to put any man to death," has been asserted to bo in direct contradiction to the narra- 
 tive. The explanation of that passage to mean "it is not lawful at the time of the 
 feast " is both philologically and historically untenable, and there seems to be little 
 doubt that there is truth in the statement of the Talmud that about forty years a 
 well-known vague term in Jewish writers before the fall of Jerusalem, the Sanhedriu 
 had relinquished it would be truer to say, had been deprived of the power of death. 1 
 That deprivation was due to the direct interference of the Komans, who would not 
 extend the highest judicial functions to men so likely to abuse them for seditious ends. 
 It is, perhaps, only an attempt of the Rabbis to veil their national humiliation, when 
 they attribute the diminished glories of their "House of Judgment" to thek own 
 leniency ; to their reluctance to shed the blood of a descendant of Abraham ; to the 
 consequent increase of crimes ; and to the migration from the Hall of Squares to the 
 " Shops " of the Benl Hanan. But, on the other hand, we know the astute connivance 
 which the Romans were always ready to extend to acts which were due to religious 
 excitement and not to civil rebellion. 2 They rarely interfered with national superstitions. 
 Even Pilate, though by no means void of a sense of justice, had been quite willing to 
 hand over Jesus to any extreme of ecclesiastical vengeance, provided only that the direct 
 responsibility did not fall upon himself. Further than this, there is every reason to 
 believe that St. Stephen's martyrdom finds its counterpart in the murder of James, the 
 Lord's brother. That was brought about by the younger Hanan during a High Priest- 
 hood of only three months' duration, in which he seized his opportunity, and availed 
 himself of a brief interregnum which followed on the death of Festus, and preceded the 
 arrival of his successor Albinus. It was at just such an interregnum that the death of 
 Stephen is believed to have taken place. Pontius Pilate had been sent to Home by his 
 official chief, Vitellius, the Prsefect of Syria, to answer to the Emperor for the com- 
 plaints of cruelty and insult brought against him by the inhabitants of every division 
 of his Procuratorship. Before his arrival the Emperor Tiberius died. An event of this 
 magnitude relaxed the sternness of government in every province of the Empire, 3 and 
 though Vitellius appointed Marcellus as a brief temporary locum tenens until the arrival 
 of Manillas, who was appointed Procurator by Gaius, 4 the Sanhedrin may have met 
 while there was no Procurator at all, and in any case would have found it easy to 
 persuade a substitute like Marcellus, or a new-comer like Marullus, that it would bs 
 useless to inquire into a mere riot which had ended in the richly deserved punishment 
 of a blaspheming Hellenist. In short, we find that the possibility of tumultuous 
 outbreaks which might end in a death by stoning is constantly recognised in the New 
 Testament ; 5 and it would have been easy for the Sanhedrin to represent the stoning of 
 St. Stephen in such a light. 
 
 EXCURSUS VHI. (p. 101). 
 DAMASCUS UNDEB HARETH. 
 
 HARETH was the father-in-law of Herod Antipas, and from the day when the weakness 
 of that miserable prince had beguiled him into his connexion, at once adulterous and 
 
 1 Alh&dah Zara, f. 8, 2. 
 
 * The policy of Rome towards her Oriental subjects was a policy of contemptuous tolerance in 
 all matters that affected the local cult. 
 
 s That there was at this very time a special desire to conciliate the Jews, who had been so much 
 exasperated by the cruelties of Pilate, is clear from the circumstance that Vitellius, after a magnifi- 
 cent reception at Jerusalem, had just restored to the Jews the custody of the pontifical vestments 
 which since the days of Herod the Great had been kept in the Tower of Antonia (Jos. Antt. xv. 11, 
 4; xviii. 4, 2). The privilege was again forfeited, and again restored to them by Claudius, at the 
 request of Agrippa II. (id. xx. 1, 2). The power of inflicting minor punishments seems always to 
 have rested with the Jews, as it does with many religious communities of raias, even under the 
 tyranny of Turkish misrule (Renan, Les Ap6tres.f. 144). * Jos. Antt. rviii. 6, 10 (cf. 4, 2). 
 
 s John viii. 59 ; x. 81-33 ; Matt, xxiii. 87 ; Acts v. 26. See Orig. ad African. 14, o&uA 
 Sk-rdsworth,
 
 SAtfl, IN AKABIA. 709 
 
 incestuous, with Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, Hareth had been the implacable 
 foe of the Tetrarch of Galilee. Their quarrel had ended in a battle, in which the 
 troops of Hareth won a signal victory. After this defeat, in which the Jews saw a 
 retribution for the murder of John the Baptist, 1 Antipas applied to the Emperor 
 Tiberius, who sent Vitellius to chastise the audacious Emir who had dared to defeat an 
 ally of Rome. But when Vitellius had reached Jerusalem, he heard the news of the 
 death of Tiberius. The death of a Roman emperor often involved so immense a change 
 of policy, that Vitellius did not venture, without fresh instructions, to renew the war. 
 The details of what followed have not been preserved. That Hareth ventured to seize 
 Damascus is improbable. Vitellius was too vigorous a legate, and the Arab had too 
 wholesome a dread of imperial Rome, to venture on so daring an act of rebellion. On 
 the other hand, it is not impossible that the Emperor Gaius who was fond of dis- 
 tributing kingdoms among princes whom he favoured, 2 and whose mind was poisoned 
 against Antipas by his friend and minion Agrippa I. should have given back to Hareth 
 a town which in old days had belonged to the Nabathzean dynasty. 3 The conjecture 
 receives some independent confirmation. Coins of Damascus are found which bear the 
 image of Augustus, of Tiberius, and again of Nero, but none which bear that of Gaius 
 or of Claudius. This would lead us to infer that during these reigns Damascus waa 
 subject to a local sway. 4 
 
 EXCURSUS EX. (p. 120). 
 SAUL IN ABABIA. 
 
 FEW geographical terms are more vaguely used by ancient writers than "Arabia," and 
 some have seen the explanation of St. Luke's silence about the retirement of St. Paul, in 
 the possibility that he may scarcely have gone beyond the immediate region of Damascus. 
 Justin Martyr challenges Trypho to deny that Damascus " belongs and did belong to 
 Arabia, though now it has been assigned to what is called Syrophcenicia." Some 
 shadow of probability may be, perhaps, given to the view that St. Paul did not travel far 
 from Syria, because the Arabic translator of the Epistle to the Galatians renders the 
 clause in GaL i. 17, &c., "Immediately I went to El Belka ; " and in GaL iv. 25, mis- 
 taking the meaning of the word <rua-Toi\ei (which means "answers to," "corresponds 
 with," "falls under the same row with"), he says that "Mount Sinai or El Belka is 
 contiguous to Jerusalem." 5 But since Sinai is certainly not in the El Belka with which 
 alone we have any acquaintance namely, the region to the north and east of the Dead 
 Sea this curious version does not seem worthy of any further notice. Doubtless, in the 
 then disturbed and fluctuating relations between the Roman Empire and the various Eastern 
 principalities, St. Paul might have found himself far beyond the range of interruption 
 by taking but a short journey from the neighbourhood of Damascus. 
 
 But is it not more probable that when St. Paul speaks of his visit to Arabia, he means 
 Arabia in that Hebrew sense in which the word would be understood by the majority of 
 his readers ? We cannot, indeed, accept the proof of his familiarity with these regions 
 which is derived from the reading of our Received text, " for this Hagar is Mount Sinai 
 in Arabia," and from the supposition that Hagar was a local name for the mountain itself. 6 
 
 i Jos. Antt. xviii. 5, 1, 2. 
 
 Thus in A.D. 38 he gave Ituwea to Soheym ; Lesser Armenia to Cotys ; part of Thrace to 
 Rhsemetalces ; Pontius, &c., to Polemo II. (Dion Cass. lix. 12). KeLm thinks that Aretas may have 
 had a sort of partial jurisdiction in Damascus. 
 
 Jo3. Antt. xiii. 5, 2, 3 ; Wieseler, Chron. des Apost. ZeitdU. 174. 
 
 * Wieseler, in his article on Aretas in Herzog's Encycl., refers to Mioiinet, p. 204, as his authority 
 for the existence of a coin of Aretas, which bears the date 101 (A.D.). Now, if this date refer to th 
 Pompeian eia, the coin would belong to A.D. 37 38, about the very time in which Saul's mission to 
 Damascus took place. 9 Lightfoot, GalcUians, p. 81. * Gal. iv. 25.
 
 710 
 
 APPXHDIZ. 
 
 For the true reading of that verse seems to be, "for Sinai i> a mountain in Arabia ; " 
 and, as Dr. Lightfoot has shown, there is no adequate authority for the assertion perhaps 
 originally a mistake of St. Chrysostom that Mount Sinai was ever called Hagar. More- 
 over, it is doubtful whether, even by way of allegoric paronomasia, St. Paul would have 
 identified Hagwr, " a wanderer," with chadjar, " a stone ; " especially since Philo, who 
 also has an allegory about Hagar and Sarah, had already extracted a moral meaning 
 from the correct derivation. But setting this ancient argument aside, nothing can seem 
 more natural than that St. Paul, possibly already something of a fugitive, almost certainly 
 a sufferer in health and mind, driven by an imperious instinct to seek for solitude, should 
 have turned his lonely steps to a region where he would at once be safe, and unburdened, 
 and alone with God. 
 
 EXCURSUS X. (p. 126). 
 ST. PAUL'S " STAKB TS TEX FLESH." 
 
 THERE are two main passages on which our inferences about the "stake in the flesh" 
 must be founded, and the impression which they leave is only strengthened by more 
 isolated allusions. These two passages, to give them in their chronological order, are : 
 2 Cor. xii. 1 10 J and Gal. iv. ; 2 and I translate them in all their ruggedness, and the 
 interchanges of thought which render it almost impossible to explain the rapid transition 
 of their causal connexions. 
 
 i. The first of them runs as follows : After showing that, however weak and 
 unworthy he may be, he has yet laboured and suffered more than "the super-pre-eminent 
 Apostles, " a boastf ulness the very semblance of which he loathes, but which, again and 
 again, he says has been forced upon him by the intrigues and slanders of interested 
 opponents he mentions his perilous escape from Damascus, which had made a deep 
 impression on his memory, and then continues : " Boasting, evidently, is not expedient 
 for me ; for I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. 3 I know a man in Christ 
 fourteen years ago (whether in the body I know not, or whether out of the body I know 
 not : God knoweth) caught up, such a one as far as the third heaven. And I know 
 guch a man (whether in the body, or apart 4 from the body, I know not : God knoweth) 
 that he was caught up into Paradise and heard unutterable things which it is not 
 lawful for man to speak. About such a one I will boast ; but about myself I will not 
 boast except in mine infirmities. For if I should wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for 
 I shall speak the truth ; but I forbear, that no one may reckon about me more than what 
 he seeth me or heareth anything from me. And, that I may not be puffed up by this 
 abundance of revelations, there was given me a stake in the flesh an angel of Satan 5 that 
 it may buffet me that I may not be puffed up. For this, thrice did I entreat the Lord 
 that it might depart from me. And He hath said to me : My grace sufficeth for thee ; 
 for power is being perfected in weakness. 6 Most gladly, then, rather will I boast in my 
 infirmities, that the power of Christ may spread its tent over me. Therefore, I am 
 content in infirmities, in insults, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's 
 sake, for when I am weak then I am powerful."? 
 
 ii. The other passage is Gal. iv. 12 16. St. Paul has been vehemently urging the 
 Galatians not to sink to the low level of their previous bondage from the freedom of the 
 Gospel, and in the midst of his reasonings and exhortations he inserts this tendei 
 appeal : 
 
 1 Written not earlier than the autumn of A.D. 57. 
 
 * Written perhaps in the spring of A.D. 68. 
 
 The reading of this verse is extremely doubtful ; v. supra, ad TJoo. 
 
 <KS, B, D, B, which is more likely to have been altered into the lurk of the previous venw 
 >. * Of. 1 Oor. r. *. Omit pov fa, A, B, D, F. O). * Cor. xiL 119
 
 85. PAUL'S "STAKE IH THE FLESH. 711 
 
 " Become as I am, for I too have become as you, brethren, I beseech you. In no 
 respect did ye wrong me. Yea, ye know that because of infirmity of the flesh I preached 
 to you the first time, and your temptation in my flesh a ye despised not nor loathed, but 
 as an angel of God ye received me, as Christ Jesus. What, then, was your self -congratu- 
 lation ? For I bear you witness that, if possible, ye dug out your eyes 2 and gave them 
 me. So, have I become your enemy by telling you the truth ? " 
 
 iii. The most prominent alhuiona to the same bodily affliction are Gal. vi. 17 : 
 " Henceforth let no man trouble me, for I carry in my body the brands of Jesus ; " s 
 2 Cor. iv. 10: "Always bearing about in the body the putting to death of the Lord 
 Jesus ; " and perhaps indirectly, Col. i. 24 : " Now I rejoice 4 in my sufferings for you, 
 and I supplement in Christ's stead the deficiences of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh 
 for His body which is the Church." When, too, we remember that the word for "stake" 
 is only a more contemptuous form of the word for "cross," 5 there may be a further 
 allusion to this special trial in the words, "I have been crucified with Christ." 6 
 
 Now, from the first of these passages we see that St. Paul, so far from boasting of 
 exceptional revelations, will only mention them because they are connected with infirm- 
 ities so painful as to render it ridiculous as well as sinful for him to boast at all, unless 
 he might boast that his very weakness was but a more signal proof of that strength of 
 Christ which had enabled him to do and to suffer more than the very chiefest Apostles. 
 
 We gather that his trial was something agonising, or it would not be called a stake 
 In the flesh ;7 mysterious in its nature, or it would not be described as an angel of Satan ; 
 intermittent, as is implied in the word "buffet," and as is also apparent from various 
 special paroxysms to which St. Paul alludes ; and a direct consequence of, or at any rate 
 intimately connected with, his most exalted moments of revelation and ecstasy. 
 
 y. From the second passage, we have the additional particulars, that it was in con- 
 sequence of some sharp attack of his malady that he had been detained in Galatia ; that 
 this malady was of such a nature as to form an actual trial to the Galatians, and 
 naturally dispose them to look on him with contempt, if not with positive loathing ; but 
 that they had so completely triumphed over this feeling as to receive him with almost 
 divine respect, and that they had so congratulated themselves on his visit as to have been 
 ready, had it been possible, to dig out their very eyee and give them to their suffering 
 teacher. 
 
 * The other references confirm these conclusions. In one of them we learn that 
 St. Paul looked on his physical infirmities as sacred stigmata by which Jesus had marked 
 him out as His slave, that he might be secured from molestation ; 3 and in the others 
 that he regarded Ms living death as a sort of continuation of his Lord's crucifixion, and a 
 supplement to those sufferings for the sake of His Church, in which Christ allowed His 
 servants to participate by taking up their cross and following after Him for the service 
 of mankind.' 
 
 Now these passages at once exclude nine-tenths of the conjectures which have been so 
 freely hazarded, and which could not have been hazarded at all by those who had care- 
 fully considered the conditions of the question. Many of these conjectures would not 
 have even deserved a passing mention if they had not, on the one haad, possessed a 
 certain archaeological interest as belonging to the history of exegesis, and on the other 
 
 1 The true reading is rov irtipoafiMv v^Siv ev rij cropxt 
 
 6 Gal. U. 20, Xpicrnp arvve<TTavptaiuu.. This epistle is full of the "cross," and was written with 
 vivid reminiscence (at least) of the "stake." The allusion of 1 Thess. ii. 18, "but Sstan hindered 
 *>" is tao vague to be referred with any special probability to this affliction. 
 
 7 * Ax<w8a.i KOI oxoAowef bSvvcu; crr^tau-oinji 810 TO ofu (Artemid. iii. 83, Meyer); (of. Num. xudli. 
 66 ; Josh, xxiii. 13 ; Ezek. xxviii. 24 ; oxdAoii trucpias, Hos. IL 6 ; LXX.). Hence perhaps the 
 tendering " tkom." Gal. vi. 17. 2 Cor. iv. 10 ; CoL i. 24 ; PhlL til. 10 ; Gal. IL 20.
 
 712 JLPPENDIX. 
 
 brought to light some fragments of old tradition, or pointed to certain features in the 
 character of the Apostle. 
 
 1. It ia, for histauce, abundantly clear that the stake in the flesh was nothing of a 
 spiritual nature. If we find such men aa Jean Gerson, 1 and Luther, and Calvin more or 
 less confidently deciding that the expression alludes to high spii~itual temptations, such as 
 shrinking from his duties as an Apostle, tormenting doubts, and stings of conscience for 
 the past, the decision is only interesting as a proof that these great and holy men could 
 so well sympathise with these painful hindrances. Yet such an explanation is wholly 
 impossible. It is excluded at once by the references to the infirmity as being of a 
 physical description. It is excluded also by St. Paul's character, and by the circumstances 
 of his life. There is much in his Epistles about weariness and sorrow, about fightings 
 without and fears within, but there ia not the faintest trace that the fire of zeal burnt 
 low, even at his moments of deepest discouragement, on the altar of his heart. Nor 
 could tormenting doubts have had much reality in the soul of one who had seen the risen 
 Christ, and to whom were constantly vouchsafed the vivid revelations which not only 
 solved the problems, but even guided the movements of his life. 1 
 
 2. And while we reject this view of some great Reformers, we must reject quite ;u> 
 decidedly the fixed opinion of the most eminent Roman Catholics. Vague expressions 
 in St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Gregory the Great seem to have led to an opinion that 
 the stake in the flesh was some form of c&rnal temptation. 3 This view, repeated by the 
 Venerable Bede, has been continued through Aquinas, Bellarmine, Cornelius a Lapide, 
 and other Roman Catholic writers down to Van Est in the sixteenth century, till it has 
 become almost a stereotyped part of the exegesis of the Roman Catholic Church. It is 
 due to the ambiguous rendering of " stake in the flesh," by stimulus carnis in the Vulgate 
 translation. Now, in this case also though we may observe with sorrowful interest 
 that the struggles of ascetics to subdue by unwise methods their carnal passions made 
 them glad to believe that even in the case of St. Paul such an infirmity was never wholly 
 removed we are nevertheless obliged on every ground to reject the explanation. It in 
 no way satisfies the general tenor of St. Paul's expressions. It is not an infirmity of 
 which by any possibility he could boast. We cannot conceive so revolting a stain on the 
 character of the Apostle as that which would be involved in the supposition that such 
 tendencies, if he had been cursed with them, should have so manifested themselves as to 
 be a hindrance to his ministry, and a source of loathing to those who heard him. It is 
 still more outrageous to imagine that such criminal concupiscence would have been 
 implanted or strengthened in him as a counterpoise to the spiritual pride which might 
 otherwise have resulted from special revelations. But besides all this, it fixes on the 
 memory of the Apostle a weakness from which we may well believe that he was most 
 exceptionally free. It is true that in the Epistle to the Romans he describes, in language 
 of intense emotion, the struggle in the soul between the good and the evil impulse the 
 Yetser ha-tdbh and Yetser ha-rd of which he had heard so much in the Beth Midrash of 
 his education. But it is idle to imagine that a strife so multiform must be referred to 
 one only of its manifestations. And we judge that St. Paul had very early subdued 
 every motion of rebellious sensuality, not only because no man who ever lived has 
 uttered words of loftier purity ; not only because upon his principles more than upon 
 those of any human moralist have been founded the very bases of Christian abstinence ; 
 not only because, to an extent unparalleled in literature, he has the high gift of being able 
 to brand the shamelessness of impurity without wounding the delicacy of Christian 
 thought ; 4 but more than this, because he is able to appeal to others that they should 
 learn by his example how possible it was to live by the rule of a holy continence. Ad' 
 
 1 Pernaps tne author, or part author, of the Imitatio Chriati. (See Compwiimi* oj tlw Devout 
 . J* 8, g.) * See Acts xvi. 7 ; xxi. 4 ; rrii. 17 ; Gal. U. 2, Ac. 
 
 * *reg. ttisuflL z. 8, 215, Bee the authorities in Tillemont, i. 222 (ed. 1608). 
 
 * Rom. i. ; Eph. v., &c.
 
 ST. PAUL'S "STAKE IN THE FLESH." 713 
 
 mitting as lie does to the Corinthians that it is better once for all to marry than to be 
 consumed by the slow inward fires of concupiscence, 1 he yet says to the unmarried, "it 
 is good for them to abide even as I," and that "he would that all men were even as he 
 himself." 8 There would be hypocrisy, and something worse than hypocrisy, in such 
 language if the "stake in the ilesh," which was still unremoved when he wrote the 
 Second Epistle, were that which this long succession of commentators have supposed 
 it to be. 3 
 
 3. It may, then, be regarded as certain that the stake in the flesh was some physical 
 malady ; for the fancy first mentioned by Chrysostom and adopted by the Greek fathers, 
 as well as by Hilary and Augustine, that it means the opposition and persecution with 
 which St. Paul met at the hands of Judaista, and perhaps especially of one leader among 
 them who was "a thorn in his side," 4 is too entirely at variance with the conditions of 
 the question to deserve further notice. But when, in our anxiety to understand and 
 sympathise as far as possible with the Apostle's personality, we still ask what was thia 
 malady, we are left in uncertainty. To omit the more futile conjectures, neither attacks of 
 headache nor earache mentioned traditionally by Tertullian and Jerome, nor the stone 
 which is the conjecture of Aquinas, present those features of external repulsiveness to 
 which the Apostle evidently alludes as the concomitants of his trial. The only con- 
 jectures which have much intrinsic probability are those which suppose him to have 
 Buffered from epilepsy or from ophthalmia. 
 
 4. There is something to be said in favour of the view that it was Epilepsy. It is 
 painful ; it is recurrent ; it opposes an immense difficulty to all exertion ; it may at any 
 tune cause a temporary suspension of work ; it is intensely humiliating to the person 
 who suffers from it ; it exercises a repellent effect on those who witness its distressing 
 manifestations. Moreover, it was regarded in ancient days as supernatural in its charac- 
 ter, was surrounded with superstitious fancies, and was directly connected by the Jews 
 with demoniacal possession. 5 Further, St. Paul himself connects his infirmity with his 
 trances and visions, and the soul of man is so constituted that any direct intercourse 
 with the unseen world even, in a lower order, any deep absorption in religious thought, 
 or paroxysms of religious feeling does tend to a violent disturbance of the nervous 
 organism. 6 It would be specially certain to act in this way in the case of one whoso 
 temperament was so emotional as was that of St. Paul. It is not impossible that the 
 prostration which followed his conversion may have been induced by the shock which 
 his system received from his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus ; and that 
 the recurrence of this shock, involving a chronic liability to its attacks, accompanied 
 that second trance in the Temple, which determined his future career as the Apostle of. 
 the Gentiles. Hi a third ecstasy happened fourteen years 7 before he wrote the Second 
 
 1 1 Cor. vii. 9, Kpeurow ya^o-at ) wvpovotfat. * 1 Cor. vii. 7, 8. 
 
 It is difficult to believe tliat 2 Cor. vii. 2 ; xl. 8 ; and 1 Thess. ii. 3 are intended to refute 
 charges which had been even brought against Paul himself. They may be intended to contrast hi/ 
 own conduct with that of other teachers, and indeed the first two passages do not necessarily refer 
 to unchastity at all. The axuSapa-ia. of 1 Thess. ii. 3 is explained, even by Chrysostom, of vile and 
 juggling arts ; and Olshausen, Ltiuemann, Alfprd, Ellicott, and others all suppose it to refer pri- 
 marily to at<rxpoKp5ui and similar impure motives. 
 
 * A special person may be indicated in 2 Cor. x. 7, 10, 11, 18 ; ad. 4, 20 ; and in Gal. i. 9 ; iii. 1 ; 
 Ti. 7, 12. 
 
 5 Morbus Com.itia.lis, ' Dion Cass. xlvi. S3 ; Cell. xix. 2. In Welsh it is called gwiahn Cltrisli, "the 
 rod of Christ," aud clefyd bendigaidd" blessed disease." A curious Celtic tradition to this effect is 
 preserved in the old Irish name for epilepsy, in gular Pail (Stokes, Old Irisli Glossary, p. 120; Aiic. 
 Laws of Ireland, iii. 506). Krenkel, in Hilgeufold's Zeitschr. xvi. (ii.) 233 244, notices the curious 
 fact that the evil omen of epilepsy was averted by spitting. Hence Plautus calls it the " morbus 
 qui sputatur" (Captiv. in. 4, 15; cf. Plin. H. N. x. 23, 33; xxviii. 4, 7). He connects this with 
 *f e'imxraTe (as though it meant " neither did ye spit ") of Gal. iv. 14. 
 
 6 The trances of Sokrates, the fits of Mohammed, accompanied by foaming at the mouth, and 
 followed by the sleep of exhaustion, the faiiitiugs and ecstasies of St. Bernard, St. Francis, and tit. 
 Catherine of Siena, have been adduced as parallels (Hausrath, pp. 52 56). Wo may add the cases of 
 George Fox, of Jacob Boehme, of Sweden borg, &c. 7 The " about " in the E. V. is interpolated. 
 
 24
 
 714 APPENDIX. 
 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, and therefore at some period during his second residence la 
 Tarsus. If we take the words, "thrice I besought the Lord," literally, we may then 
 further believe that it was at each of these recurrences of anguish upon the renewals of 
 special revelations that he had made his most earnest entreaty to be delivered from the 
 buffets of this angel of Satan ; and that it was only during, or after, his third and most 
 memorable vision that his Lord pointed out to him the meaning of the trial, and told 
 him that, though it could not be removed, he should be strengthened with grace sufficient 
 to enable him to bear it. 1 
 
 5. But even if this was the actual "stake in the flesh," there is the strongest reason 
 to believe that St. Paul suffered further from acute Ophthalmia, which also fulfils in every 
 particular the conditions of the problem. This, too, would have the advantage of following 
 the analogy of God's dealings, by being a trial not arbitrarily inflicted, but one which 
 might have resulted naturally or, to use the more exact term, let us say, providentially 
 from the circumstances through which Paul had passed. We know that he was 
 physically blinded by the glare of light which surrounded him when he saw the risen 
 Lord. The whole circumstances of that event the noonday journey under the fierce 
 Syrian sun, the blaze of light which outshone even that noonday brightness, and the 
 blindness which followed it would have been most likely to leave his eyes inflamed and 
 weak. His stay in the desert and in Damascus regions notorious for the prevalence of 
 this disease would have tended to develop the mischief when it had once been set up ; 
 and though we are never told in so many words that the Apostle suffered from defective 
 sight, there are yet so many undesigned coincidences of allusion all pointing in this direc- 
 tion, that we may regard it as an ascertained fact. Apart from the initial probability 
 that eyes which had once been so seriously affected would be liable to subsequent attacks 
 of disease, we have the following indications : (i.) When speaking of his infirmity to 
 the Galatians, St. Paul implies that it might well have rendered him an object of loathing ; 
 and this is pre-eminently the case with acute ophthalmia. The most distressing objects, 
 next to the lepers, which the traveller will ever see in the East those who will most 
 make him inclined to turn away his face with a shudder of pity and almost involuntary 
 disgust are precisely those who are the victims of this disease. 3 (ii.) And this would 
 [give a deeper pathos and meaning to the Apostle's testimony that the Galatians in the 
 first flush of their Gospel joy, when they looked on the preacher of those good tidings as 
 an angel of God, would, had it been possible, have dug out their eyes in order to 
 place them at the sufferer's service, (iii.) The term, " a stake in the flesh," would be 
 most appropriate to such a malady, because all who have been attacked with it know 
 that the image which it recalls most naturally is that of a sharp splinter run into the 
 eye. 3 (iv.) Moreover, it would be extremely likely to cause epileptic or other symptoms, 
 since in severe attacks it is often accompanied by cerebral disturbance, (v.) In spite of 
 the doubt which has been recently thrown on the commonly accepted meaning of the 
 expression which St. Paul uses to the Galatians, "Ye see in what large letters I write 
 to you with my own hand," it must at any rate be admitted that it suits well with the 
 hypothesis of a condition which rendered it painful and difficult to write at all. That 
 this was St. Paul's normal condition seems to result from his almost invariable practice 
 of employing an amanuensis, and only adding in autograph the few last words of greet- 
 ing or blessing, which were necessary for the identification of his letters in an age in 
 which religious forgeries were by no means unknown, (vi.) It is obvious, too, that an 
 ocular deformity, caused aa this had been, might well be compared to the brand fixed by 
 
 1 Compare the interesting parallels of Alfred and of St. Bernard. 
 
 When Dr. Lightfoot, who rejects this theory, says that " St. Paul's language implies some 
 more striking complaint," he is probably thinking of the milder forms of ophthalmia with which alone 
 we are familiar in England, and not of those virulent attacks which are but too common in Syria 
 And which make such terrible havoc of the human countenance. 
 
 * Alford's remark that ophthalmic disorders are not usually painful is singularly Tnigfaitnn.
 
 ON JEWISH SCOUKGINQS. 715 
 
 a master 6n hia slave, (vii.) Lastly, there is no other reasonable explanation of tha 
 circumstance that, when St. Paul had uttered an indignant answer to the High 
 Priest, and had been rebuked for it, he at once frankly offered his apology by 
 saying that "he had not recognised the speaker to have been the High Priest." Now, 
 considering the position of the High Priest as Nasi of the Sanhedrin, seated at the end 
 of the hall, with the Ab Beth Din on one side of him, and the Chacham on the other, 1 
 it is almost inconceivable that Paul should not have been aware of his rank if he had 
 not suffered from defective sight. All that his blurred vision took in was a white figure, 
 nor did he see this figure with sufficient clearness to be able to distinguish that the 
 overbearing tyrant was no less a person than the High Priest himself. 2 
 
 But if these conjectures are correct and to me they seem to be almost certain how im 
 mensely do they add to our conception of Paul's heroism ; how much do they heighten 
 the astonishment and admiration which we feel at all that he endured and all that he 
 accomplished ! This man, who almost single-handed carried the Gospel of Christ from 
 Damascus to Rome, was so great a sufferer from inflammation of the eyes that he was often 
 pitiable to look upon ; was unable to write except with pain, and in large letters ; was 
 liable to attacks of severe agony, accompanied at times with loss of consciousness. He 
 was so weak and ailing that under circumstances of danger he was personally helpless ; 
 that be had to be passively conducted from place to place ; that it was almost impossible 
 for him, I will not say only to preach, but even to get through the ordinary routine of 
 life without companions to guide, and protect, and lead him by the hand. 3 We can then 
 see how indispensable it was that St. Paul should have some " that ministered unto him ;" 
 how strongly he would feel the necessity of being always accompanied upon his missions 
 by faithful friends ; 4 how much anguish might lie in his remark that in his strong affec- 
 tion for the Thessalonians he was even ready for their sakes to part with his beloved 
 Timotheus, and to be left at Athens alone. 5 How close, then, and how tender would be 
 the bond of mutual gratitude and affection which would inevitably grow up under such 
 circumstances between himself and the little band of disciples by whom he was usually 
 accompanied ! With what deepened bitterness would he feel the cruelty of neglect "~ >v 
 ingratitude when, at his first answer, no man stood with him, but all forsook him * ' 
 
 EXCURSUS XI. (p. 127). 
 ON JEWISH SCOUBQINQS. 
 
 EVEN a single Jewish scourging might well entitle any man to be regarded as a martyr. 
 Thirty-nine blows were inflicted, unless, indeed, it was found that the strength of the 
 patient was too much exhausted to admit of his receiving the full number. Eoth of his 
 hands were tied to what is sometimes called a column, but which was in reality a stake a 
 
 1 Acts xxiii. 5. It is possible that the presence of Roman officials disturbed this order. 
 
 * The expression " fixing an earnest gaze " (dTei/iVa?) has often been adduced as yet another sign 
 that St. Paul's eyesight was weak, and therefore that he had acquired the intent stare so common 
 in short-sighted people. This argument is, however, untenable, since the word is a favourite one 
 with St. Luke (Acts xiii. 9 ; xxiii. 1) and is applied not only to St. Paul, but also to St. Peter, St. 
 Stephen, and even to whole bodies of men (Luke iv. 20 : xxii. 56 ; Acts i. 10 ; iii. 2 1 ; vL 15 ; 
 vii. 55). 
 
 3 Acts XViL 14, rov IIouXov efaire'oreeAav ot a&e\<j>ol; 15, oi S KafltOTai/ovres (Kaffierriavre^, E, G, II) 
 TOV UaOXov mayov ews 'Aflrji-coi'. These phrases seein more specific than those in Gen. xviii. 16: 
 Rom. XV. 24 (Trpoirfn<j>9rjv<u). 
 
 * Mr. Lewm (St. Paid, i. 189, third edition) was, I believe, the earliest to point out that these 
 passages bear on the question. They are not in themselves conclusive; but when we find the 
 Mine words used in Acts ix. 30 (to which Mr. Lewin does not refer), when we may well suppose that 
 a fresh attack had followed a fresh revelation, they not improbably point to some such state of 
 things aa that which I have inferred, * i Thess. iii. 1. 2 Tim. iv. IS.
 
 716 APPENDIX. 
 
 cubit and a half high. 1 The public officer then tore down his robe until his breast was 
 laid bare. The executioner stood on a stone behind the criminal. The scourge consisted 
 of two thongs, one of which was composed of four strands of calf -skin, and one of two 
 strands of ass's-skin, which passed through a hole in a handle. The executioner, who 
 was ordinarily the Chazzan of the synagogue, could thus shorten or lengthen them at will, 
 so as not to strike too low. 2 The prisoner bent to receive the blows, which were inflicted 
 with one hand, but with all the force of the striker, thirteen on the breast, thirteen on 
 the right, and thirteen on the left shoulder. While the punishment was going on, the 
 chief judge read aloud Deut. xxviii. 58, 59, " If thou wilt not observe to do all the words 
 of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful 
 name, the Lord thy God ; then the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful, and tlio 
 plagues of thy seed." He then read Deut. *\ 9, " Keep therefore the words of this 
 covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all ye do ; " and lastly, Ps. Ixxviii. 38, 39, 
 "But He, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity, and destroyed them not : yea, 
 many a time turned He His anger away, and did not stir up all His wrath." If the 
 punishment was not over by the tune that these three passages were read, they were again 
 repeated, and so timed as to end exactly with the punishment itself. Meanwhile a second 
 judge numbered the blows, and a third before each blow exclaimed " Hakkehu" (strike 
 him). All these particulars I take from the Treatise on Punishments (iron, Makkblh) in 
 the Mishna. 3 The severity of the pain may best be estimated by the brief addition : " If 
 the criminal die under the infliction, the executioner is not accounted guilty unless he gives 
 by mistake a single blow too many, in which case he is banished." 
 
 These facts have an interest far deeper than archaeological. They not only show how 
 awful were the trials which St. Paul had to endure, if such as these were hardly counted 
 worthy of narration amongst them, but also they illustrate to a singular degree the 
 minute scrupulosity which reigned through all Jewish observances. If, for instance, 
 only thirty-nine blows were inflicted instead of forty, it was not only, as is usually stated, 
 to avoid the possibility of error in the counting, but also (such at least is the reason as- 
 signed by Maimonides 4 ) because the Law says, "in number, forty," 5 not "forty in 
 number;" whence they concluded that they might assign a smaller but not a larger 
 number; and, perhaps, also because the word "thy brother "(^TIN) stands by Gematria 
 for thirty-nine. 6 Another assigned reason is that the passage of the Psalm (Ixxviii. 33, 39) 
 which was recited on the occasion ends at verse 39. The scourge was made partly of ox- 
 hide, partly of ass's-hide, for the astounding reasons that immediately after the passage 
 in Deuteronomy which orders the infliction of scourging follows the verse, " Thou shalt 
 not muzzle tho ox when he treadeth out the corn ; " ' and that in Isa. i. 3 we find, " The 
 ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib ; but Israel doth not know, my people 
 doth not consider." And thus it was thought right that those who do know should punish 
 him who does not know 1 8 The criminal was to receive only thirteen blows on his breast, 
 but twenty-six on his shoulders, because it was inferred from Deut. xxv. 2 that it was 
 only on the back that he was to be beaten, 9 " according to his fault," so that the back 
 
 1 Marble " columns," traditionally assigned to this purpose, are shown among the relics of 
 Roman Catholic churches ; e.g., the column of the flagellation in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ; 
 that of the scourging of St. Paul in S. I'aalo fuori de' Muri at Rome, &c. 
 
 * This was not strictly in accordance with Deut. xxv. 2 ; but it is strange to see how traditional 
 laxity was mingled by the Jews with unintelligent literalism. 
 
 * See Surenhusius, Mishna, voL iv., p. 280, seqq. 
 
 * Maimon. Sanliedr. 17. s D'3?T)N 7IDDQ3- 
 
 * Gematria (Geomatria) was one of the Kabbalistic methods of drawing interpretations from tho 
 numerical value of letters. I have given many instances in Rabbinic Exegesis (Expositor, May, 1877). 
 Thus because both Mashiach and nachash, " serpent," numerically represent 358, they inferred that 
 it was the Messiah who would bruise the serpent's head, &c. 
 
 1 Deut. xxv. 4. So Maimonides and 11. Ob. de Bartenora, ap. Surenhus. I. a. 
 
 * Buxtorf, Synag., p. 523. See also Praef. Libr. de Abbreviaturis. This was one of the numerous 
 instances hi which the Jews were more legal than tho Law itself. Similarly they extended the 
 Bab bath Into a Little Sabb&th, an hour before and an hour after the true Sabbath. They wern i>'>
 
 APOTHEOSIS OF ROMAN EMPEEORS. 717 
 
 received a double number of blows. The duty of reading aloud while the scourging 
 continued was also a minute inference from the words of Scripture. 1 
 
 A person was liable to this penalt7 if he wilfully violated any of the negative 
 precepts of the Law, and inadvertently any of those which, if deliberately transgressed, 
 involved the threat of excision from among the people, 2 or "death by the visitation 
 of God." 8 Under which of the numerous offences for which this punishment was 
 assigned Paul five times suffered, is by no means easy to say. Looking through them 
 all as enumerated in the treatise Makkoth, 4 and as expanded by Maimonides,* I cannot 
 find any of which the Apostle could possibly have been guilty. Where, however, the 
 will to punish him existed, the pretext would not long be wanting. His flagellation 
 must have been that minor but stil] terrible punishment which was called " the legal 
 scourging" or the "scourging of forty," 6 because the yet deadlier flagellation with rods, 
 which was called the Rabbinic, or the flagellation of contumacy, 7 was never inflicted 
 within the limits of the Holy Land, and is expressly stated to have been a beating to 
 death, 
 
 "When once an offender had been scourged this punishment was considered to remove 
 the danger of "cutting off," 3 and not only so, but it was regarded as leaving no igno- 
 miny behind it. The humane expression of Moses that forty stripes were not to be 
 exceeded " lest thy brother seem vile unto thee," was interpreted to mean that when 
 the punishment was over the sufferer was "restored to his integrity." So completely 
 was this the case that even the High Priest himself might be thus scourged, and 
 afterwards be "restored to his majesty." But although it was assumed that he would 
 suffer no ulterior injury, but rather be sure to win an inheritance in the future, yet, of 
 course, if he again offended he was again scourged. 9 It was even possible that for one 
 offence, if it involved the disobedience to several negative precepts, he might incur 
 several consecutive scourgings, care being only taken that he had sufficiently recovered 
 from the first before the next was inflicted. It is, therefore, by no means impossible, 
 or even improbable, that during those "many days" which Paul spent in Damascus La 
 trying to convince these passionate disputants, he may have incurred this torture 
 several times. 
 
 To have refused to undergo it by sheltering himself under the privilege of hie 
 Roman citizenship would have been to incur excommunication, and finally to have out 
 himself off from admission into the synagogues. 
 
 EXCURSUS XII. (p. 141). 
 APOTHEOSIS OF ROMAN EMPERORS. 
 
 THE early Emperors rather discouraged than stimulated this tendency to flatter them by 
 a premature apotheosis. If temples had been built to them in their lifetime, they had 
 always been to their " genius," or had at least been associated as at Athens with the 
 divinity of Rome. 10 Augustus, with these restrictions, had yielded to the earnest 
 
 bidden to have leaven In their houses daring the Passover, and they abstained from oven using the 
 word. Being forbidden swine's flesh, they avoid the word pig altogether, and call the pig nnw "lyi, 
 dablMr acheer, "the other thing," &c. (Godwyn, Moses and Aaron, viil. 12.) These are specimens 
 of the " hedge of the Law." 
 
 1 Deut. xrv. 4, imn mpa, "hlnc colligimus plagas inflgi debere inter legendum" (B. Ob. da 
 Bartenora, op. Snrenhus. MisTina, iv. 290). * p-fl. C'DttJ 'T3 niTO- 
 
 * III., 1, 2, 3, 4. s HUkoth Sanhedr. xviii., xix. Mdlkooth, nrVWIi or D'JWN- 
 
 7 nmo. See Carpzov. App. Crit., p. 589. The Greek rvfiironcr/ios . 8 2 Mace. hi. 35. 
 
 They quoted Lev. xviii. 29 ; 2 Mace. ill. 15. 
 
 10 Dion Cass. M. 20 ; Suet. Avg. 62. Though he knew that even Proconsuls had in the provinces 
 been honoured with temples, yet in " nullcl provincift, nisi comwvuni suo Jiowifieque nomiiiz recepit." 
 See the excellent chapter on " L'Apotheose Imperiale," in Boissier, La Religion Komaine, i. 123 205.
 
 718 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 entreaties of the people of Pergamop and Nicomedia, but had expressly forbidden the 
 Romans to take any part in this new cult. The base example spread rapidly in the 
 provinces, and though it is probable that in secret Augustus was not displeased at so 
 astonishing a proof of his own power, he affected to smile at it aa a man of the world. ' 
 In the frenzy of flattery, which is the disease of despotisms, it was but too likely that 
 this deification of a living man would creep from the provinces into Italy, and, in spite 
 of the assertion of Dion Cassius, that in Italy no one ventured to worship Augustus, it is 
 certain from the Corpus Inscriptionum that at his death there had sprung up, either by 
 his permission or without his interference, priests of Augustus at Pompeii, flamens at 
 Praeneste, an Augusteum at Pisa, and a Caesareum at Puteoli ; and this though it was 
 due far more to the religious degradation of the age than to the phrenetic pride of the 
 autocrat was made a source of bitter blame against him when he was dead. Even at 
 Rome, 2 though no temple rose to him till he was dead, yet we need go no further than 
 the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, 3 to show that he was commonly addressed as a 
 deity (numen) and a god, and that sacrifices were offered either to him or in his name ; 
 and, as appears from inscriptions, even at Rome, if they did not worship him directly, 
 they did so indirectly, by rearing altars to his virtues and his laws, and by inserting his 
 name among those of ancient deities in the songs of the Arval brothers. After his death 
 the worship was extended without limit. He was known universally as the Divine 
 Augustus, a phrase which became as common as feu le roi. 4 
 
 Tiberius, for political reasons, patronised, and even to a certain extent enforced, thia 
 new worship, but he also discouraged the extravagance which endeavoured to extend 
 divine honours to his living self, and by doing so he at once gratified his undisguised 
 cynicism and showed his strong good sense. But the tendency to apotheosis was in his 
 time firmly established. He was, as a matter of course, deified after his death, and his 
 panegyrist, Velleius Paterculus, tells us a story that when he was in the midst of a 
 campaign among the Chauci, a barbarian chief obtained permission to see him, and after 
 crossing the river in order to do so, gazed at him for a long time in silence, and 
 exclaiming that he had now seen the gods, 5 asked to touch his hand, and then pushed 
 off his boat towards the opposite shore, gazing to the last on the living deity. So rapidly 
 did the disease of adulation grow that, according to Suetonius, Domitian actually used 
 to begin his letters with the words "Dominus et Deus noster sic fieri jubet" "Thus 
 orders our Lord and God, Domitian 1 " 6 
 
 EXCURSUS XIII. (p. 185). 
 BURDENS LAID ON PBOSELYTES. 
 
 WE are told in the Talmud that if a Gentile wished to become a proselyte he was asked 
 his reasons for the wish, and informed that Israel is now afflicted, persecuted, and cast 
 down with all kinds of sufferings. If he replies that he knows it, and is not worthy to 
 share in their sufferings, he is admitted, but is told enough of the "light" and the 
 
 i Qidntil Instt. Orat.vL 3, 77. 
 
 Tac. Ann. L 10, " Nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum so templis et efflgie numinum per 
 flat/lines et sacerdotes coli vellet;" Aurel. Viet de Coesctr. 1, "Huicque, uti Deo, Romae provin- 
 ciisque omnibus, per urbes celeberrimas vivo mortuoque tenipla sacerdotes et collegia sacravere." 
 This seems, however, to be a positive mistake, though Pliny, Nat. Hist. xii. 19, mentions a temple 
 which Livia erected to him after his death (Divo) on the Palatine. Suetonius, a very high authority 
 on such a subject, says that he most obstinately refused this honour at Rome when it was pressed 
 upon him (Aug. 52, " In urbe quidem pertinacissime abstinuit hoc honore "). 
 
 See Bentley's note on Hor. Epp. II. i. 10 ; Virg. Eccl. i. 7 ; Georg. i. 42 ; Hor. Od. 1. 2, ; ilL 
 I, 1 ; iv. 5, 16 ; Ov. Trist. ii. 8, 9 ; iv. 9, 111. (Boissier, L 153.) 
 
 * Tac. Ann. 1, 73, " Caelum decretum." 
 
 Veil Patera U. 107, " Quos ante audiebam hodie vtdj deos." .fiuet. Domtt. 18.
 
 HATRED OF THE JEWS. 719 
 
 "heavy "precepts to warn him to desist in time if he is not sincere, since, as Rabh 
 Chelbo said, " proselytes are as injurious to Israel as a scab." He is told about the rules 
 respecting gleaning, and tithes, and the penalties attached to any transgression of the 
 Law, and is informed that henceforth if he desecrates the Sabbath he is liable to death 
 by stoning. If he submits he is circumcised, and even circumcised a second time, if 
 there were any neglect or carelessness in the first performance of the rite. After his 
 recovery he is immersed without delay by way of baptism, and two "disciples of the 
 wise" stand by him, repeating some of the "light" and "heavy" precepts. 1 In fact, a 
 Gentile could only become a proselyte by submitting himself to the whole yoke of 
 Eabbinism, the tyranny of archaic, puerile, and wearisome halach6th which year by year 
 was laid more heavily on Jewish shoulders by the pedantry of their theologio schools. It 
 was the fault of the Jews that the Gentiles usually concentrated their attention on mere 
 transient Jewish rites, and not on the eternal principles which God had revealed to them. 
 Can we be surprised at this when we find R. Eleazar Ben Chasmah saying that the rules 
 about birds' nests (kintm), and the " uncleanliness " of women (niddah) are essential* of 
 the Law I* 
 
 EXCURSUS XIV. (p. 186). 
 HATRED OF THE JEWS IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITT. 
 
 IT la at once curious and painful to perceive how strange was the mixture of curiosity, 
 disgust, and contempt, with which the Jews were regarded in pagan antiquity. From 
 Alanetho the Egyptian priest, with whom seems to have originated the calumny that 
 they were a nation of lepers, 3 down to Annaeua Floras, who brands them as an impious 
 race, 4 the references to them in secular literature are a tissue of absurd calumnies or 
 biting sarcasms. Chaeremon alludes to them as unclean and polluted; 5 Lysimachus, as 
 diseased and unsocial ; 6 Diodorus Siculus, as addicted to strange rites, and hostile to 
 strangers; 7 Apollonius Molon, a Greek rhetorician of the time of Cicero, as "godless 
 and misanthropical ; " 8 Cicero heaps scorn and indignation upon them in his Oration for 
 the extortionate and tyrannous Flaccus, 9 and in that on the consular provinces calls 
 them "a race born for slavery;" 10 Horace sneers at their proselytism, and their 
 circumcision, and their Sabbaths; 11 Seneca calls them "a most abandoned race;" 1 - 
 Martial, besides odious allusions to their national rite, pours his contempt on their 
 poverty, their mendicancy, their religion, and their low trade of selling sulphur matches 
 and buying broken glass, and he seems to be the first to originate the slander repeated 
 by Sir Thomas Browne in his "Popular Errors;" 13 Quintilian, gentle as he was, yet 
 admits a very bitter remark against the Jews and Moses; 14 Lucan alludes to their 
 " uncertain Deity ;" 15 Petronius Arbiter seems to think, as did many of the ancients, 
 that the Jews did not abhor, but actually worshipped the pig ; I$ Tacitus, in his History, 
 
 1 YtblmmOth, f. 47, 1. 
 
 * Pirke Abhdth, in. 28. In partial defence of the'Jews it may be said that some were Inclined to 
 become proselytes to avoid military service (Tac. Ann. ii. 85 ; Suet. Tib. 36 ; Jos. Antt. xviii. 3, 5), 
 others were Shechemite proselytes i.e., to marry rich Jewesses (id. xvi. 7, 6 ; xx. 7, 2, 3), others 
 were " Jion-proselytes "i.e., out of fear (2 Kings xvii. 26 ; Jos. H. J. ii. 17, 10). Herzog, KeaZ-Enc., 
 v. * Ap. Jos. c. Ap* i. 26. 
 
 Speaking of Pompey, Floras says, "Kt vidit illud grande impiae gentis arcanum." 
 
 Jos. c. Ap. 1. 82. Id. 1. 34. 1 Diod. Sic. xL Jos. e. Ap. U. 14. 
 
 Cic. pro. Flacco, xxviii. " De Prow. COM. v. " Hor. Sat. 1. iv. 143 ; v. 100 ; ix. 69. 
 Ap. Aug. De Civ. Del. vll. 80, " Usque eo sccleratissimae gentis consuetudo convaluit [the 
 
 Sabbathl ut," &c 
 
 i Mart. Ep. L 42 ; xii. 30, 85, 57 ; Iv. 4 ; vii. 82 ; xl. 94, 1. 4. Cf. Stat. Silv. 1. 6. The relation of 
 the Herods to the Caesars had attracted a large share of attention to the Jews in the Imperial epoch. 
 Pers. v. 17 184 ; Juv. vi. 157. i* De Instt. Oro. iii. 7. 
 
 '* PiMrsal. ii. 593, " incerti Judaea Dei." 
 
 " Satirui. Biichler, p. 221, " Judaeua licet et POR*MM numen, adoreV &c, (Cf. Pint
 
 75SU APPENDIX. 
 
 reproaches them with gross sensuality, low cunning, and strong hatred of alt nations but 
 their own, and gives at full length, and with all gravity, the preposterous story about 
 their veneration for the ass. 1 In his Annals he speaks with equal horror and equal 
 ignorance of Jews and Christians, and considers that if the thousands of Jews who were 
 deported to Sardinia died it would bo a cheap loss ; 2 Juvenal flings scornful allusion at 
 their squalor, beggary, turbulence, superstition, cheatery, and idleness ; 3 Celsus abused 
 them as jugglers and vagabonds ; 4 Ammianus Marcellinus as " disgusting and noisy ; " 5 
 Kutilius Numatianus closes the long line of angry slanderers by a burst of abuse, in 
 which he characterises Judaea as a "lying slave-cage." 6 Jeremiah had bidden the Jews 
 to seek the peace of, and to pray for, the city of their captivity, "for in the peace 
 thereof shall ye have peace." 7 Better had it been for the ancient Jews if they had lived 
 in the spirit of that large advice. But the Gentiles were well aware that in the Jewish 
 synagogues there was an exception to the dead uniformity of the liomish Empire, and 
 that they and their customs were there treated with open and bitter scorn, which they 
 repaid tenfold. 8 
 
 EXCUESUS XV. (p. 186), 
 JUDGMENTS OF EARLY PAGAN WRITERS ON OHRISTIANITT. 
 
 SUETONIUS (died ciro. A.D. 110). 
 
 *' Judaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit" (Claud. 25).' 
 "Afflicti suppliciis Christiani genus hominum superstitionis novae et maleficae" 
 o, 16). 
 
 " Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis, ot eo tempore. 
 Judaea profocti rerum potirentur " (Fesp. 4). 
 
 TACITUS (Consul suffectus, A.D. 97). 
 
 "Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quaesitissimis pocnis affecit, quos per 
 flngitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. Auctor ejus nominia Christus Tiberio 
 imperitante per procuratorem Pont. Pilatum supplicio afifectus est ; repressaque in 
 praesens oxitiabilis superstitio rursum erumpebat non modo per Judaeam originem ejus 
 in.ili, sed per urbem etiam quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebran- 
 turque. Igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitude ingens, 
 haud perinde in crimine incendii quam odio generis humani convicti aunt. Et pereunti- 
 bus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut criicibus 
 affixi aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urerentur . . . 
 undo quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur 
 tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur " (Ann. rv. 44). 
 
 Gentiles in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons complain, f enji- nva <u 
 KouTji' rifuv eTayov<ri Opri<rKfCo.v (ap. Euseb. H. E. V. 1). 
 
 1 Tac. Hist. v. 25 ; Died. Sic. i. 28 ; Plut. Synop. iv. 5. On this story see Geiger, Jufcn und 
 Judenthum, illustr. Monatxfi. d. Judeneth., Oct., 1S65. 
 
 2 Ann. xv. 44 ; ii. 85, "si ob gravitatem caeli intcrissent, vile damnmn." (Cf. Suet. Tib. 36 ; 
 Jos. Antt. xviii. 3, 5 ; Philo, Leg. 24.) 
 
 Sat. vi. 542547, 156160 ; xiv. 96107. See, for other allusions, id. iii. 13, 296. 
 
 * Ap. Orig. c. Cels. i. 33, yen/row. 
 
 5 Ammian. Mare. xxii. 5, " fetentes Judaei." (See "Gentiles " in Kitto.) 
 
 ' Itinerar. i. 8, 89. In the above quotations and references I have made free use (with certain 
 additions) of Dr. Gill's Notices of the Jews by Classic Authors (see also Meier's Judaica, and the article 
 of Geiger, above quoted). ? Jer. xxix. 7. 
 
 8 Ps. Heraclit. Ep. vil. ; Hausrath, N. T. Gesch. 11. 79. Specimens of this scorn may be seen in 
 Jos. c. Ap. ii. 34, 35. 
 
 9 According to Sulplc. Severus (Hist. Sacr. 11. 80), Titus decided that the Temple should b 
 destroyed that Christianity and Judaism might be eradicated together. " Quippe has religiones, 
 licet contrarias sibi, iisdem tamon auctoribus profectas ; Christianos ex Jndaeis exstitisse ; radioe 
 sublata, stirpem facile perituraiu." This is believed by Beraaya to be a quotation from Tacitus.
 
 PROCONSULATE OF 8ERQIUS PATJLUS. T21 
 
 PLINY THE YOUNGER (died circ. A.D. 117). 
 
 His famous letter to Trajan is too long for insertion. He asks whether he is to punish 
 persons for simply being Christians, or for crimes involved in the charge of being so (nomen 
 ipsum, siflagitiis cweat, anflagitia, cohaerentia nomini). He says that he has punished thosa 
 who, after threat of punishment, still declared themselves Christians, because he con- 
 siders that in any case their " inflexible obstinacy " should be punished. Others equally 
 infatuated (similis amentiae) he determined to send to Rome, being Roman citizens. 
 Having received an anonymous accusation which inculpated many, he tested them, if 
 they denied the charge of being Christians, by making them call on the gods, and offer 
 incense and wine to the Emperor's image, and curse Christ. If they did this he dismissed 
 them, because he was told that no true Christian would ever do it. Some said that they 
 had long abjured Christianity, but declared that the head and front of their " fault " or 
 "error " had simply been the custom of meeting before dawn, and singing antiphons to 
 Christ as a God, and binding themselves with an oath l not to steal, rob, commit 
 adultery, break their word, or deny the trust committed to them; after which they 
 separated, meeting again for a harmless meal a custom which they had dropped after 
 Pliny's edict forbidding guilds. Scarcely crediting this strange account of their innocent 
 life, he had put two deaconesses (ex duabus ancillis quae ministrae dicebantur) to the 
 torture, but discovered nothing beyond perverted and immoderate superstition (pravam, 
 immodicam). He therefore consults Trajan, because of the multitude of the accused, 
 who were of every age, rank, and sex, both in the city and in the country. So widely 
 had ' ' the contagion of that wretched superstition " spread that the temples were almost 
 deserted, and there was scarcely any one to buy the victims (Ep. x. 97). 
 
 To this letter Trajan briefly replies that the Christians are to be punished if con- 
 victed, but not to be sought out ; to be pardoned if they sacrifice, and not to be tried on 
 anonymous accusations. 
 
 EPIOTETUS (died A.D. 117). 
 
 " Then through madness it is possible for a man to be so disposed towards these 
 things" (i.e., to be indifferent to the world), "and the Galilseans through habit* 
 (Dissert, iv. 7). 
 
 M. AURELIUS ANTONINUS (died A.D. 180). 
 
 Speaking of readiness to die, he says that it is noble, " so that it comes from a man's 
 own judgment, not from mere obstinacy (&ia ij/iMiv Traparaf iv), as with the Christians, but 
 considerately, and with dignity " (Eucheir. xi. 3). 
 
 LUCIAN (died circ. A.D. 200). 
 
 His sneers and parodies of what he calls the eav/iaorrj <ro$la of the Christians are to be 
 found in the Ver. Historia, I. 12, 30 ; II. 4, 1112 (Alexand. (Pseudomantis) xxv. 38). 
 The Philopatris is not by Lucian, but a hundred years later. 
 
 GALEN, the great writer on Physic (died A.D. 200). 
 In his book, De different, pulsv.um, he alludes twice to the obstinacy of Christians. 
 
 EXCURSUS XVI. (p. 197). 
 
 THE PROCONSULATE OF SERGIUS PAULDS. 
 
 THE title of " Proconsul " 3 given to this insular governor is one of those minute touches 
 of accuracy which occur on every page of the Acts of the Apostles. 
 
 It might have been a serious difficulty that the name of Sergius Paulus does not occur 
 in the Fasti of the Consuls till long after this period, 3 but the difficulty vanishes when 
 
 1 Interesting as the earliest Christian application of the word " Sacrament " (Waterland, On tfn 
 Eucharist, i.). * K. V. " Deputy." 
 
 3 Berg. Paulas, consul suffectus, A.D. 21, and another, Consul, A.D. 168. 
 
 24
 
 __ 
 
 722 APPENDIX, 
 
 we find that the title of Proconsul was given to the Governor of a senatorial province, 
 whatever may have been his previous rank. 1 But another and more serious difficulty 
 was once urged. There were two kinds of provinces, the imperial and the senatorial, 
 both of which were called Eparchies (ropx""). The imperial were those to which the 
 governors were sent by the Emperor, because their circumstances involved the necessity 
 of military command. Augustus, under pretence of relieving the Senate from the burden 
 of the more disturbed provinces, had astutely reserved for his personal administration 
 those regions of the empire where the presence of an army was required. As the title 
 Praetor (in Greek, SrpaTiryb?, or general) still retained some shadow of its old military 
 significance, the Governors of these provinces were called Propraetors, or 'AjTiorpanj-yoi. 
 for which, in the New Testament, the more general term 'Hye^wi- is often used. This 
 Greek word for " Governor " serves as an equivalent both for " Procurator " and also for 
 Praeses or Lfgatus, which was, for instance, the ordinary designation of the Governor of 
 Syria. These Praesides, Legati, or Propraetors held their commands at the Emperor's 
 pleasure, and, especially in the reign of Tiberius, were often left for years undisturbed 
 in their tenure of office. The Proconsuls, or 'AvflviroToi, on the other hand, who were 
 appointed by the Senate, only held their posts for a single year. Now it appears from 
 Strabo that when, in B.C. 27, Augustus divided the provinces between himself and the 
 Senate, Cyprus was reserved as one of the imperial districts (oTpanjyio/ en-apxta), and with 
 this Dion Cassius agrees. 2 Consequently even eminent writers like Grotius thought that 
 St. Luke had here fallen into an error ; and Baronius supposes that Cyprus must at this 
 time have been an honorary adjunct to the Proconsulship of Cilicia, while Grotius suggests 
 that Greek flattery might have often given to a Propraetor the more distinguished title 
 of Proconsul, and that St. Luke might have used it in accordance with the common 
 parlance. But a little more research has resulted in the discovery that though Cyprus 
 originally was an imperial province, and ultimately reverted to the same condition, yet 
 Augustus restored both it and Gallia Narbonensis to the Senate in exchange for Dalmatia, 
 because he found that they did not need the presence of many soldiers. 3 And to set the 
 matter finally at rest, copper coins and inscriptions of this very epoch have been found 
 at Curium and Citium in which the title of Proconsul is given to Cominius Proclus > 
 Julius Cor Jus, and L. Aunus Bassus, who must have been immediate predecessors or 
 successors of Sergius Paulus. 4 
 
 The name Sergius Paulus is itself interesting. Of this particular Proconsul, indeed, 
 we know nothing beyond the eulogy of the sacred historian that he was a man of sense, 5 
 and that he was deeply impressed by the teaching of St. PauL But Pliny the Elder, in 
 his Natural History, three times refers to a Sergius Paulus as a person interested in 
 intelligent researches. ; and it is not impossible that this Sergius Paulus may be none 
 other than our Cyprian Proconsul.' If so, the character given him in one passing word 
 by St. Luke will be confirmed, and we feel additional pleasure in tracing similar 
 characteristics in others of the same name who may well have been his descendants ; for 
 instance, in the Sergius Paulus who, more than a hundred years afterwards, receives 
 the encomium of the physician Galen for his eminence both as a theoretic and a practical 
 philosopher. 7 
 
 1 Dion Cass. liil. 13, xal ivdwarovt (coAtiff&u M on. TOUS Suo TOVS inraTCVKorac (ex-Consuls) oAAa 
 KOI Toii aAAovc TUV (orpanjyriKOTUn' (ex- Praetors), K. T. A. 
 
 * Dion Cass. liii. 12 ; Strabo, xiv. 685 ; Suet Aug. 47. 
 
 * Dion Cass. liii, 13, nji' Hun-pop ... rep SI//JKU aneSiaictv : liv. 4, al ovru avOuiraroi leal t 
 bcctpa ra iOvn veunta6<u ijpai/TO. 
 
 * Eckhel, iii. 84 ; Akerman, Numitm. Illustr., pp. 39, 42 ; Boeckh, Corp. Inscr. 2681, 2632. 
 
 8 Acts xiii. 7, AfSpi owtrtp. The name of a Proconsul Paulus has been found on an inscription 
 at Soli (Cesnola, Cyprus, p. 495). 
 
 Plin. H. N. I. Pliny is writing only twenty years after this period. 
 
 Kenan, St. Paul, p. 15, who refers to Orelli,_2414, 4938. Galen, De Anatom. 1 (ftpud Wetstein), 
 ii-Jeoj rot jraira irpwwovros ifyou T KOI Advoif Totj iv '
 
 ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL, 723 
 
 EXCURSUS XVII. (p. 249). 
 
 ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL. 
 
 Or the three "seeming pillars," John appears to have taken no part In the synod at 
 Jerusalem, or if he did it was not sufficiently decisive to be recorded. He belonged, it 
 is clear, at this time to the Church of the Circumcision, and, so far as we know, this was 
 the only occasion on which he was thrown into the society of St. Paul. But we have St. 
 Paul's express testimony in the only passage in which he is mentioned in the Epistles 
 that he recognised his apostolate ; and the Apocalypse, his earliest writing, so far from 
 showing that irreconcilable hatred to the doctrines of St. Paul which has been assumed 
 on grounds inconceivably frivolous, and repeated subsequently with extraordinary reck- 
 lessness, offers a close parallelism to St. Paul's Epistles in thoughts and principles, which 
 is all the more striking from the marked differences of tone and expression. We are 
 calmly assured, without even the condescension of an attempted proof, that the " false 
 Jew," the "false Apostle," the "false prophet," the "Balaam," the "Jezebel," the 
 "Nicolas," the " chief of the synagogue of Satan," alluded to in the Apocalypse, 1 are as 
 indubitably intended for St. Paul as are the savage allusions covertly made to him under 
 the name of Simon the Magician in the Pseudo- Clementines. Now, on what basis is this 
 conclusion founded ? Simply on the resemblance in tone of a spurious Ebionite romance 
 (the Clementines) to the phrases, "those which say they are Apostles and are not," 
 " those which say they are Jews and are not," and the allusions to some who held the 
 doctrine of Balaam, and of "that woman Jezebel," who taught people "to commit forni- 
 cation, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols." It is true that there were Judaisers who 
 attacked St. Paul's claim to be an Apostle ; but to assert that St. John was one of them 
 is to give the direct lie to St. Paul, while to class St. Paul with them " that say they are 
 Jews and are not " is to falsify the most notorious facts concerning one who was a 
 Pharisee of Pharisees, and a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Again, to assert boldly that St. 
 Paul ever taught people to eat things offered to idols, or anything which could be so 
 described without the grossest calumny, is a distinct contradiction of his own words, since 
 he expressly warned his converts not to do this, and assigns for his warning the very 
 reason that to do so would be "to cast a stumbling-block before the children of Israel." 2 
 In fact, though St. Paul would have denied that to eat them was wrong in itself, his 
 concessions on this point went very little beyond those which are sanctioned in the 
 Talmud itself. 3 Once more, what conceivable excuse could there be for saying that St. 
 Paul ever taught men " to commit fornication " ? a sin against which, whether literally 
 or metaphorically understood, he has urged considerations more deeply seated, mora 
 likely to touch the heart, more likely to bind the conscience, than all the other writers in 
 the New Testament put together. That even in earliest days there did spring up anti- 
 nomian sects which were guilty of such accursed teaching, we know from Church history, 
 and find traces even in the sacred writers ; and it is therefore probable that the allusions 
 of the Apocalypse are as literal as the Old Testament analogies to which St. John no less 
 than St. Paul refers.* That "the fornication" of the Apocalypse means "mixed 
 marriages " there is not even a shadow of reason to believe, nor if it did would there be 
 
 '"' 1 Rev. 11. 2, 6, 9, 14, 15, 20, 34 ; ill. 9. (See Benan, St. P., 302305, who quietly asserts this as 
 tf it were indisputable.) Yet St. Paul himself was the first to use this very comparison with Balaam 
 (1 Cor. x. 7, 8), and to denounce the extreme wickedness of putting a stumbling-block before others 
 (Bom. xiv. 21 ; 2 Cor. xi. 29). 1 Cor. viii. 13 (cf. x. 32). 
 
 KetubMOi, f. 15, 1, which, almost in the very language of St. Paul, kys down the rule that if 
 I man has bought meat, and is doubtful whether it is legally clean, he must not eat it ; but if he 
 lights upon it accidentally, he may eat it without further inquiry. Meat declared to be legally 
 clean (tabor) is stamped with a leaden seal, on which is the word kashar (" lawful," icaflapov). (I. 
 D'lsraeli, Genius of Judaism, p. 154.) 
 
 1 1 Cor. x. 7, 8. (See some excellent remarks In Llghtfoot's Gal., pp. 290, 335.)
 
 724 APPENDIX, 
 
 any ground for saying that St. Paul encouraged them, Though he used, on that as on 
 all such topics, the language of wisdom and of charity, the.whole tendency of his teaching 
 is to discourage them. 1 Moreover, if Paul had been aimed at, and if St. John, the 
 Apostle of Love, really had been the slanderous and rabid Judaiser which these allusions 
 would then imply, it is inconceivable that no word should be said about the points 
 respecting which, to a Judaiser, he must have seemed infinitely more assailable namely, 
 St. Paul's very low estimate of circumcision, and his declared conviction that by the 
 works of the Law no man can be justified in God's sight. Now, in the Apocalypse neither 
 circumcision, nor the Law, nor Moses, nor oral tradition are scarcely so much as men- 
 tioned or alluded to, a while redemption by the blood of the Lamb, and the universality of 
 that redemption as extending to "every kindred and tongue and people and nation," 1 
 are asserted as absolutely and unconditionally as they could have been by Paul himself. 
 Further, it needs but a casual study of St. John and St. Paul to see that " Jesus Christ " 
 is in both of them the divine secret and the fundamental conception of all Christianity. 
 St. John at this time was the more contemplative, the less prominently active, St. John 
 of the Gospels. " The hidden fires of his nature " had not yet "burst out into a flame." 
 Two incidents preserved for us in the Gospels had indeed shown that those fires were 
 there ; 4 but it was not till James the Lord's brother, and Peter, and Paul himself had 
 ' passed away that he became the bold and uncompromising leader whose counsels were as 
 oracles to the Asian Church. Nevertheless, we may be sure that St. John was not found 
 among the opponents of St. Paul. That opposition is always connected with the 
 adherents and the influence of James. During the lifetime of Jesus James had not fully 
 accepted His mission, and seems only to have been converted by the Resurrection. He 
 had not therefore lived, as the other Apostles had lived, in daily contact with the mind 
 and influence of Jesus, and was in consequence more deeply imbued with the beliefs of 
 his early Jewish training, and less entirely permeated in intellect by the breath of the 
 new life. But Peter and John, more than any living men, must have known what was 
 the mind of Christ. We know that they were one in heart, and we may be sure that 
 they who had gone together to visit and confirm the detested Samaritans and witness 
 their participation in the gifts of the Holy Ghost, would be little likely to look with 
 rabid jealousy on the equal freedom of a yet wider extension of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 EXCURSUS XVHI. fo,254). 
 
 THE ATTACKS OK ST. PAUL IN THE CLEMENTINES. 
 
 THAT Paul, in consequence of the death-blow which he gave to Jewish Pharisaism, was 
 pursued by a particular section of the Judaeo-Christian Church with unrelenting opposi- 
 tion, is a matter of history. It needs no further proof than the large sections in his 
 Epistles which are occupied with arguments against Pharisaic or Gnostic Judaism, such 
 as had invaded the Churches of Corinth, Galatia, Colossse, and Crete. But true though 
 it is that he wag obliged to contend in lifelong straggle with a party, it is not true that 
 he remained long unrecognised by the Church at large. The supposition that he was, 
 has merely originated from the exceptional literary activity of a single section of 
 Christian Ebionites. Dr. Lightfoot, in his essay on "St. Paul and the Three," has 
 shown, by patient and entirely candid investigation, that even the Church of Judaea was 
 not exclusively anti-Pauline, and that the anti-Pauline faction within it, go far from 
 representing the tendencies of the whole Christian Church, did not even represent the 
 Christians of Palestine. The Christian Jews of the Holy Land naturally continued, as a 
 
 1 Bee especially 2 Cor. vi. 14. * \Vhich will be explained by Bey. xr.'B. 
 
 Rev. v. : vli. 9. Lwtc is. 64 ; Matt. xx. 21.
 
 ST. PAUL IN THK CLEMENTINES. 725 
 
 body, to observe the Mosaic Law as was done by St. Paul himself so far as he could do 
 BO without compromising the emancipa^ .-f the Gentiles until the fall of Jerusalem 
 rendered all such observance a mere mockery and sham. l If the Passover, the very central 
 ordinance of Mosaism, was rendered simply impossible, God had Himself demonstrated 
 that the aeon of the Law was closed. The withdrawal of the Church to Pella, caused by 
 a recollection of the warnings of Jesus, would look to the Jews like an unpatriotic 
 desertion of their cause ; and the frantic denunciations of the Mins, which date from 
 this epoch, were but signs of the gathering detestation of Jew for Christian which 
 culminated in the savage massacres by Bar-cochba of those Christians who refused to 
 apostatise and blaspheme. When the name of Jerusalem had given way to that of 
 .iElia Capitolina, and Christians wore allowed to live where no Jew might set his foot, 
 the Church of the new city became predominantly Gentile, and was for the first time 
 governed by a Gentile bishop. 2 It is not till after this period that we hear of two sects, 
 distinct from each other, but often confused. These were the Nazarenea and the 
 Ebionites. The NAZARENES were not in any way hostile to the work and memory of 
 Paul, and they differed from other Christians only in holding that the Law was still 
 binding on Jewish converts. " The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs " a book 
 which, whether written by a Nazarene or not, expresses their general tenets so far as we 
 can gather them not only does not oppose the doctrines of St. Paul, but, though 
 written from the Judaso-Christian standpoint, puts into the mouth of Benjamin a 
 splendid eulogy of Paul, as one who is to arise from that tribe "beloved of the Lord, 
 listening to His voice, enlightening all the Gentiles with new knowledge." The 
 EBIONITES, on the other hand a powerful and zealous sect breathed the exact 
 spirit of Paul's Judaising enemies, and the views of many of them became deeply tinged 
 with the Gnostic tendencies of the more advanced Essenes. To this section of the 
 Ebionites we owe the forgeries known as the Clementine Homilies, the Clementine 
 Recognitions, extant in a Latin paraphrase of Rufinus, 3 and a spurious letter of Peter to 
 James. In the Homilies St. Paul is surreptitiously attacked in the guise of Simon 
 Magus. 4 The allusion to his reproof of St. Peter at Antioch is too plain to be overlooked, 
 and discredit is thrown on his doctrine, his revelations, and his independent attitude 
 towards James. In the letter of St. Peter he is still more severely, though still covertly 
 slandered, as "the enemy" whose teaching was antinomian and absurd, and who 
 calumniously asserted that St. Peter held one view and sanctioned another. In the 
 Recognitions these attacks do not appear, but "the enemy " sent by Caiaphas to arrest 
 St. Peter at Antioch, and who throws St. James down the Temple steps, is evidently 
 meant for St. Paul, and this notable story is believed to have been borrowed from a 
 prating fiction called the "Ascents of James," which is also the source of the venomous 
 calumny that Paul was a Gentile who had accepted circumcision in hopes of marrying 
 the High Priest's daughter, and had only apostatised from Mosaism when his hopes 
 were disappointed. 5 
 
 It is on trash of this kind, at once feeble and virulent, at once baseless and malignant, 
 that some have based the belief that there was deadly opposition between Paul and the 
 Twelve, and that his work was not fully recognised till the close of the second century. 
 The fact, however, is that these Ebionite slanders and forgeries are representative of none 
 but an isolated sect. Justin lived in Samaria in the earlier half of the second century, 
 and shows no trace of these views. Hegesippus was a Jewish Christian who travelled to 
 Rome in the middle of the second century, visiting many Christian Churches ; and 
 
 1 Griitz, Gesch. d. Jttden, iv. Ill * Marcus, B.C. 132. Just. Mart. Apol. i. 81, p. T2. 
 
 * And partly in Syriac. 
 
 * The English reader may sea these passages translated in Banr'a First Three Centuries, i. pp 
 rfS. 
 
 * Epiphan. Haerts, xxz. 16. Henan also refers to Massechta, Qtri<&, 1, ed. Kirchhelm.
 
 726 APPENDIX 
 
 Eusebius, who knew his writings, vouches for his perfect orthodoxy. 1 Such being ths 
 case, it is hardly even necessary to prove that the other churches of the second century 
 were in no sense anti-Pauline. It may be true that for a short time there were two 
 sections a Jewish and a Gentile in the Church of Borne, and even that each section 
 had its own bishop, the possible successors respectively of the Apostles of the circumcision 
 and of the uncircumcision. 2 But if so, these two sections were, at the close of the first 
 century, united under the gentle and orthodox Clement ; and even on the doubtful 
 hypothesis that the Clementines had a Roman origin, their indirectness the cautious, 
 ubterranean, timid sort of way in which they attack the great Apostle is alone a 
 decisive proof that the forger could by no means rely on the general sympathy of the 
 readers into whose hands his writings fell. And yet on this very attenuated apex is built 
 the huge inverted pyramid of inference, which finally declares the Epistle of St. Jude to 
 be a specimen of one of the letters, breathing sanguinary hatred and atrocious falsehood, 
 which are supposed to have been despatched from Jerusalem in the name of the Apostles, 
 and in the composition of which, "since James and Jude probably could not speak Greek,** 
 they probably employed Greek secretaries 1 s Let any one read the Epistle of St. Jude, 
 and consider, verse by verse, how it could be possibly applied to St. Paul, and how abso 
 lately such a theory contradicts every really authentic fact of his relation to the Apostles, 
 as well as the character and bearing of the Apostles themselves, and he will be able to 
 estimate the validity of the criticism which calmly represents as reasonable history this 
 darkening fume of inferences from the narrow aperture of a worthless forgery. 
 
 EXCUESUS XIX (p. S51). 
 THE MAN OF Snr; OB, "THB LAWLESS," 
 
 " figo prorsus quid dixerit fateor me ignorare." S. A0O. 
 
 THE various conjectures as to the " Man of Sin," and " that which withholdeth," may be 
 classed under three heads (i.) the nearly contemporary, (ii.) the distantly prophetic, and 
 (iii.) the subjectively general And in each of these classes the suggested antitypes are 
 either (a) general and impersonal, or (P) individual and special. 
 
 (i.) The opinion adopted will, of course, depend greatly on the extent to which the 
 destruction of Judaism in the overthrow of Jerusalem can be regarded as " a coming of 
 the Lord." Those who, in accordance with most of the definite temporal prophecies of 
 Scripture, think that St. Paul must have been alluding to something nearly contemporary 
 something which already loomed on the horizon, and therefore to something which 
 would alone have a direct bearing on the lives of contemporary Christians, explain the 
 Apostasy and the Man of Sin to represent, (a) generally, the Pharisees, or Gnosticism, or 
 
 1 It is no disproof of this that he borrows the Ebionite account of St. James ; and his supposed 
 condemnation of St. Paul for using the expression " Eye hath not seen," &c., seems to rest on an 
 entire misapprehension (Light/foot, Qal., p. 811). 
 
 * Some such fact may be behind the remark of Tertullian that Clemeat was ordained bishop by 
 Ht. Peter, whereas Iremeus places Linus and Anencletus before him. 
 
 1 Renan, St. Paul, p. 800. " En quittant Autioohe lea agents du parti hierosolomyto jtugrent 
 do bouleverser lea fondatlons do Paul, de detruire les Eglises, de renverser co qu'il avait edifle aveoj 
 tant de labours. II semble qu'a cette occasion de nouvelles lettres furent ezpediees de Jerusalem. : 
 ; au nom des apdtres. II se peut ineme qu'un exemplaire de ces lettres haineuses nous ait ete conserve 
 ' dana 1'Epitre de Jude, frere de Jacques, et comme lui ' frere du Seigneur,' qui fait partie du canon," 
 &c. The apparent array of authorities quoted in support of such inferences has no real bearing on 
 them, and upon examination dwindles into the narrow limits indicated below. Nor does M. Renan 
 adduce a single proof, or anything remotely resembling a proof, that by noavtia. the Apocalypse and 
 the Epistle of Jude imply the doctrine of St. Paul (id. p. 300), or that the relative moderation of 
 Michael (Jude 9) is contrasted with the impertinence of St. Paul (I), or, in fact, any other of the 
 utterly wild conclusions into which he has exaggerated the perverted ingenuity of Tubingen theorist*. 
 Bee further the Excursu* on St. John and St. PauU
 
 IBB MAN 07 snr 727 
 
 the growth of heresy ; or () individually, Nero, or some Roman Emperor, Simon Magus, 
 or Simon the son of Gioras ; and they see " the check " generally in the Roman Emperor, 
 or the Jewish Law, or spiritual gifts, 1 or the time appointed by Qod ;* or individually in 
 some Emperor ( e.g., Claudius=qui claudit=4 jearlx")>* or James the Just, 4 or in St. 
 Paul himself I 
 
 (ii.) Those who have taken the distantly prophetical view of the passage explain tho 
 Apostasy of the Man of Sin to be, (a) generally, the Papacy, or the Reformation, or 
 Rationalism, or something as yet undeveloped ; or (P) individually, Mahomet, or Luther, 
 or Napoleon, or some future personal Antichrist; while they see " the check" either, aa 
 above, in the Roman Empire, or in the German Empire, or, more generally still, in the 
 fabric of human polity. 
 
 (iii.) Finally, those who take an entirely broad and subjective view of the passage, see 
 in it only a vague forecast of that which finds its fulfilment in all Christian, and, indeed, ' 
 in all secular, history, of the counter working of two opposing forces, good and evil, 
 Christ and Antichrist, the Jctser tSbh and the Jetser-ha-rd, a lawless violence and a 
 restraining power. 
 
 Now, of all these interpretations one alone can be regarded as reasonably certain 
 namely, that which views "the check" as the Roman Empire, 5 and "the checker" aa 
 the Roman Emperor. This may be regarded as fairly established, and has received the 
 widest acceptance, first, because it fulfils the conditions of being something present and 
 intelligible ; secondly, because we see an obvious reason why it should have been only 
 hinted at, since to express it would have been a positive danger both to the writer and 
 the community;' and, thirdly, because, as Bishop Wordsworth has pointed out, the 
 Epistle was from the first publicly read, and the Thessalonians must have attached a 
 meaning to it, and that meaning has been handed down to us traditionally from the 
 earliest times.? Whatever may have been the wild vagaries of theological rancour,] 
 expressing itself in the form of Biblical commentary, the early Fathers, at least, were 
 almost unanimous in regarding "the restraining power" as being the Roman Empire, 9 
 and the " restrainer " as being some Roman Emperor. 9 And it seems obvious that one 
 main feature in the blasphemous self -exaltation and opposition to God which is to be a 
 mark of the Man of Sin is suggested by the insane and sacrilegious enormities of Caligula 
 (A.D. 40) thirteen years earlier, as well as by the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. 
 Other traits may have been suggested by the pretensions and sorceries of Simon Magus 
 
 '1 iif feUJ -j 
 
 1 Chrysostom. Theodoret (i rov Ceou Spot). ' 
 
 Hitzig very precariously. ... Wieseler, Chrm. 268278. 
 
 " Qufi nisi Ilomanus status T " (Tort. De Beiurr. Cam. 24). " Clausulam saeculi acerbitates 
 horrendas comminentem Roman! Imperil commeatu scimus ratardarl" (Id. Apol. 82). This was all 
 the more natural, because the Roman Empire was regarded aa the Fourth Kingdom of Daniel. Prof. 
 Jowctt objects (1) that he could not have expected it to be so soon swept away ; and (2) that it is 
 not in pari matend. But for (1) see 1 Thess. L 10 ; v. 4 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 22, &c. ; and (2) St. Paul daily saw 
 the bearing of the Empire on the spread and position of Christianity. 
 
 i '. St. Paul had already found this by experience, even though his conversation with the Thessalo- 
 nians had been comparatively private. But when the Church grew, and heathens dropped not un- 
 frequently into its meetings, It would have been [most compromising to them to speak of the 
 destruction of the Roman Empire contemplated as a near event. 
 
 i The Rabbis held a similar view. One of them said, " The Messiah will not come till the world 
 Jias'become all white with leprosy (Lev. xiii. 13) by the Roman Empire embracing Christianity." 
 \Sanhedrin, t. 97, 1 ; Soteh, f. 49, 2 ; (Amsterd. ed.). 
 
 8 So Tert. De Resurr. Carnit, 24 ; Ireii. v. 25, 26 ; Aug. De Civ. Del. xx, 19 ; Jer. Qu. xL ad Algat; 
 Lact. vii. 15, &c. 
 
 i Claudius was Emperor when the Epistle was written, early in A.D. 54. Whether there is any 
 Allusion to his name in the word KCLTC'XCO I am not prepared to say. Kern believes that Nero ia 
 intended by "the Lawless," and[therefore (seeing that the first five years of Nero were that "goldea 
 quinquennium," which Roman writers so highly praise) concludes that the Epistle is spurious. 
 iRev. xvii. 10, 11, refers to a later time, and possibly to the strangely prevalent notion that Nero was 
 not really dead, but would in due time re-appear. The expressions used are evidently coloured by 
 the picture of Antiochus Epiphanes in Dan. xL He is called " a man of sin " (arrjp apaprwAfc) in 
 1 Mace, ii 48, 02.
 
 723 APPENDIX. 
 
 and similar widely-accredited impostors. Nero became to the Christian Church some 
 years afterwards the veiy impersonation of their ideal Antichrist. 
 
 But to form any conception as to St. Paul's meaning, besides being guided by his 
 belief of the probable nearness of the Advent, and by the necessity that what he said 
 should have some meaning and value to his hearers, we must consider (a) the views of the 
 age ; (P) the symbols he uses ; and (y) his own subsequent language when he alludes to 
 any similar topic. 
 
 Turning, then, to these, we find that (a) St. Paul was fully aware that, in the then 
 present dispensation, the triumph of Christ was not to be final or complete. He may 
 well have heard of Christ's solemn question, "Nevertheless, when the Son of Man 
 cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" 1 Even thus early in his career his prescient 
 eye may have observed the traces of that Judaic and Antichristian faction which waa 
 to undo so much of his work, and embitter so many years of his life, and to whom he 
 applies tke sternest language. Already he may have noticed the germs of the various 
 forms of Gnosticism, of which, in his Epistle to Timothy, he describes the " devilish 
 doctrines " in language which recalls some of his expressions in this place. 2 And the 
 views of the early Christians, as expressed by other Apostles, were all founded on warn- 
 ings which Christ had uttered, and all pointed in the same direction. 3 That St. Paul 
 should have throAvn his forebodings into the concrete was natural to one so familiar with 
 Old Testament prophecy, 4 so given to personification, and so trained to the expectation 
 of a Messiah who should be the personal victor over all iniquity in the person of the 
 Arch-foe, the KashA, the Antichrist. That this personification should also in part have 
 taken its colour from the monstrous wickedness and blasphemous follies of emperors like 
 Tiberius and Caligula, was exactly what we should have expected ; and, indeed, the 
 hopes and fears of the Jews had acted on the world of heathendom, which in its turn 
 reacted upon them. It is a most interesting confirmation of this fact that the Jews gave 
 to Antichrist the name of Armittus (D^-IN)- Thus> in the Targum of Jonathan on Isa. 
 xi. 4, we find, " With the breath of His lips shall He destroy the wicked Armillus ; ** and 
 In the Jerusalem Targum on Numb. xt 26, and Deut. xxxiv. 2, we are told of Armalgus 
 the Impious. This seems to be an allusion to the bracelets (a/rmiMce) which, with utter 
 defiance of all public dignity, were worn in public by Caligula. 6 "We see, then, what 
 St. Paul's anticipations at this moment were. He thought that ere long the Roman 
 Empire, so far at any rate as it was represented by the reigning Emperor, would be swept 
 away; that thereupon the existing tendencies of iniquity and apostasy, whether in 
 Judaism or in the Church itself, would be concentrated in the person of one terrible 
 opponent, and that the destruction of this opponent would be caused by the personal 
 Advent of the Lord. At this time portents and presages of the most direful character 
 were in the air. The hideous secrets of the Imperial Court were darkly whispered among 
 the people. There were rumours of monstrous births, of rains of blood, of unnatural 
 omens. 6 Though Claudius had been the last to learn the infamous orgies of his wife 
 Messalina, and perhaps the last to suspect the murderous designs of his wife and niece 
 Agrippina, yet by this time even he was not unaware that his life hung on a thread. Little 
 was as yet known of Nero in the provinces, but it might have been anticipated, before 
 the illusive promise of the early part of his reign, that the son of such a father and auch a 
 mother could only turn out to be the monster which bis father expected, and which he 
 did ultimately turn out to be. If St. Paul anticipated that the present condition of the 
 
 Luke xvliL 8. 
 
 1 Tim. Iv. 1 (cf. 2 Tim, 1. 15 ; 111. 19 ; Col. IL 8, 16 19 ; Acte xx. 29). 
 
 Luke xviii. 8 ; 1 John iv. 3 ; 2 Pet. 11. 1, 2 ; iii. 3 ; Rev. xiii. and passim ; and the Epistle of 
 . * Ezek. xxxviii. 16, 17. 
 
 Suet. CBH0. 6. " AroiiOattu in publicum processit" (Hitzig., Gesch. Is. 583). The anniversary 
 of his death was observed as a festival (Derenbourg, Palest. 208). Others, however, connect 
 Armillits with tm^Aaos, or " Romulus " (Hamburger. Talm, Worterb, a. v.). 
 
 * Tac. Ann. xii. U : Soot. Claud. 43 : Dion Cass. be. 84. 86,
 
 THE MAN OF SIN. 729 
 
 government would perish with Claudius, the reigning Emperor, and that his successor 
 would be the Man of Sin, his anticipation was fulfilled. If he further anticipated that 
 this representative of lawless and already working opposition to God and His Christ would 
 be destroyed by the second Advent, he was then absolutely right so far as its Judaio 
 elements were concerned, and so far as the second Advent was foreshadowed by the 
 destruction of Jerusalem ; and his anticipations were only mistaken on a point respecting 
 which all knowledge was confessedly withheld only in that ante-dating of the personal 
 second Advent which was common to him with all Christians in the first century of 
 Christianity. Nor need it be surprising to any one that he should mingle Jewish and 
 heathen elements in the colours with which he painted the coming Antichrist. In doing 
 this he was in full accord with that which must be the case, and with the dim expecta- 
 tions of paganism no less than with Rabbinic notions respecting the rival of the Messiah. 1 
 Further than this we cannot go ; and since we cannot since all attempts at nearer 
 indication have failed since by God's express and declared Providence we are as far as 
 the Thessalonians could have been from any accurate conception as to the times and 
 seasons of the coming of Christ it is clear that we lose no vital truth of the Gospel by 
 our inability to find the exact interpretation of an enigma which has been hitherto 
 Insoluble, and of which, had it been necessary for ua, the exact explanation would not 
 have been withheld. 3 
 
 1 It was but a few years after this time that Balbillus, the Ephesian Jew, who professed a know- 
 ledge of astrology, used the prophecies of the Old Testament to assure Nero that he should be King 
 at Jerusalem. 
 
 s The Thessalonians, says St. Augustine, knew what St. Paul meant, we do not " Nos qai 
 neacimufl quod ilii scieb&at pervenire labore ad id quod sennit Apoatolua eupirnua, nee valemus."
 
 730 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 EXCURSUS XX. CHLB UNCIAL MANUSCBUEI 
 
 
 Century 
 
 Acts of the 
 Apostles. 
 
 Roman*. 
 
 ICor. 
 
 Cor. 
 
 N, Sinai ticus, at Peters-") 
 burg (Imp. Library) J 
 
 IV. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 A, Alexandrinus, at") 
 British Museum ...J 
 
 V. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL { 
 
 (i. 1 toiv. 13) \ 
 (xii. 7 to end)) 
 
 B, Vaticanus, at Rome) 
 (Vatican Library) ...) 
 
 rv. 
 
 All. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 
 ' 
 
 (1. 2 to iv. 3) 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 0, Ephraeini, at Paris") 
 (Imperial Library), a > 
 Palimpsest MS. ... j 
 
 v. - 
 
 (v. 35 x 43) 
 (xiii. 1 xvi. 37) 
 (xx. 10 xxi 31) 
 rxxii. 21 xxiiL 18) 
 (xxiv. 15 xxvi. 19' 
 
 (i. 1 ii. 5) 
 (iii. 21 ix. 6) 
 ' (x. 15 xi. 31) 
 (xiiL 10 end) 
 
 !(i. 1 vii. 18) 
 (ix.7 xiii. 81 
 (xv. 40 end. 
 
 } (L 2-*. 8) 
 
 
 
 
 (xxvii. 17-xxviil. 6) 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 (L 1 viii. 29) 
 
 )'"" '" ''-**<**' 
 
 
 
 Dj, Bezae.at Cambridge > 
 (Univ. Library) ... f 
 
 H 
 
 (x. 14 xxi. 2) 
 (xxi. 1016) 
 (xxi. 18 xxii. 10) 
 
 - 
 
 ...... 
 
 .- 
 
 
 t 
 
 (xxU. 2029) 
 
 
 
 
 D2, Claromontanus, ") 
 Paris (Imp. Lib.) ...) 
 
 VI. 
 
 
 CL 7-nd) 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 B 2 , Laudianus, Oxford") 
 (Bodleian) j 
 
 51 
 
 (i. 1 xxvi. 29) 
 (xxviiL 26 end) 
 
 I .... 
 
 ~. M . 
 
 * 
 
 ES, Sangerraanensis,") 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Petersburg (Imperial ( 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Lib.). A transcript f 
 
 x. 
 
 MM 
 
 MMH 
 
 ****** 
 
 ****** 
 
 of D s , mutilated ...J 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 F 2 , Augiensls, Trinity") 
 College, Cambridge... ) 
 
 IX. 
 
 HH.I 
 
 (iii. 19 to end) j 
 
 (i. 1 iii. 8) 
 (iii. 16 vi. 7) 
 (vi. 16 end) 
 
 } ^ 
 
 F., Coislinianua, Paris 
 
 VIL 
 
 
 
 Some fragments of the Epistles found IB 
 
 Gj, Angelicus, Rome ") 
 (August. Monks) ... ) 
 
 IX. | 
 
 (viii. 10 end) 
 Same as La. See 
 below. 
 
 ? The Epistles of St. Paul in this MS. ar 
 r known as />_>. 
 
 63, Boernerianus, Dres- > 
 den (Royal Library) ) 
 
 IX 
 
 
 
 (L 1 onward) 
 
 This is a sister MS. to F 
 
 Hj, Mutinensis, Mo-") 
 
 .. 
 
 (v. 28 ix. 89) 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
 dena (Grand Ducal > 
 
 IX \ 
 
 (x. 19 xiii. 36) 
 
 v ^^, 
 
 .. 
 
 M.Mt 
 
 Library) j 
 
 (_ 
 
 (xiv. 3 xxvii. 4) 
 
 ) 
 
 
 
 HQ, Coislinianus (twelve") 
 leaves at Paris, two f 
 leaves at Petersburg),) 
 
 VL 
 
 ,.~ 
 
 
 
 f (x. 2329) 
 1 (xL 917) 
 
 } .... 
 
 I, Fragmenta, Palimp-^\ 
 sestaTischeudorftana, ( 
 They are seven frag- t 
 ments, at Petersburg,) 
 
 V. VII. 
 
 f (ii. 6-17) 
 1 (xxvi. 7-18) 
 ( (xxviiL 817) 
 
 } 
 
 (xv. 53 xvL 9) 
 
 ~~ 
 
 Ko, Mosquensis, at ") 
 Moscow j 
 
 IX 
 
 
 
 a i-*. is) { 
 
 (1. 13 viii. 7) 
 (viii. 12 end) 
 
 \ 
 
 1*2, Angelicus, Rome.") 
 Same as Gj j 
 
 IX. { 
 
 (viii. 10 end) 
 See a above. 
 
 } AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 Ma, Ruber. Fragments") 
 at Hamburg and at f 
 British Museum ...) 
 
 X 
 
 -.-. 
 
 
 
 [xv.52 end) | 
 
 (Ll-15) I 
 (x.13 xii.0)f 
 
 P, Porphyrlanus. Pub-") 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 lished by Tischen- 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 (i. 1 xii. 23) 
 
 
 dorf. Monumenta V 
 
 IX 
 
 (iL14-ond) 
 
 lllttl J 
 
 (xiii.6 xiv. 23) 
 
 *Mj 
 
 sacra luedita. (See 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 (xiv. 39 end) 
 
 
 Alford, vol. 2.) ...J 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This Table has kindly been drawn np for 
 
 [The general reader should notice (i.) that D and E mean different MSS. for the Acts and for the 
 
 (iii.) that F (Angiensis) is in most instances
 
 THE UHCIA1A 
 THB ACTS, AND EPISTLES Off ST. PAUL. 
 
 731 
 
 6*1. 
 
 Eph. 
 
 Philip. 
 
 Colog. 
 
 1 Thcgg. 
 
 2 Thees. 
 
 iTim. 
 
 1 Tim. 
 
 Titu*. 
 
 Phllem. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 All. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 Mt* 
 
 
 
 ~~ 
 
 ~- 
 
 0. ai- 1 til ) 
 
 (iL 18-iv. 17) 
 
 (1.22-111.5) 
 
 (t. 2-end) 
 
 (L 8 11. 9) 
 
 
 
 (ill. -v. 20) 
 
 (t. 8 end) 
 
 (1. 4-end) 
 
 (Stoend) 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 All. 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 
 AIL 
 
 M1KI 
 
 AIL 
 
 All. 
 
 AU.{ 
 
 
 
 (i. 1-ii. 1) 
 (ii. 8-end) 
 
 } AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 
 AIL 
 
 <i-si) 
 
 marginal notes to the great Septuugint Octateuch known as Cod. Coislinlanua L 
 
 applying the commencement of Romans, not other deficiencies. It la considerably mutilated. 
 
 < (i. 4-10) 
 l(iL 9-14) 
 
 * 
 
 } ft 
 
 M* 
 
 "" 
 
 MUM 
 
 ...... 
 
 (iiL 714) 
 
 .....{ 
 
 M*M 
 
 O.l) 
 
 (i. 15 li. 5) 
 (iii.lStoend) 
 
 }~ 
 
 ~- 
 
 ~~ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 0.1-13) 
 
 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 ffitil 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 All 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AB.{ 
 
 rt.l lii.16) 
 (iv.8 end) 
 
 (LI 11L6) 
 
 (ir. 17-euU) 
 
 }^ 
 
 AIL 
 
 AIL 
 
 AD. 
 
 AIL 
 
 me ty the Rev. J. 8. Northcote. 
 
 Epistles ; (ii.) that B (Sangermanensis) la a copy of the third corrector of D (Claromontamui)* 
 Almost identical with O (Boereeriaims).]
 
 732 APPENDIX, 
 
 v___ ; -*?'-'* - 1 * ' *'> - 'V 1H2 W 
 
 EXOUESUS XXI. (p. 898). 
 THEOLOGY AND ANTINOMIES OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 I HAVE treated so fully of the main outlines of St. Paul's theology in the sketch of the 
 Epistle to the Romans that I need not here enter upon it, but it may be convenient to 
 the reader to see at one glance two of his own most pregnant summaries of it. These 
 are Rom. iii. 2126 ; Tit. iii. 37, for further explanation of which I must refer to 
 pp. 472, seq., 663. 
 
 Eom. iii. 21 26: "But now apart from Law, God's righteousness has been mani- 
 fested, being witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets even God's righteousness (I say) 
 by means of faith In Jesus Christ unto all and upon all believers ; for there is no 
 difference. For all sinned and are falling short of the glory of God, being made righteous 
 freely by His grace, by the means of the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God 
 set forth as " a propitiary " by means of faith in His blood for the manifestation of His 
 righteousness, because of the praetermission of past sins by the long-suffering of God 
 with a view (I say) to the manifestation of His righteousness in the present season, so 
 that He may be righteous and the giver of righteousness to him who is of faith in 
 Jesus." 
 
 Tit. iii. 3 7: "For we were once ourselves also foolish, disobedient, wandering 
 slaves to various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, hating one 
 another. But when the kindness and the love to man of our Saviour God appeared, not 
 by works of righteousness which we did, but according to His mercy He saved us by 
 means of the laver of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Ghost, which He poured 
 forth upon us richly by means of Jesus Christ our Saviour, that being justified by His 
 grace we should become heirs of eternal life according to hope." 
 
 By "antinomies" I mean the apparent contradictoriness to human reason of divine 
 facts. Such antinomies must arise when Eeason seeks to know something of the absolute, 
 stepping beyond the limits of experience. 
 
 Among the apparent antinomies left without any attempt because there is no 
 possibility of their reconciliation to our finite reason in the writings of St. Paul, are 
 L Predestination Eom. ix. (as explaining the rejection of Israel 
 
 (Absolute dependence). from the objective and theological point 
 
 of view). 
 
 Free Will Eom. ix. 30 x. 21 (as explaining the rejection 
 
 (Moral self-determination). of Israel from the moral and anthropolo- 
 
 gical point of view). 
 2. Sin through Adam's fall ; Eom. v. 1221. 
 
 Sin as inherent in the flesh ; 1 Cor. xv. 50, seq. 
 S. Christ judging all Christiana at His Advent; Eom. ii. 16; xiv. 10; 1 Cor. iii. 
 
 13 ; 2 Cor. v. 10. 
 God finally judging ott men through Christ ; 1 Cor. iv. 5 (xv. 24, 25). 
 
 4. Recompense for ALL according to works ; Eom. ii. 6 10 ; 2 Cor. v. 10. 
 Free forgiveness of the redeemed ; Eom. iv. 4 ; ix. 11 ; xi. 6. 
 
 5. Universal Restoration and Blessedness ; Eom. viii. 19 23 ; xi. 30 36. 
 A twofold end ; Eom. ii. 612. "The perishing ;" 2 Cor. ii. 15, &o. 
 
 6. Necessity of human effort ; 1 Cor. ix. 24. " So run that ye may obtain. 
 Ineffectualness of human effort ; Eom. ix. 16, " It is not of him that willeth, 
 
 I nor of him that runneth." 
 
 The two are brought together in Phil. ii. 12, 13, " Work out your own salvation 
 
 . . . For it is God which worketh in you." 
 To these others might perhaps be added, but none of them causes, or need cause, any
 
 DISTINCTIVE WORDS, ETC., OP THE EPISTLES. 733 
 
 trouble to the Christian. On the one hand, we know that omnia exeunt in myiterium, 
 and that we cannot think for five minutes on any subject connected with the spiritual 
 life without reaching a point at which the wings of the soul beat in vain as against a wall 
 of adamant. On the other hand, we must bear in mind that Paul almost created the 
 language of Christian theology ; that he often enshrines in a single word a whole world 
 of ideas ; and that he always refuses to pursue the great saving truths of religion into 
 mere speculative extremes. If we cannot live as yet in the realms of perfect and 
 universal light, we have at any rate & lamp which throws a circle of radiance around our 
 d?jly steps. 
 
 " Lead thou me on. I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene ; one step enough for me." 
 
 EXCURSUS XXII. (p. 690). 
 DISTINCTIVE WORDS, KEY-NOTES, AND CHABAOTEBISTIOS OF THE EPISTLES. 
 
 IT may perhaps serve to call attention to the individuality of the Epistles if I endeavour 
 to point out how some of them may be roughly characterised by leading words or 
 conceptions. 
 
 J. The Eschatological Group. 
 
 1 THESSALONIANS. This Epistle is marked by the extreme sweetness of its tone. 
 Its key-note is Hope. Its leading words, napovo-ia., 0/u'i>ts. Its main theme is Consolation 
 from the near hope of the Second Advent, iv. 17, 18, w * "* opirayijofi0a, K. r. A. 
 rapoucoAeiTe aAXjjXovj iv TOIS Xdyois Tourots. 1 
 
 2 THESSALONIANS. The key-note is ii. 1, 2, ^ Tax-> <raAev0ijiH . . . we ori mi<rrnMv } 
 TOV miptov. Peculiar doctrinal section on the Man of Sin. 
 
 II. The Anti-Judaic Group. 
 
 1 COBINTHIANS. Love and unity amid divergent opinions. Little details decided by 
 great principles. Life in the world but not of it. 
 
 2 COBINTHIANS. The Apostle's Apologia, pro vitd su&. The leading words of L vi. 
 " tribulation " and "consolation." In viii. end, the leading conception "boasting not 
 on merits but in infirmities." 
 
 GALATIANS. The Apostle's independent authority. Christian liberty from the yoke 
 of the Law. Circumcision nothing, and uncircumcision nothing, but - 
 
 .ROMANS. The Universality of sin, and the Universality of grace ( a leading word). 
 Justification by faith. This Epistle is the sum of St. Paul's theology, and Bom. i. 16, 17 
 is the sum of the Epistle. 
 
 ///. The Christoloyiccd or Anti-Gnostic Group. 
 
 PHnjPPlANS. Joy in sorrow. " Summa Epistolae, yaudeo, gaudete " (Bengel). 
 
 COLOSSIANS. Christ all in all. The Pleroma. Leading conception, ii. 6, iv air* 
 ipraTetT. "Hie epistolue scopus est" (Bengel). 
 
 PHILEMON. Can & Christian master treat a brother as a slave? Leading conception, 
 12, irpooAojSou O.VTOV. 
 
 EPHESIANS. Christ in His Church. The Epistle of the Ascension. The leading 
 
 Words are x^P'S. Ta cirdvpavia, iv XptcrruJ. 
 
 1 " Habet haec epistola meram quaudam dulcedinem, quae lectori dulclbus affectibus noa 
 assueto minus sapit quam ceterae severitate quadam palatum etringentes * (Bengel). " Im Gauzw 
 ift os ein Trostbrief " (Hansrath, p. 299).
 
 734 APPENDIX, 
 
 IV. The Pastoral Group. 
 
 ' . _ /"Manuals of the Christian pastor's dealing with the faithful and with 
 
 _. < false teachers. Leading conceptions, sobriety of conduct, soundness of 
 
 J.ITU3 I . . , -i 
 
 ^ faith. 
 
 2 TIMOTHY. Last words. Be brave and faithful, as I have tried to be. Come 
 quickly, come before winter; come before I die. IT. 6, yi> yap % 
 
 EXCUESUS XXIII. (p. 628). 
 LETTEB or PLINY TO SABINIANUS ON BEHALF OF AW OFFENDING FEEEDMAX. 
 
 " 0. Plinius Sabiniano suo S. 
 
 "Libertus tuus, cui succensere te dixeras, venit ad me advolutusque pedibus meta 
 tanquam tuis haesit. Flevit multum, multum rogavit, multum etiam tacuit, in summa 
 fecit mild fidem paenitentiae. Yere credo emendatum, quia deliquisse se sentit. 
 Irasceris, scio, et irasceris merito, id quoque scio : sed tune praecipua mansuetudinus 
 laus, cum irae caussa iustissima est. Amasti hominem et, spero, aniabis : interim sufficit 
 ut exorari te sinas. Licebit rursus irasci, si meruerit, quod exoratus excusatius facies. 
 Kcmitte aliquid adulcscentiae ipsius, remitte lacrimis, remitte indulgentiae tuae : ne 
 torseris ilium, ne torseris etiam te. Torqueris enim, cum tarn lenis irasceris. Vereor ne 
 videar non rogare, sed cogere, si precibus eius meas iunxero. Jungam tamen tanto 
 plenius et effusius, quanto ipsum acrius severiusque corripui, districte minatus numquam 
 me postea rogaturum. Hoc illi, quem terreri oportebat ; tibi non idem. Nam f ortasse 
 iterum rogabo, impetrabo iterum: sit modo tale ut rogare me, ut praestare te deceat. 
 Vale!" 
 
 TRANSLATION. 
 
 "0. Plinius to his Sabinianus, greeting : 
 
 "Your freedman, with whom, as you had told me, you were vexed, came to me, and, 
 flinging himself at my feet, clung to them as though they had been yours. He wept 
 much, entreated much, yet at the same time left much unsaid, and, in short, convinced 
 me that he was sincerely sorry. I believe that he is really reformed, because he is 
 conscious of his delinquency. You are angry, I know ; justly angry, that too I know ; 
 but gentleness is most praiseworthy exactly where anger is most justifiable. You loved 
 the poor fellow, and I hope will love him again ; meanwhile, it is enough to yield to 
 intercession. Should he ever deserve it you may be angry again, and all the more 
 excusably by yielding now. Make some allowance for his youth, for his tears, for your 
 own kindly disposition. Do not torture him, lest you torture yourself as well, for it is a 
 torture to you when one of your kindly nature is angry. I fear you will think that I am 
 not asking but forcing you if I join my prayers to his ; I will, however, do so, and all the 
 more fully and unreservedly in proportion to the sharpness and severity with which I 
 took him to task, sternly threatening that I would never say a word for MTU again. 
 That I said to him because he needed to be well frightened; but I do not say it to you, 
 for perhaps I shall say a word for him again, and again gain my point ; provided only 
 my request be such as it becomes me to ask and you to grant. Farewell 1 " 
 
 BXCTmSUS XXIV. (pp. 175, 556). 
 THE HEBODS IN THE ACTS. 
 
 IF there be sufficient ground for the plausible conjecture which identifies Agrippa I. and 
 Cypros with the king and que*n who figure in the two following anecdotes of the Talmud,
 
 THE HEBOD3 IN THE ACTS. 735 
 
 we shall see that the part he had to play was not always an easy one, and even led to 
 serious complications. 
 
 L The Talmud relates that on one occasion, at a festival, a lizard was found in the 
 royal kitchen. It appeared to be dead, and if so the whole banquet would have become 
 ceremonially unclean. The king referred the question to the queen, and the queen to 
 Eabban Gamaliel. He asked whether it had been found in a warm or a cold place. "In a 
 warm place," they said. "Then pour cold water over it." They did so. The lizard 
 revived, and the banquet was pronounced clean. So that, the writer complacently adds, 
 the fortune of the entire festival depended ultimately on Eabban Gamaliel. 1 
 
 ii. The other story is more serious. It appears that at a certain Passover the king 
 and queen were informed by their attendants that two kinds of victims a lamb and a 
 kid either of which was legal had been killed for them, and they were in doubt as to 
 which of the two was to be regarded as preferable. The king, who considered that the 
 kid was preferable, and was less devoted to the Pharisees than his wife, sent to ask the 
 high priest Issachar of Kephar-Barcha'i, thinking that since he daily sacrificed victims, 
 he would be sure to know. Issachar, who was of the same haughty, violent, luxurious 
 temperament as all the numerous Sadducean high priests of the day, made a most con- 
 temptuous gesture in the king's face, and said that, if the kid was preferable, the lamb 
 would not have been ordained for use in the daily sacrifice. Indignant at his rudeness, 
 the king ordered his right hand to be cut off. Issachar, however, bribed the executioner 
 and got him to cut off the left hand. The king, on discovering the fraud, had the right 
 hand cut off also. 1 It is thus that the story runs in the Pesachlm, and further on it is 
 said that when the doubt arose the king sent to the queen, and the queen to the Rabban 
 Gamaliel, who gave the perfectly sensible answer that as either victim was legal, and as 
 the king and queen had been perfectly indifferent in giving the order for the Paschal 
 yktims to be slain, they could eat of the one which had been first killed. 3 
 
 As this story was not very creditable to Agrippa I., we find a sufficient reason tor the 
 ilence of Josephus in passing over the name of Issachar in his notices of the High 
 Priests. 4 His was not a name which could have sounded very agreeable in the ears of 
 Agrippa II. The elder Agrippa seems to have been tempted in this instance into a 
 violence which was not unnatural in one who had lived in the court of Tiberius, but 
 which was a rude interruption of his plan of pleasing the priestly party, while Cypros 
 took the Pharisees under he. special patronage. Issachar seems to have come between 
 Theophilus, son of Hanan, and Simon, son of Kanthera the Boethusian. 5 Whatever may 
 have been the tendencies of Cypros, and his own proclivities, it was important to 
 Agrippa that he should retain the support of the sacerdotal aristocrats ; and they were 
 well pleased to enjoy, in rapid succession, and as the appanage of half-a-dozen families, 
 the burdensome dignity of Aaron's successor. 
 
 The Pharisees, on the other hand, recounted with pleasure the fact that no sooner 
 had Agrippa arrived at Jerusalem than he caused to be suspended on the columns of the 
 oulam, or Temple portico, the chain of massive gold which he had received from Gaius as 
 an indemnification for his captivity ; 6 that he was most munificent in his presents to 
 the nation ; that he was a daily attendant at the Temple sacrifice ; that he had called 
 the attention of the Legate Petronius to the decrees of Claudius in favour of Jewish 
 privileges, and had thereby procured the reprimand and punishment of the inhabitants 
 
 i PesaeMm, t. 88, 2. 
 
 * Pesachim, t 57, 1. In KeriUth, t 28, 2, it is told with some variations, and the king Is called 
 , Jannaeus. It is, however, a fashion of the Talmud to give this name to Asmonsean kings (Deren- 
 iDourg, p. 211). May this wild story have been suggested by the indignation of the Jews against the 
 first High Priest who wore gloves to prevent his hands from being soiled ? 
 
 s Id. 88 ft. When I was present at the Samaritan passover on the summit of Mount Gerizim, 
 ix lambs and one kid were sacrificed. * Antt. xx. 10, 1. 
 
 Herod the Great had married a daughter of Boethus. 
 
 MiddOth, ill. 7. Josephus (Antt, xix. 9, 1) says that it wa huny " OTCT the treasury."
 
 736 APPENDIX. 
 
 of Dor, l who had insulted the Jews by erecting In their synagogue a statue of th 
 emperor. They had also told with applause that he carried his basket of first-fruits to 
 the Temple like any ordinary Israelite ; 2 and that although every one had to give way in 
 the streets to the king and his suite, yet Agrippa always yielded the right of road to a 
 marriage or funeral procession. 3 There were two stories on which they dwelt with 
 peculiar pleasure. One was that on a single day perhaps that of his arrival at 
 Jerusalem he offered a thousand holocausts, and that when they had been offered, a 
 poor man came with two pigeons. The priest refused this sacrifice, on the pretext that 
 on that day he had been bidden to offer none but royal victims ; but he yielded to the 
 poor man's earnest solicitation on being told that the pigeons were brought in fulfilment 
 of a vow that he would daily offer half the produce of his day's work ; and Agrippa 
 warmly approved of this disobedience of his orders. 4 On another occasion, at the Feast 
 of Tabernacles, he received from the hands of the High Priest the roll of the Law, and 
 without seating himself, read the Lesson for the day, which was Deuteronomy xvii. 
 14 20. When he came to the words, " Thou mayest not set a stranger over thee which 
 is not thy brother," the thought of his own Idumsean origin flashed across his mind, and 
 he burst into tears. But the cry arose on all sides, " Fear not, Agrippa ; thou art our 
 brother, thou art our brother." 6 
 
 There were other tendencies which would win for Agrippa the approval of the people 
 no less than that of the Pharisees. Such, for instance, were his early abolition of a 
 house-tax in Jerusalem, which had been felt to be particularly burdensome ; and his 
 construction of a new quarter of the Holy City, which was called Bezetha. 6 The Kabbis, 
 indeed, refused to accord to the new district the sanctity of the old, because it had not 
 been inaugurated by the presence of a king, a prophet, the Urim and Thummim, a 
 Sanhedrin of seventy-one, two processions, and a choir." It is far from improbable that 
 this addition to Jerusalem was mainly intended to strengthen its natural defences, and 
 that Agrippa had formed the secret intention of making himself independent of Home. 
 If so, his plans were thwarted by the watchful jealousy of Vibius Marsus, 8 who had 
 succeeded Petronius as Praefect of Syria. He wrote and informed the Emperor of the 
 suspicious proceedings of Agrippa, and an Imperial rescript commanded the suspension 
 of these building operations. Petronius had been on terms of intimacy with Agrippa, 
 but Marsus distrusted and bitterly offended him. 9 After the completion of the magni- 
 ficent theatre, and other buildings which he had presented to Berytus, he was visited by 
 a number of neighbouring princes Antiochus, King of Commagene, Sampsigeramus of 
 Emesa, Cotys of Lesser Armenia, Polemo of Pontus, and his brother Herod, King of 
 Chalcis. It is probable that these royal visits were not of a purely complimentary 
 character, but may have been the nucleus of a plot against the Koman power. If so, 
 their machinations were scattered to the winds by the contemptuous energy of the 
 Praefect, who felt a truly Koman indifference for the gilded impotence of these 
 Oriental vassals. As the gathering took place at Tiberias, he went thither, and Agrippa, 
 
 i Jos. Antt. xix. 6, 8. * Bikkurim, iii. 4 ; Derenbourg, p. 217. 
 
 Bab. KethubMth, 17, 1 ; Munk, Palest, p. 571. * Vayyikra-rabba, iii. 
 
 5 Sota, f. 41, 1, 2. Bat, as Derenbourg points out, there were not wanting some stern Rabbis 
 who unhesitatingly condemned this "flattery of the king." (See, too, Jost, Gesch. d. Judenthvmt, 
 420. It is not certain that the anecdote may not refer to Agrippa II.) In continuation of the story 
 about Babha Ben BuU's advice to Herod the Great to rebuild the Temple, the Talmud adds that the 
 Romans were by no means willing, but that the task was half done before the return of the 
 messenger, who had been purposely told to spend three years in his mission. Among other things 
 the Romans said, " If thou hast succeeded by violence at home, we have the genealogy here. Thou 
 art neither a kino, nor the son of a king, but a liberated slave " (Babha Bathra, f. 3, 2). 
 
 8 Josephus (B. J. v. 4, 2) says that this word means "New City"; but elsewhere (Antt. rii. 
 10, 2; 11, l)hu writes it BMh-Zttho, or "House of Olive-trees." In the Syriac version of Acts L 
 12, eXatwi', olive-yard, is rendered 3tth-Ztho ; and in B. J. ii. 19, 4, Josephus seems to draw a 
 distinction between Bezetha and the New City (Munk, Palest., p. 45). Derenbourg, however, holds 
 that Bezetha is a transliteration of the Chaldaic Bet!i Hadta, and that Josephus is right (Palest., 
 p. 218). 1 Jer. Sanhedr. i. 8 ; Jos. V. J. v. 4, 2. 
 
 * Jew. B. /. a. 11, 1 0. Jos. Antt. xix. 7, 2.
 
 THE HERODS IN THE ACTS. 73T 
 
 In whose character, as in that of all his family, there was a large vein of ostentation,* 1 
 went seven furlongs out of the city to meet him, with the five other kings in his chariot.' 
 Marsus did not like the look of this combination, and sent his servants to the kings withj 
 the cool order that they were all to make the best of their way at onco to their respective' 
 homes. It was in consequence of this deliberate insult that, after the death of Agrippa, 
 Claudius, in respect to his memory, and in consequence of a request which he had 1 
 received from him, displaced Marsus, and sent C. Cassius Longinus in his place. 3 
 
 AGRIPPA AND BEEENIOB. 
 
 Not a spark of true patriotism seems ever to have been kindled in the breast of 
 Agrippa II. He was as complete a renegade as his friend Josephus, 3 but without hi* 
 versatility and genius. He had passed all his early years in the poisoned atmosphere of 
 such coiTrts as those of Gaius and Claudius, and was now on excellent terms with Nero. 
 The mere fact that he should have been a favourite with the Messallinas, and Agrip- 
 pinas, and Poppneas, of a palace rife with the basest intrigues, is sufficient to condemn 
 him. His appointments to the High-priesthood were as bad as those of his predecessors, 
 and he incurred the displeasure of the Jews by the arbitrary rapidity of the constant 
 changes which he made. Almost the only specific event which marked his period of 
 royalty was a dispute about a view from a window. In a thoroughly unpatriotic and 
 irreverent spirit he had built a banquet-hall in Herod's palace at Jerusalem, which 
 overlooked the Temple courts. It was designed to serve the double purpose of gratifying 
 the indolent curiosity of his guests as they lay at table, by giving them the spectacle of 
 the Temple worship in its most sacred details, and also of maintaining a certain 
 espionage over the movements of the worshippers, which would at any moment enable 
 him to give notice to the Roman soldiers if he wished them to interfere. Indignant at 
 this instance of contemptible curiosity and contemptible treachery, the Jews built up a 
 counter wall to exclude his view. Agrippa, powerless to do anything himself, invoked 
 the aid of the Procurator. The wall of the Jews excluded not only the view of Agrippa, 
 but also that of the commandant in the tower of Antonia, and Festus ordered them to 
 pull it down. The Jews resisted this demand with their usual determined fury, and 
 Festus BO far gave way that he allowed them to send an embassy to Home to await the 
 decision of the Caesar. The Jews sent Ishmael Ben Phabi the high priest, Helkias the 
 treasurer, and other distinguished ambassadors, and astutely gaining the ear of Poppsea 
 who is believed to have been a proselyte, but if so, was a proselyte of whom the Jews 
 ought to have been heartily ashamed obtained a decision in their favour. Women like 
 Poppaea, pantomimists like Aliturus such were in theso days the defenders of the Temple 
 for the Jews against their hybrid kings ! We hear little more of Agrippa II. till the 
 breaking out of the war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem. As might have 
 been expected, ho, like Josephus. like Tiberius Alexander, and other eminent renegade*, 
 was found in the ranks of the Roman invaders, waging war on the Holy City. He 
 probably saw the Temple sink amid its consuming fires. Like Josephus he may have 
 watched from a Roman window the gorgeous procession in which the victor paraded the 
 sacred spoils of the Temple, while the wretched captives of his countrymen 
 
 " Swelled, slow-pacing, by the car's tall side, 
 The Stoic tyrant's philosophic pride." 
 
 After that he fell into merited obscurity, and ended a frivolous life by a dishonoured 
 old age. 
 
 1 Thus on a coin, engraved by Akerman, Numism. Tllustr., he is called 0<x<riXev? pc'yat. 
 
 Jos. Ant., xix. 8, 1. 
 
 * For instance, he changed the name of Caesarea Philippi to Neronias; stripped Judaea to 
 Ornament Berytus ; and even stooped to take the surname Mareiu, which is found oil one of his 
 coins (Jos. Anit. xs. 0, 4 ; Eckhel, Doct. Num. F{. iii. 493).
 
 738 APPENDIX. 
 
 Such was the prince who came to salute Festus, and he was accompanied by his sister, 
 who was unhappily notorious even among the too notorious ladies of rank in that evil 
 time. Berenice was the Lucrozia Borgia of the Herodian family. She was beautiful, 
 like all the princesses of her house. Before the age of sixteen she had been married to 
 her uncle Herod of Chalcis, and being left a widow before she was twenty, went to live 
 in Borne with her equally youthful brother. Her beauty, her rank, the splendour of her 
 jewels, the interest and curiosity attaching to her race and her house, made her a promi- 
 nent figure in the society of the capital ; and a diamond, however lustrous and valuable, 
 was enhanced in price if it was known that it had once sparkled on the finger of Berenice, 
 and had been a present to her from her brother. 1 The relations between the two gave 
 rise to the darkest rumours, which gained credence, because there was nothing to 
 contradict them in the bearing or character of the defamed persons. So rife indeed did 
 these stories become, that Berenice looked out for a new marriage. She contracted an 
 alliance with Polemo II., King of Cilicia, insisting, however, that he should save her from 
 any violation of the Jewish law by submitting to the rite of circumcision. 2 Circumcision, 
 not conversion, was all that she required. So true is the charge brought alike by St. 
 Paul in his Epistles, and by the writers of the Talmud, that the reason why the Jews 
 insisted upon circumcision was only that they might have whereof to glory in the flesh. 1 
 The lowering of the Gentile fasces in token of external respect was all that they cared 
 for, and when that was done, the Ger might go his own vile way not improbably to 
 Gehenna.* Circumcision to them was greater than all affirmative precepts, and was 
 therefore exalted above love to God or love to our neighbour. 5 No doubt it cost Polemo 
 something to accept concision, in order to satisfy the orthodox scrupulosity of an 
 abandoned Jewess ; but her wealth was an inducement too powerful to resist. It was 
 hardly likely that such a marriage could last. It was broken off very rapidly by the 
 elopement of Berenice, after which Polemo immediately repudiated every shadow and 
 semblance of allegiance to the Jewish religion, and Berenice returned to the house of her 
 brother, until her well-preserved but elderly beauty, added to the munificence of her 
 presents, first won the old Vespasian, and then his son Titus. 6 The conqueror of Judaea 
 was so infatuated by his love for its dishonoured princess that he took her with him to 
 Borne, and seriously contemplated making her a partner of his imperial throne.? But 
 this was more than the Bomans could stand, far gone as they were in servitude and 
 adulation. The murmurs which the rumoured match stirred up were so wrathful in their 
 indignation, that Titus saw how unsafe it would bo to wed a Jewess whose name had 
 been dragged through the worst infamy. He dismissed her invitus invitam and we 
 hear of her no more. Thus in the fifth generation did the sun of the Herodian house set 
 in obscure darkness, as it had dawned in blood ; and with it set also the older and purer 
 splendour of the Asmonaean princes. They had mingled the honourable blood of Judas 
 the Maccabee with that of Idumsean adventurers, and the inheritors of the grandest 
 traditions of Jewish patriotism were involved in a common extinction with the repre- 
 sentatives of the basest intrigues of Jewish degradation. 
 
 1 " Adamas nottissimns, et Berenices 
 
 In digito factus pretiosior ; hunc dedlt olim ' 
 Barbaras incestae, dedit hunc Agrippa sororl." 
 
 Juv. Sat. vi. 156; Jos. Antl. n. 6, S. 
 Jos. Antt. xx. 7, 8. 
 
 Gal. vi. 13. It was, of course, a Judaic triumph to make a king not only a Ger Thoshabh, or a 
 proselyte of the gate (Ex. xx. 14), but even a Ger hatsedek, " a proselyte of righteousness," or " of tho 
 Covenant." These latter were despised alike by Jews and GentUes (Suet. Claud. 25 ; Domit. 12 ; 
 Yebhamoth, xlvii. 4 ; see Wetstein on Matt, xxiii. 151 
 See McCaul, Old Paths, pp. 63 tq^. 
 
 * Nedarim, t. 82, c. 2. 
 
 Jos. Antt. XX. 7, | 8. 
 
 Boot. Tit 7 ; Tac. H. ii 81.
 
 PHBASEOLOGY OF THE EPHESIANg, 739 
 
 EXCURSUS XXV. (p. 637V 
 PHRASEOLOGY AND DOCTBINES or THE Erisrun TO 
 IT i admitted that there are some new and rare expressions in this Epistle ;* but they 
 are sufficiently accounted for by the idiosyncrasy of the writer, and the peculiarity of the 
 subjects with which he had to deal. It is monstrous to assume that, in the case of one so 
 fresh and eager as St. Paul, the vocabulary would not widely vary in writings extending 
 over nearly twenty years, and written under every possible variety of circumstances, to 
 very different communities, and in consequence of very different controversies. The 
 wide range of dissimilarity in thought and expression between Epistles of admitted 
 authenticity ought sufficiently to demonstrate the futility of overlooking broad probabili- 
 ties and almost universal testimony, because of peculiarities of which many are only 
 discoverable by a minute analysis. It must be remembered that at this period the 
 phraseology of Christianity was still in a plastic, it might almost be said in a fluid, 
 condition. No Apostle, no writer of any kind, contributed one tithe so much to its 
 ultimate cohesion and rigidity as St. PauL Are we then to reject this Epistle, and that 
 to the Colossians, on grounds so flimsy as the fact that in them for the first time he 
 speaks of the remission (a(ns, Eph. i. 7; CoL i. 14) instead of the prsetermission (irapeais, 
 llom. iii. 25) of sins; or that, writing to a Church predominantly Gentile, he says 
 " Greeks and Jews" (CoL iii. 11) instead of "Jews and Greeks" (Rom. L 16, &c.) ; or 
 that he uses the word "Church" in a more abstract and generic sense than in his former 
 writings ; or that he uses the rhetorical expression that the Gospel has been preached in 
 all the world (CoL i. 6, 23) ? By a similar mode of reasoning it would be possible to 
 prove in the case of almost every voluminous author in the world that half the works 
 attributed to him have been written by some one else. Such arguments only encumber 
 with useless d&yrit the field of criticism. There is indeed one very unusual expression, 
 the peculiarity of which has been freely admitted by all fair controversialists. It is the 
 remark that the mystery of Christ is now revealed " to the holy Apostles and Prophets" 
 (iii. 5). The Prophets (as in ii. 20; iv. 11) are doubtless those of the New Testament 
 those who had received from the Spirit His special gifts of illumination ; but the epithet 
 is unexpected. It can only be accounted for by the general dignity and fulness (the 
 o-efivonp) of the style in which the Epistle is written ; and the epithet, if genuine, is, it 
 need hardly be said, official and impersonal. 
 
 It would be much more to the purpose if the adverse critics could produce even one 
 decided instance of un-Pauline theology. The demonology of the Epistle is identical 
 with that of Paul's Rabbinic training. 2 The doctrine of original sin, even if it were by any 
 means necessarily deducible from Eph. ii. 3 which is not the case, since the word <vVei is 
 not identical with " by birth " is quite as clearly involved in the Epistles to the Romans 
 and Galatians. The descent of Christ into Hades is not necessarily implied in iv. 8; and 
 even if it were, the fact that St. Paul has not elsewhere alluded to it furnishes no shadow 
 of a proof that he did not hold it. The method of quoting Scripture is that of all Jewish 
 writers in the age of Paul, and the reminiscences of the Old Testament in iv. 8 and v. 14 
 (if the latter be a reminiscence) are scarcely more purely verbal than others which occur 
 in the Epistles of which no doubt has ever been entertained. On the other hand, it is 
 frankly admitted that in all essential particulars the views of the Epistle are distinctly 
 Pauline. The relations of Christianity to Judaism ; the universality of human corrup- 
 tion through sin ; the merging of heathenism and Judaism in the higher unity of 
 Christianity ; the prominence given to faith and love ; the unconditional freedom of 
 
 1 Such aTraf Arydfifi'a, Or unusual expressions, &S TO. inovpavui, KoayxoKparopet 7ro\vjrai.<i.\gt 
 
 iroli)<rtf , o</>0op<rto, 6ioj3oA<x. 
 
 ' Thacktfyhit an association of demons, and Isbalganith (see BeracMtA, L 61, 1).
 
 740 APPENDIX. 
 
 grace; the unserviceableness and yet the moral necessity of good works ; are In absolute 
 accordance with the most fundamental conceptions of St. Paul's acknowledged writings. 
 If some of these great truths, of theology here receive a richer, more mature, and more 
 original development this is only, what we should expect from the power of a mind which 
 never ceased to grow in grace and wisdom, and which regarded growth in grace and wisdom 
 as the natural privilege of a Christian soul. On the other hand, we might well be amazed 
 if the first hundred years after the death of Christ produced a totally unknown writer 
 who, assuming the name of Paul, treats the mystery which it was given him to reveal 
 with a masterly power which the Apostle himself rarely equalled, and most certainly 
 never surpassed. Let any one study the remains of the Apostolic Fathers, and he may 
 well be surprised at the facility with which writers of the Tubingen school, and their 
 successors, assume the existence of Paula who lived unheard of and died unknown, 
 though they were intellectually and spiritually the equals, if not the superiors, of St. 
 Paul himself ! In no single Epistle is the point of view so clear, so supreme, so final 
 in no other Epistle of the Homologoumena is the doctrine so obviously the outcome and 
 issue of truths which before had been less fully and profoundly enunciated so undeniably 
 the full consummate flower from germs of which we have, as it were, witnessed the 
 planting. At supreme epochs of human enlightenment whole centuries of thought seem 
 to separate the writings of a few years. The questions which occupy the Apostle in the 
 Thessalonians and Galatians seem to lie indefinitely far behind the goal which his thoughts 
 have now attained. In earlier Epistles he was occupied in maintaining the freedom of 
 the Gentiles from the tyrannous narrowness of Jewish sacerdotalism ; here, on the other 
 hand, he is dwelling on the predestined grandeur of the equal and universal Church. 
 In the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians he has founded the claims of Christianity 
 on "a philosophy of the history of religion," by showing that Christ is the Second Adam, 
 and the promised seed of Abraham ; here he contemplates a scheme predestined before 
 the ages of earth began, and running through them as an increasing purpose, so that aeon 
 after aeon revealed new forms and hues of the richly-varied wisdom, and the Gentiles 
 (KOI v/xeis, i. 13) as well as the Jews are included in the predestined election (e/cXrjpu^ev, 
 irpoopio-BevTfs, i. 11) to the purchased possession (n-epuronjais, 14). And not to exhaust, 
 which would be indeed impossible, the manifold aspects of thia so-called "colourless" 
 Epistle, the manner in which it expresses the conception of the quickening of spiritual 
 death by union with the Risen Christ (ii. 1 6) ; the present realisation, the immanent 
 consciousness of communion with God ; the all-pervading supremacy of God in Christ ; 
 the importance of pure spiritual knowledge ; the dignity given to the Church as the 
 house (ii. 20-22), the body (iv. 1216) and the bride (v. 2527) of Christ, all mark it 
 out as the most sublime, the most profound, and, if I may use the expression, the most 
 advanced and final utterance of that mystery of the Gospel which it was given to St. Paul 
 for the first time to proclaim in all its fulness to the Gentile world. 1 It is not surprising 
 that when these truths had once found utterance they should have had their influence 
 on the teachings of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews and upon St. Peter and 
 St. John ; nor is this any ground whatever, but rather the reverse, for looking with 
 suspicion on the authenticity of the Epistle. 8 
 
 1 Entirely an I disagree with Pflelderer, I have received great help from his PBwHnfemws (B. T. 
 H. 162193) In the study of this Epistle. - 
 
 2 See 1 Pet. i. 14 (Eph. iv. 14) ; 1 Pet. i. 20 (Eph. 1. 4) ; 1 Pet i. 7 (Eph. 1. 6) ; 15 (Eph. 111. 5) ; 
 Si. 9 (Eph. 1. 14) ; 1. 3 (Eph. i. 17) ; U. 11 (Eph. II. 3) ; lii. 7 (Eph. tit 6) ; v. 10 (Eoh. Iv. 2), &C. See 
 Webs, Petrintech. Lehrbegr. 434, 

 
 THE LIBERATION OF ST. PAUL. 741 
 
 -v 
 
 " 
 
 EXCURSUS XXVL (p. 649). 
 EVIDENCE AS TO THE LIBERATION OF ST. PAU&I 
 
 THE chief passages on the remaining life of St. Paul which have much historic importance 
 are the following : 
 
 I. Clemens Romanus, possihly a personal friend and fellow- worker of St. Paul, if he 
 be the Clement mentioned in PhiL iv. 3, 1 but certainly a Bishop of Rome, and a writer of 
 the first century, says that : 
 
 "Because of envy, Paul also obtained tho prize of endurance, having seven times 
 borne chains, having been exiled, and having been stoned. After he had preached the 
 Gospel both in the East and in the "West, he won the noble renown of his faith, having 
 taught righteousness to the whole world, and having come to the limit of the "West, and 
 borne witness 2 before the rulers. Tims he was freed from the world, and went into the 
 holy place, having shown himself a pre-eminent example of endurance." 3 
 
 H. The fragment of the Muratorian Canon (about A.D. 170), though obscure and 
 corrupt, and only capable of uncertain conjectural emendation and interpretation, yet 
 seems on the whole to imply the fact of "Paul's setting forth from the city on his way to 
 Spain."* 
 
 III. Eusebius, in the fourth century, says : 
 
 "Then, after his defence, there is a tradition that the Apostle again set forth to the 
 ministry of his preaching, and having a second time entered the same city [Rome], waa 
 perfected by his martyrdom before him [Nero]." 5 
 
 IV. Chrysostom (died A.D. 407) says : 
 
 "After he had been in Rome, he again went into Spain. But whether he thence 
 returned into those regions [the East] we do not know." 6 
 
 V. St. Jerome (died A.D. 420) says that "Paul was dismissed by Nero, that he might 
 preach Christ's Gospel also in the regions of the West." 1 
 
 I take no notice of the inscription supposed to have been found in Spain (Gruter, pp. 
 238 9), which gratefully records that Nero has purged the province of brigands, and of 
 the votaries of a new superstition, because even on the assumption that it is genuine it 
 has no necessary bearing on the question. Nor does any other writer of the least 
 authority make any important contribution to the question, since it cannot be regarded 
 as adding one iota of probability to the decision to quote the general assertions of Cyril 
 of Jerusalem and Theodoret that St. Paul visited Spain ; nor can it be taken as a 
 counter-evidence that Origen does not mention Spain when he remarks " that he carried 
 the Gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum, and was afterwards martyred in Rome in the 
 
 1 Wo can only say that this is an ancient and not impossible tradition (see Lightfoot, 
 Philippians, pp. ICG 109). 
 
 2 The word at this period did not necessarily mean "suffered martyrdom," but probably 
 connoted it. 
 
 3 Ata <Jrj\oi> [KCM o] HauAos inrofjLOinjf fipafieiov vjrecrxev, iirrajtif Scoria <op<ra9, <j>yya5cv9cis, 
 \i0acr0eis, K-rjfivf yevQiievos tv re TJJ afaroAjJ Kai [777] Svtrei., TO yewaiov Trjs iriareut ai'Tov Xe'o? efAajScv, 
 SiKaiotrvvyv SiSafas o\<a T<p KO<T/J.O> Kai eiri To Tp(ia TTJS Sv<re<as el\9uiv, Kai ^oprvp>]<ra eiri riav TJyot'fieVajp 
 oimos aTnjAAayij TOU *6o>iov icai is rov Hyiov TOTTQV fnopevSy, uiro/xovijs yevo^fvot ftfyiarros VTroypafc/idf. 
 Ep. 1 ad Cor. 5 (see Lightfoot, Epistles of Clement, pp. 4652). 
 
 * " Lucas obtime Theophile comprindit quia sub praesentia ejus singula gerebantur, sicuti et 
 semote passionern Petri evidenter declarat, sed profectionem Pauli ab urbo ad Spaniam proflcis- 
 centis . . ." 
 
 s Tore fuv oZv a.no\oyt]<raji.evov, aSflir eiri Tip TOU KrjpvyjiaTOS SLOLKOVULV \6yps ex. ei oretAatrflai TOJ 
 airoVToA.oi', Seurepov 8* 5ri/3aiTa Tfj avrfj iroAei T<3 tear OVTOV (Ne'pwi'a) TcAciwOijyat fiaprvpiio (Euseb. 
 H. E. ii. 22, 25). He quotes Dionysius' of Corinth to show that Peter and Paul had both been at 
 Rome (id. t&. 25), which is also stated by Ignatius (ad Rom. iv.). 
 
 6 MeTa TO yeVco-^ai et> Pcojip iraXiv til TT)V ~S.Tra.vuiv enirfi^Sev ti J tKttOfv wdXaf lj raura ri fie (HI 
 OUK l<rii.ev (Clirys. ad 2 Tim. iv. 20). 
 
 7 " Sciendum est. . . . Puuluin a Nerone dimissum nt evangelium Christi in occidentis 
 quoque partibus praedicaret" (Jer. Catal. Scrip.). See also Tert. Scorp. 15, De Praetor. 89; Lactaut. 
 De Mart. Persw. S. .-,- -- ,..- '
 
 742 APPENDIX. 
 
 time of Nero." Even as late as the fourth century, no writer ventures to do more than 
 allude distantly to the supposed fact in a manner which shows that not a single detail on 
 the subject existed, and that tradition had nothing tangible to add to the data furnished 
 by the New Testament, or the inferences to which it led. On the other hand, the 
 testimony of the pseudo-Dionysius (A.D. 170) that St. Peter and St. Paul, after founding 
 the Church of Corinth, went to Italy apparently together (o^do-e) and were there 
 martyred about the same time, is, so far as it goes, somewhat unfavourable to the 
 Spanish journey, and at any rate proves that even in the second century tradition had 
 buried its ignorance in the shifting sand of erroneous generalities. 
 
 If we be asked what is the historic value of this evidence, we must answer that it is 
 very small indeed. The testimony of Clement, assuming it to be genuine, would be 
 important from his early date if it were not so entirely vague. It is a purely rhetorical 
 passage, in which it seems not impossible that he means to compare St. Paul to the sun 
 rising in the east and setting in the west. The expression that " he taught righteousness 
 to the whole world " shows that we are here dealing with enthusiastic phrases rather 
 than rigid facts. The expression "having come to the limit of the "West" is unfavourable 
 to a Spanish journey. "The limit of the West," though undoubtedly it would mean 
 Spain to an author who was writing from Rome, if he were speaking in plain and lucid 
 prose, has not necessarily any such meaning in a glowing comparison, least of all on the 
 hypothesis that the native place of the writer was Philippi. If, however, Spain is 
 intended, and if the word " bearing witness " (jmapTvpjjo-as) means martyrdom, then the 
 author, taken literally, would imply that St. Paul perished in Spain. The argument 
 that "before the rulers " must be a reference to Helius and Polycletus, or Tigellinus and 
 Nymphidius Sabinus, or two other presidents left to act as regents during Nero's absence 
 in Greece, is a mere gossamer thread of attenuated inference. The authority of St. 
 Clement, then, must be set aside as too uncertain to be of decisive value.* 
 
 Nor is the sentence in the second-century Canon discovered by Muratori at Milan ol 
 any great value. The verb which is essential to the meaning has to be supplied, and it 
 is even possible that the writer may have intended to quote Luke's silence as to any 
 Spanish journey to prove that the tradition respecting it which would have been 
 naturally suggested by Bom. xv. 24 had no authority in its favour. 
 
 Eusebius, indeed, is more explicit, but, on the one hand, he lived so late that hia 
 testimony, unless supported by reference to more ancient authorities, is of no importance ; 
 and on the other hand, he is so far from following his usual habit of quoting any 
 authority for hisr assertion, that he distinctly ascribes it to tradition. He merely 
 observes that " it is said," and then proceeds to support the probability of this tradition 
 by an extraordinary misconception of 2 Tim. iv. 16, 17, in which he founds an argument 
 for the Apostle's second imprisonment on the grounds that he spoke of deliverance from 
 the first when he said, "I was saved from the mouth of the lion." His testimony is 
 rendered the more worthless because in his Chronicon he misdates by nearly ten years 
 the time of the first imprisonment, and his erroneous inference from 2 Tim. seems to 
 show that the floating rumour was founded on a mere hypothesis suggested by the 
 Epistles themselves. 3 The real proofs of St. Paul's liberation are, as we have seen, of a 
 different character. 
 
 1 See however Dollinger, First Age, 78, seq. ; Westcott, Hist, of Canon, p. 479 ; and LigMfoot, 
 Ep. of Clement, p. 608, who quotes Strabo, ii. 1, Veil. Paterc. i. 2, to show tliat Spain la probably 
 meant. 
 
 * He makes Paul arrive at Borne A.D. 65.
 
 OF THE PASTOBAL EPISTLES. 
 
 EXOUBSUS XXVIL (p. 649). 
 
 THE GENUINENESS OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES. 
 
 As our knowledge of the life of St. Paul, after his first imprisonment, depends entirely 
 on the decision as to the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, I will here briefly examine 
 the evidences. 
 
 I. Turning first to the external evidence in their favour, we find an almost indis- 
 putable allusion to the First Epistle to Timothy in Clement of Rome. 1 That they were 
 universally accepted by the Church in the second century is certain, since they are found 
 in the Peshito Syriac, mentioned in the Muratorian Canon, and quoted by Ignatius, 
 Polycarp, Hegesippus, Athenagoras, Irenseus, Clemens of Alexandria, Theophilus of 
 Antioch, and perhaps by Justin Martyr. After the second century the testimonies are 
 unhesitating and unbroken, and Eusebius, in the fourth century, reckons them among 
 the homologomena or acknowledged writings of St. PauL With the exception of 
 Marcion, and Tatian, who rejected the two Epistles to Timothy, there seems to have 
 been no doubt as to their genuineness from the first century down to the days of Schmidt 
 and Schleiermacher. On what grounds Marcion rejected them we are not informed. It 
 is possible that Baur may be right in the supposition that he was not aware of their 
 existence. 3 But this would be no decisive argument against them, since the preservation 
 and dissemination of purely private letters, addressed to single persons, must have been 
 much more precarious and slow than that of letters addressed to entire Churches. But 
 in such a case Marcion's authority is of small value. He dealt with the Scriptures on 
 purely subjective grounds. His rejection of the Old Testament, and of all the New 
 Testament except ten Epistles of St. Paul, and a mutilated Gospel of St. Luke, shows 
 that he made no sort of scruple about excluding from his canon any book that militated 
 against his peculiar dogmas. Nor is Tatian's authority of more weight. The only 
 reason why he accepted as genuine the Epistle of Titus while he rejected those of 
 Timothy, is conjectured to have been that in the Epistle to Titus the phase of incipient 
 Gnosticism which meets with the condemnation of the Apostle is more distinctly 
 identified with Jewish teaching. 3 
 
 But perhaps it may be argued that the Pastoral Epistles were forged in the second 
 century, and that the earlier passages which are regarded as allusions to them, or 
 quotations from them, are in reality borrowed from Clemens, Polycarp, and Hegesippus, 
 by the writer, who wished to enlist the supposed authority of St. Paul in condemnation 
 of the spreading Gnosticism of the second century. No one would argue that there is a 
 merely accidental connexion between, "Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and 
 oppositions [or antitheses] of the knowledge [Gnosis] which is falsely so called" in 
 1 Tim. vi. 20, and "the combination of impious error arose by the fraud of false 
 teachers [e-repoSiSao-KcuW, comp. 1 Tim. L 3, cTcpo<.5aa-icaAeii>] who henceforth attempted to 
 preach their science talsely so called " in Hegesippus. 4 But Baur argues that the forger 
 of the Epistle stole the term from Hegesippus, and that it was aimed at the Marcionites, 
 who are especially indicated in the word "Antitheses," which is the name of a book 
 written by Marcion to point out the contradiction between the Old and New Testament, 
 and between those parts of the New Testament which he rejected and those which he 
 retained.* Now, " Antitheses " may mean simply " oppositions," as it is rendered in our 
 version, and the injunction is explained by Chrysostom and Theophylact, and even by 
 
 1 " Let us then approach Him In holiness of soul, lifting to Him pure and unstained hands." 
 Sp. 1, ad Cor. 29 ; cf. 1 Tim. iL 8. Baur, PastorcJbrieft, p. 138. 
 
 8 Tit i. 10, 14 ; iii. 9. Tatian founded a sect of Gnostic Eucratites towards the close of the 
 second century. Ap. Euseb. E. E. iii. 32. 
 
 5 Tort. Adv. Marc. I. 19 ; iv. &c. Baur also (Paul. ii. Ill) dwells on the use of the word 
 " sound," ' wholesome," by Hegesippus and iu 1 Tim. L 10.
 
 744 APPENDIX. 
 
 De Wette, to mean that Timothy is not to embroil himself in idle and fruitless con- 
 troversies. But even, supposing that "antilogies" are meant, what shadow of proof is 
 there that nothing of the kind existed among the "vain babblings" of Essenian specula- 
 tion? " Hegesippus, " says Baur, 1 "considering his Ebionite views, can scarcely have 
 drawn from an Epistle supposed to be by Paul." It is difficult to believe that this 
 remark is perfectly serious; 2 but if it be, I would ask, Is it not indefinitely more 
 improbable that the falsarius 3 would instantly condemn his own work as spurious by 
 interpolating marked passages from Clemens, Polycarp, and Hegesippus, which hia 
 instructed readers would be sure to recognise, and which would then bo absolute!}' fatal 
 to the success of his design ? 
 
 II. Let us, then, pass to the internal evidence. It is argued that these three 
 Epistles cannot have been written by St. Paiil (1) Because " they stand far below the 
 originality, the wealth of thought, and the whole spiritual substance and value of 
 the authentic Epistles;" 4 (2) Because they abound in un-Pauliue words and phrases; 
 (3) Because their theology differs from that of the Apostle ; (4) Because they deal with 
 conditions of ecclesiastical organisation which had no existence till long after the ago of 
 the Apostles ; (5) Because they betray allusions to later developments of Gnostic 
 heresy : and these objections we will briefly consider. 
 
 (1) Now as to the style of these Epistles, we admit at once that it is inferior to that 
 of St. Paul's greatest productions. For eloquence, compression, depth, passion, and 
 logical power, they cannot for one moment be compared to the letters to the Corinthians, 
 Homans, Galatians, or Ephesians. St. Paul is not here at his best or greatest. " His 
 restless energies," says Alford, 5 " are still at work; but those energies have changed their 
 complexion ; they have passed from the dialectic character of his earlier Epistles, 
 from the wonderful capacity of intricate combined rationalism of his subsequent Epistles, 
 to the urging, and repeating, and dilating upon truths which have been the food of 
 his life ; there is a resting on former conclusions, a constant citation of the temporis acti, 
 which lets us into a most interesting phase of the character of the great Apostle. Wo 
 see here rather the succession of brilliant sparks than the steady flame ; burning words 
 indeed and deep pathos, but not the flower of his firmness as in his discipline of tho 
 Galatians ; not the noon of his bright, warm eloquence, as in the inimitable Psalm of 
 Love." 6 
 
 But in what way does this invalidate their authenticity ? Wo entirely dissent from 
 Baur's exaggerated depreciation of then* value ; if we admitted that they were as meagre 
 of contents, as colourless in treatment, as deficient in motive and connexion, as full of 
 monotony, repetition, and dependence, as he asserts what then? Must a writer be always 
 at his greatest ? Does not the smallest knowledge of literary history prove at once that 
 writers are liable to extraordinary variations of literary capacity ? Do not their shorter 
 and less important works offer in many cases a most singular contrast to their more 
 elaborate compositions ? Are all the works of Plato of equal value ? Do we find in the 
 Epinomis the grandeur and profundity which mark the Phaedo and the Tkeaetetus f Is 
 the Leges as rich in stylo as the Phaedrus ? Is there no difference in manner between the 
 Annals of Tacitus and the dialogue De Oratoribusf Was it the same hand which wrote 
 
 Paul. ii. 101. 
 
 * Davidson freely admits that "there Is no great difficulty In supposing that he read the 
 Pastoral Epistles written in Paul's name, and remembered some of their expressions " (Introd. 
 ii. 181). 
 
 3 Admitting that " pseudonymity and literary deception " were regarded in antiquity as very 
 different things, I would willingly avoid the word "forger " if there were auy other convenient word 
 which could be substituted for it. I quite concede to Do Wette, Schloiermacher, Baur, &c., that 
 the word connotes much more than it ought to do, as applied to a writer of the first two centuries, 
 and that " the forging of such Epistles must not be judged according to the modern standard of 
 literary honesty, but according to the spirit of antiquity, which attached no such definite value as 
 we do to literary property, and regarded the thing much more than the person " .(Baur, Paul. 
 U. 110). * Baur, Paul. ii. 100. * Greek Ttst. iii. 83. 6 1 Cor. xiil
 
 GENUINENESS OF THE PASTOBAL EPISTLES. 745 
 
 Love's Labour't Lost and Hamlet? Would any one who read the more prosaic parts of the 
 Paradise Regained recognise the poet of the first or sixth books of the Paradise Lostf 
 IB the style of Burke in the Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful the same as his style in 
 the Essay on the French Revolution f It would be quite superfluous to multiply 
 instances. If it be asserted that the Pastoral Epistles are valueless, or unworthy of 
 their author, we at once join issue with the objectors, and, Independently of our own 
 judgment, we say that, in that case, they would not have deceived the critical intuition 
 of centuries of thinkers, of whom many were consummate masters of literary expression. 
 If, on the other hand, it be merely contended that the style lacks the verve and passion 
 of the earlier Epistles, we reply that this is exactly what we should expect. Granted that 
 " it is not the object of this, as of preceding Epistles, to develop fully some essentially 
 Pauline idea which has still to vindicate itself, and on which the Christian consciousness and 
 life are to be formed, but rather to apply the contents of Christian doctrine to practical lifo 
 in its varying circumstances," we reply that nothing could be more natural. Granted 
 that, unlike all the other Epistles, they have no true organic development ; that they 
 do not proceed from one root-idea which penetrates the whole contents, and binds all 
 the inner parts in an inner unity, because the deeper relations pervade the outward dis- 
 connectedness ; that no one creative thought determines their contents and structure ; 
 that they exhibit no genuine dialectic movement in which the thought possesses 
 sufficient inherent force to originate all the stages of its development ; J granted, I say 
 and it is a needlessly large concession that this depth of conception, this methodical 
 development, this dialectic progress, are wanting in these three letters, we entirely 
 refuse to admit that this want of structural growth belies their Pauline origin. It is 
 little short of absurd to suppose that every one of St. Paul's letters however brief, 
 however casual, however private must have been marked by the same features as the 
 Epistles to the Romans or the Galatians. I venture to say that every objection of this 
 kind falls at once to the ground before the simple observation of the fact that these were 
 not grand and solemn compositions dealing with the great problems which were rending 
 the peace of the assembled Churches before which they would be read, but ordinary 
 private letters, addressed by an elder and a superior to friends whom he had probably 
 known from early boyhood, and who were absolutely familiar with the great main 
 features of his teaching and belief. Add the three circumstances that one of them waa 
 written during the cruel imprisonment in which his life was drawing to its close ; that 
 they were probably written by his own hand, and not with the accustomed aid of an 
 amanuensis ; 2 and that they were certainly written in old age, and we shall at once see 
 how much there is which explains the general peculiarities of their style, especially in 
 its want of cohesion and compression. There are in these Epistles inimitable indications 
 that we are reading the words of an old man. There is neither senility nor garrulity, 
 but tliore is the dignity and experience which marks thejttcwrtda senectua. 3 The digres- 
 siveness becomes more diffuse, the generalities more frequent, the repetitions more 
 observable. 4 Formulae are reiterated with an emphasis which belongs less to the 
 necessities of the present than to the reminiscences of the past. Divergences into 
 personal matters, when he is writing to Timothy, who had so long been his bosom com- 
 panion, become more numerous and normal. 5 And yet it is impossible not to feel that a 
 
 1 Baur, Paul. ii. 107. 
 
 The Epistle to the Galatians and the concluding doxology of the Epistle to the Romans wera 
 also autographic ; and Dean Alford than whom few men have ever been more closely acquainted 
 with the style of the Apostle in all its peculiarities has pointed out a series of resemblances between 
 these writings and the Pastoral Epistles (Greek Test. iii. 86). 
 
 * Even when he wrote the Epistle to Philemon he calls himself Paul the Aged, and he had gone 
 through much since then. Supposing him to have been converted at the age of thirty, he would now 
 have been nearly sixty, and could hardly have seemed otherwise than aged, considering the illnesses 
 and trials which had shattered a weak and nervous frame. 
 
 * ITim. i.15; ii. 4 6 ; UL 16, &c. ; 2 Tim. I. 9; ii. 11 18 ; Tit. i M; U. 11; iii. 8c. . 
 
 * 1 Tim. L 11, aa.; 2 Tim. i. 11, seqq.; lft> <'</<<; iv. 0, ;.>, - 
 
 26
 
 746 APPENDIX. 
 
 Paul is still the writer. There are Sashes of the deepest feeling, outbursts of the most 
 intense expression. There is rhythmic movement and excellent majesty in the doxo- 
 1 logics, and the ideal of a Christian pastor is drawn not only with an unfaltering hand, but 
 'with a beauty, fulness, and simplicity, which a thousand years of subsequent experience 
 have enabled no one to equal, much less to surpass. In these Epistles direct logical 
 controversy is to a great extent neglected as needless. All that the Apostle had to say 
 In the way of such reasoning had probably been said to his correspondents, in one form 
 or other, again and again. For them, as entrusted with the supervision of important 
 Christian communities, it was needless to develop doctrines with which they were 
 familiar. It was far more necessary to warn them respecting the fatal moral tendencies 
 in which heresies originated, and the fatal moral aberrations in which they too often 
 issued. 
 
 And while we are on this subject of style, how much is there which we must at once 
 see to be favourable to the authenticity of these writings I Take the First Epistle to 
 Timothy alone, which is more seriously attacked than the other two, and which is 
 supposed to drag down its companions by the evidence of its spuriousness. Do we not 
 find in it abundant traces of a familiar style ? Is it even conceivable that a forger would 
 have actually begun with an anakolutlwn or unfinished construction? Such sentences 
 abound in the style of St. Paul, and to imitate them with perfect naturalness would be 
 no easy task. But even supposing the possibility of imitation, would a forger have 
 started off with one ? Again, it would be very easy to caricature or clumsily imitate the 
 digressive manner which we have attributed to familiarity and age ; but to reproduce it 
 so simply and naturally as it here appears would require supreme literary accomplish- 
 ment. Would an imitator have purposely diverged from St. Paul's invariable salutation 
 by the insertion of " mercy" between " grace " and " peace " ? It is easy to understand 
 on psychological grounds that St. Paul might call himself " the chief of sinners " (i. 15) ; 
 but would a devoted follower have thus written of him ? Would he purposely and con- 
 , tinuatty have lost the main thread of his subject as at ii. 3, 7 ? A writer with a firm grasp 
 ' of truths which he knows to be complementary to each other would never hesitate at any 
 merely apparent contradiction of his previous opinions ; still less would he hesitate to 
 modify those opinions in accordance with circumstances ; but would a forger have been 
 so bold as apparently to contradict in ii. 15 what St. Paul had taught in 1 Cor. vii. ? 
 Would he be skilful enough to imitate the simple and natural manner in which, more 
 than once, the Apostle has resumed his Epistle after seeming to be on the point of ending 
 it, as at iii. 14, 15 ? St. Paul, like most supremely noble writers, is quite indifferent to 
 confusion of metaphors ; but would an imitator be likely to follow him with such lordly 
 indifference as at vi. 19 ? In writing to familiar friends, nothing is more natural than the 
 perfectly casual introduction of minute and unimportant particulars. There is nothing 
 like this in St. Paul's other letters, not even in that to Philemon, and therefore a forger 
 would have had no model to copy. How great a literary artist, then, must have been the 
 forger who writing with some theory of inspiration, and under the shadow of a great 
 name, and with special objects in view could furnish accidental minutiae so natural, sa 
 interesting, and even so pathetic as that in 1 Tim. v. 23, or introduce, by way of precaution, 
 such particulars "unexampled in the Apostle's other writings, founded on no incident, 
 tending to no result" as the direction to Timothy to bring with him to Rome "the 
 cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments." It 
 eems to me that forgery, even under the dominant influence of one impressive personality 
 and one supreme idea, is by no means the extraordinarily easy and simple thing which it 
 appears to be to the adherents of the Tubingen criticism. It is a comparatively simple 
 matter to pass off imitations of a Clemens Komanus or an Ignatius, but it is hardly likely 
 that the world would be long deceived by writings palmed off upon it as those of a Milton 
 till less of a St. Paul.
 
 GENUINENESS OP THE PABTOBAL EPISTLES. 747 
 
 (2) It ia said they abound in unusual, isolated, and un-Pauliue expressions. Among 
 'these are "It is a faithful saying," 1 "piety, 5 ' and "piously" (cvo-e'/Seia, ev</Jw), found 
 i eight times in these Epistles, and nowhere else except in 2 Pet. ; 2 the metaphor of 
 
 " wkolesomeness " (i/yirj?, vyuuVeiv), applied to doctrines nine times in these Epistles, and 
 not elsewhere ; 3 the use of &t<nr6rrit " Lord " for Kvpivt " master " ; 4 the use of apvct<r0a " to 
 [deny " for the renunciation of true doctrine ; and of iropatTeio-flai " to avoid," of which the 
 latter is, however, used by Paul in his speech before Festus, and which, as well as 
 irpoae'xeiv, with a dative in the sense of "attend to," he very probably picked up in inter- 
 course with St. Luke, to whom both words are familiar. 5 No one, I think, will be 
 seriously startled by these unusual phrases, nor will they shake our belief in the genuine- 
 ness of the Epistles when we recall that there is not a single Epistle of St. Paul in which 
 these hapax legomena, or isolated expressions, do not abound. Critics who have searched 
 minutely into the comparative terminology of the New Testament Scriptures, tell us 
 there are no less than 111 peculiar terms in the Epistle to the Romans, 186 in the two 
 Epistles to the Corinthians, 57 and 54 respectively in the short Epistles to the Galatians 
 and Philippians, 6 even in the few paragraphs addressed to Philemon. It is not therefore 
 in the least degree surprising that there should be 74 in the First Epistle to Timothy, 67 
 in the Second, and 13 in that to Titus. Still less shall we be surprised when we examine 
 them. St. Paul, it must be remembered, was the main creator of theological language. 
 In the Pastoral Epistles he is dealing with new circumstances, and new circumstances 
 would inevitably necessitate new terms. Any one who reads the list of unusual expres- 
 sions in the Epistles to Timothy will see at once that the large majority of them are 
 directly connected with the new form of error with which St. Paul had recently been 
 called upon to deal. Men who are gifted with a vivid power of realisation are peculiarly 
 1 liable to seize upon fresh phrases which embody their own thoughts and convictions, and 
 these phrases are certain to occur frequently at particular periods of their lives, and to be 
 varied from time to time. 6 This is simply a matter of psychological observation, and is 
 quite sufficient to account for the expressions we have mentioned, and many more. We 
 can have little conception of the plasticity of language at its creative epoch, and we must 
 never forget that St. Paul had to find the correct and adequate expression for conceptions 
 which as yet were extremely unfamiliar. Every year would add to the vocabulary, 
 which must at first have been more or less tentative, and the harvest of new expressions 
 would always be most rich where truths, already familiar, were brought into collision 
 with heresies altogether new. The list of hapax legomena in the note 7 are all due, not to 
 the difference of authorship, but to the exigencies of the times. 
 
 (3) It would be a much more serious it would indeed be an all but fatal objection 
 to the authenticity of these Epistles, if it could be proved that their theology differs from 
 that of Paul. But a very little examination will show that there is no such contradiction 
 
 Tim. 1. 15; ill. 1 ; iv. 9; 2Tim. 11. 11 ; Tit ffl. 8. 
 
 *l\ Tim. ii. 2 ; iii. 16 ; iv. 7 ; vi. 11 ; 2 Tim. iii. 5, 12 ; Tit. t. 1 ; ii 12. Pfleiderer suggests that 
 this word ruo-e'/Seia may have been taken as the fundamental idea of the Christian holy life as the 
 word " faith " became gradually externalised. 
 
 s 1 Tim. i. 10 ; vi. 3, 4 ; 2 Tim. i. 13 ; iv. 3 ; Tit. 1. 9, 13 ; ii. 1, 8. And, as a natural antithesis, 
 yoyvpoiva and vo&tiv are applied to false doctrine. * 1 Tim. vi. 1, 2 ; 2 Tim. ii. 21 ; Tit. ii. 9. 
 
 * Alford, l.c. Can the use of 8e<riror>j instead of xvpiof be due to the literary inconvenience 
 which was gradually felt to arise from the fact that the latter word was more and more incessantly 
 employed as the title of our Lord Jesus Christ ? 
 
 I feel convinced that the Tubingen methods applied to the writings of Mr. Carlyle (for 
 instance) or Mr. Ruskin, would prove in the most triumphant manner that some of their writings 
 were forgeries (a) from their resemblance to, (/S) from their dissimilarity from, their other writings. 
 But as Dean Alford happily says, " In a fresh and vigorous style there will ever be (so to speak) 
 librations over any rigid limits of habitude which can be assigned ; and such are to be judged of, 
 not by their mere occurrence or number, but by their subjective character being or not being in 
 accordance with the writer's well-known characteristics " (Test. iii. 54). 
 
 1 yeveoAoyicu, 1 Tim. i. 4, Tit. iii. 9 ; ^aratoXoyos, IJTim. i. 6, Tit i. 10 ; Myo^tmat, 1 Tim. vL 
 80, 2 Tim. ii. 16 ; A.oyofioxM, irapaftjoj, /3c'/37)Ao$, o.<rro\<iv, rv<ov(7tf<u ; &a . .
 
 748 APPENDIX. 
 
 nothing beyond the varying expression of truths which complement but do not con- 
 tradict each other. Some, indeed, of the alleged discrepancies are too shadowy to grasp. 
 If Christianity be described as "the doctrine," and as "sound doctrine"; l if the word 
 " faith " has acquired a more objective significance, so as sometimes almost to imply a 
 body of truths as opposed to heresy; 2 if the name "Saviour" rare in St. Paul be 
 applied to God, and not to Christ ; 3 if " Palingenesia " (regeneration) occurs only in the 
 Epistle to Titus ; 4 these are peculiarities of language, not differences of theology. There 
 is a dominant practical tendency in these Epistles; so there is, we reply, in all St. Paul's 
 Epistles. The value and blessedness of good works is incessantly insisted on ; 5 is this, then, 
 to be stigmatised as "utilitarianism and religious eudsemonism," and a decided pietistic 
 attenuation of the Pauline doctrine ? Are they not, then, insisted on even in the Epistles 
 to the Romans and Galatians, though there he is developing a theory, and here he is 
 professedly occupied with moral instructions? Will any one attempt to prove that 
 St. Paul, either in these Epistles or elsewhere, held any other view of good works than 
 this that they are profitless to obtain salvation, but are morally indispensable ? 8 De 
 Wette's further objection, that St. Paul here makes an apology for the Law (1 Tim. L 8), 
 and his attempt to draw a subtle distinction between the universalism of these Epistles 
 and of the other Pauline writings, deserve no serious refutation. St. Paul's method 
 and object are here wholly unlike those of his Epistles to Churches composed of hetero- 
 geneous and often of hostile elements ; but it may be asserted, beyond all fear of con- 
 tradiction, that, bearing in mind the non- theoretical treatment of the points on which 
 i he here touches, and the fact that he is writing to friends and disciples already absolutely 
 convinced of the main truths of his theology, there is not one word in these Epistles 
 which either contradicts or seriously differs from the fundamental ideas of St. Paul. 
 Even Baur candid, with all his hypercritical prejudices only sees in them " a certain 
 something of the specific Pauline doctrine with a dominant practical tendency," an 
 "applying of the contents of Christian doctrine to the various circumstances of practical 
 life. "7 
 
 : (4) It is not, however, on the above grounds that the Pastoral Epistles have been 
 most seriously attacked. The considerations which we have here seen to be untenable 
 are really due to after-thoughts ; and the assaults on the genuineness of the Epistles 
 have mainly risen from the belief that they are "tendency-writings," meant to serve the 
 twofold object of magnifying ecclesiastical organisation and of covertly attacking a 
 Gnosticism which was not prevalent till long after the Apostle's time. The two subjects 
 are by no means disconnected. The Gnostics, it is said as the first heretics properly 
 so called gave occasion for the episcopal constitution of the Church ; and if there were 
 no such heretics at that time, then these ecclesiastical arrangements will be devoid of any 
 historical occasion or connexion 1 I have sought the strongest and fullest statements of 
 these objections, and shall try to express the reasons why they appear to me to be most 
 absolutely groundless. I quite freely admit that there are some remarkable peculiarities 
 in these Epistles ; I do not deny that they suggest some difficulties of which we can give 
 no adequate explanation ; I cannot go so far as to say that the objections brought against 
 them are "not adequate even to raise a doubt on the subject of their authenticity ; " but 
 for these very reasons I can say, with all the deeper sincerity, that, whatever minor 
 
 i 1 Tim. 1. 10 ; vi. 1. 
 
 1 Tim. L 19 ; li. 7 ; iiL 9 ; iv. 16 ; yi. 10, 21. Pfleiderer, Paulinism, ii. 201 
 
 8 Pfleiderer says that In Tit. ii. 13 Christ is called " our great God and Saviour," and that " this 
 goes beyond all the previous Christology of St. Paul." But there can be no doubt that the phrase is 
 applied to God in this place, as also in 1 Tim. i. 1 ; li. 3 ; iv. 10 ; Tit. i. 3 ; ii. 10. The anarthrous- 
 ness of 2o>ri)p is no valid grammatical objection. Tit. iii. 6. 
 
 * Baur, Paid. ii. 106 ; De Welte, PastordUtr. 117, c. ; Pfleiderer, Paulinism, 210 ; Beuss, La 
 Epitres, ii. 314. Bom. ii. 610 ; xiii. 3 ; GaL v. 6, &c. ; Eph. ii. 810, &c. 
 
 i Paul. ii. 107. It is the view of some hostile critics that the Asiatic Epistles (Eph. and Col.) 
 are Pauline with mi-Pauline Interpolations ; and the Pastoral Epistles un-1'uuliue, yet containing 
 Pauline matter.
 
 GENUINENESS OF THH PASTORAL EPISTLES 749 
 
 hesitations and doubts may remain unremoved, the main arguments of those who reject 
 the Epistles have even without regard to other elements of external testimony and 
 internal evidence In their favour been fairly met and fairly defeated all along the 
 lino. 
 
 (a) Let us first consider the question of ecclesiastical organisation. And here we are 
 at once met with the preliminary and fundamental objection of Baur, that in the Epistles 
 which supply us with the surest standard of St. Paul's principles he never betrays the 
 slightest interest in ecclesiastical institutions, not even when they might be thought to 
 lie directly in his way ; and that this want of interest in such things is not merely 
 accidental, but founded deep in the whole spirit and character of Pauline Christianity. 
 
 But this form of statement is invidious, and will not stand a moment's examination. 
 In the minutiae of ecclesiastical institutions, as affected by mere sectarian disputes, St. 
 Paul would have felt no interest ; and to that exaltation of human ministers which has 
 received the name of sacerdotalism feeling as he did the supreme sufficiency of one 
 Mediator he would have been utterly opposed. It is very probable that he would have 
 treated the differences between Presbyterianism and Episcopacy as very secondary 
 questions questions of expediency, of which the settlement might lawfully differ in 
 different countries and different times. But to say that he would have considered it 
 superfluous to give directions about the consolidation of nascent Churches, and would 
 have had no opinion to offer about the duties and qualifications of ministers, is surely 
 preposterous. It is, moreover, contradicted by historic facts. His tours to confirm the 
 Churches, his solemn appointment of presbyters with prayers and fastings in his very 
 first missionary journey, 1 and his summons to the Ephesian presbyters, that they might 
 receive his last advice and farewell, would be alone sufficient to prove that such matters 
 did as it was absolutely necessary that they should occupy a large part of his attention. 
 Are we to suppose that he gave no pastoral instructions to Timothy when he sent him 
 to the Churches of Macedonia, or to Titus when he appointed him a sort of commissioner 
 to regulate the disorders of the Church of Corinth? 
 
 It is true that the pseudo-Clementines, the Apostolical constitutions, parts of the 
 letters of Ignatius, and in all probability other early writings, were forged, with the 
 express object of giving early and lofty sanction to later ecclesiastical development, and 
 above all to the supposed primacy of Rome. But what could be more unlike such 
 developments than the perfectly simple and unostentatious arrangements of the Pastoral 
 Epistles ? In the rapid growth of the Christian Church, and the counter-growth of error, 
 the establishment of discipline and government would almost from the first become a 
 matter of pressing exigency. Even in the Epistles to the Corinthians and Romans we 
 find terms that imply the existence of deacons, deaconesses, teachers, prophets, apostles, 
 rulers, overseers or presbyters, and evangelists; and a comparison of the passages 
 referred to will show that all these names, with the exception of the first, 2 were used 
 vaguely, and to a certain extent even synonymously, or as only descriptive of different 
 aspects of the same office. 8 If the imposition of hands is alluded to in the Epistles to 
 Timothy, so it is in the Acts. 4 The notion that a formal profession of faith was required 
 at ordination so little results from 2 Tim. i. 13 that the very next verse is sufficient to 
 disprove such a meaning. If the Pastoral Epistles contained a clear defence of the 
 episcopal system of the second century, this alone would be sufficient to prove their 
 spuriousness ; but the total absence of anything resembling it is one of the strongest 
 proofs that they belong to the Apostolic age. Bishop and presbyter are still synonyms, 
 
 i Acts Jdv. 23. 
 
 1 Cor. xii. 28; xvi. 15 ; Rom. xii. 7; xvl. 1 ; PhlL 1. 1 ; 1 Thess. V. 12; Eph. iv. 11 ; Acts x*. 
 17, 28. 
 
 3 To a certain extent, indeed, the overseers, presbyters, and deacons, in their purely official 
 wpect, corresponded to the Sheliach, the RosJi ha-Kcneseth, the Chazzan of the synagogue, 
 
 1 Tim. iv. 14 ; v. 22 : Acts vi. 6 ; viii. 17.
 
 50 APPENDIX. 
 
 as they are throughout the New Testament. 1 If em<TKOjros, "overseer," or "bishop" be 
 used in the singular, this is partly an accident of language in the common generic use of 
 the Greek article, and partly arises from the very nature of things as a transitional stage 
 to the ultimate meaning of the word since, even in a presbytery, it is inevitable that 
 some one presbyter should take the lead. Timothy and Titus exercise functions which 
 would be now called episcopal ; but they are not called "bishops" ; their functions were 
 temporary ; and they simply act as authoritative delegates of the Apostle of the Gentiles. 3 
 Nor is there any trace of exalted pretensions in the overseers whom they appoint. The 
 qualifications required of them are almost exclusively moral. The directions given are 
 "ethical, not hierarchical." And yet it is asserted that one main object of the First 
 Epistle to Timothy is "to establish the primacy of the bishops as against the 
 presbyters"! 3 A more arbitrary statement could hardly be formulated. Let any one 
 turn from the Epistle to the letters of St. Ignatius, 4 where he will read, "Give heed to 
 the bishop, that God also may give heed to you ; " to the pseudo-Ignatius, 5 who tells us 
 that " he who doeth anything without the knowledge of the bishop serveth the devil " ;- 
 to the pseudo-Clementines, which say that " the bishop occupies the seat of Christ, and 
 must be honoured as the image of God ; " 6 and he will see how glaring is the anachronism 
 of supposing that it was written towards the middle of the second century to oppose the 
 Marcionites ; and how utterly different is the mild and natural authority which the 
 Apostle assigns to a representative presbyterate from that "crushing despotism" of 
 irresponsible authority for which the writers of the second century were willing to betray 
 their Christian liberty. 
 
 We will consider the minor objections on this head when we come to the actual 
 passages to which exception is taken, and especially the difficult expression in which the 
 Church is apparently called " a pillar and ground of the truth. "1 But another ground 
 of objection is the rules about widows, which, as Baur asserts, " can only be successfully 
 explained out of the ecclesiastical vocabulary of the second century," in which the term 
 xijpai is applied to an order consisting not only of bereaved persons but even of young 
 virgins. 8 That this use of the word did not arise in the Apostle's time may be fairly 
 assumed, but if there be not one single fact in the passage referred to which makes this 
 necessary, the objection falls to the ground. Baur's only argument is that if x^P at be 
 actual widows, the Apostle gives two directly contradictory precepts about them, 
 bidding the younger widows to marry again (1 Tim. v. 11 14), and yet ordering that a 
 second marriage is to exclude them, should they again become widows, from the viduatus 
 of the Church. But where is the contradiction ? We learn from the Acts that the 
 Church continued the merciful and, indeed, essential custom, which it had learnt from 
 the synagogue, of maintaining those widows, who from the circumstances of Eastern and 
 ancient society were its most destitute members, and whose helpless condition constituted 
 a special appeal to pity. But it was only natural that each Church should try as far as 
 
 1 Thus in 1 Tim. ill. St. Paul passes at once from " bishops " (1 7) to " deacons " (813), and 
 afterwards speaks of these same bishops as "presbyters" (v. 1719), and in Tit. i. 6 7 the identi- 
 fication is indisputable. No one is ignorant that " bishops " and " presbyters " are in the New 
 Testament identical (Acts xx. 1728 ; Phil. LI; 1 Pet. v. 2). The fact was well known to the 
 
 Fathers, ot irpea/Surepoi. TO TroAaibi/ (KaXovvro iiriawmii . . . KOJ. 01 eiriVxoTroi irpe<rf)vTCpoi (Clirys. 
 
 ad Phil. i. 1 ; Jer. ad Tit. i. 5). The more marked distinction of the two is first found in Ignatius 
 ad Polyc. 6. 1 Tim. 1. 3 ; iii. 14 ; 2 Tim. iv. 9, 21 ; Tit. i. 5 ; iii. 12. 
 
 * Pfleiderer, Faulinism, ii. 205. Yet he admits (p. 203) that in the second Epistle the remarks 
 addressed to Timothy are " very far removed from the later conceptions of the exalted condition of 
 a bishop," and that even in the first Epistle " the difference between bishops and presbyters does 
 not appear to be any fixed difference of officers." 
 
 * Ad Polyc. 6. If the shorter form of the seven Ignatian Epistles be genuine, they show that 
 even at the beginning of the second century, the ecclesiastical development was so far in advance of 
 the Pastoral Epistles as almost to demonstrate the genuineness of the latter. * Ad Smyrn. 9. 
 
 * Clem. Horn. iii. 62, 66, 70. For these and other quotations see Dr. Lightfoot'g essay on the 
 Christian ministry (Philippianf, p. 209, seqq.). 1 1 Tim. iii. 15. 
 
 1 rat irapdlrovf rat Aryo^cVaf xijpas (Ign. ad Smyrn. 13). The genuineness of the passage i ta 
 from certain.
 
 GENUINENESS OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES. 751 
 
 possible to utilise this institution, and that the widows should themselves desire to be 
 serviceable to the brethren to whom they owed their livelihood. Hence " the widows " 
 became a recognised order, and acquired a semi-religious position. Into this order St. 
 Paul wisely forbids the admission of widows who are still of an age to marry again. Of 
 the female character in general and in the abstract he does not ordinarily speak in very 
 exalted terms, and in this respect he only resembles most ancient writers, although, in 
 spite of surrounding conditions of society, he sees the moral elevation of tho entire sex 
 in Christ. He regarded it as almost inevitable that the religious duties of the "order of 
 widows," although they involved a sort of consecration to celibacy for the remainder of 
 their lives, would never serve as a sufficient barrier to their wish to marry again ; and he 
 thought that moral degeneracy and outward scandal would follow from the Intrusion of 
 such motives into the fulfilment of sacred functions. There is here no contradiction, 
 and not the shadow of a proof that in the language of the Epistle there must be any 
 identification of widows with an order of female celibates or youthful nuns. 1 
 
 (0) We now come to the last objection, which is by far the strongest and most per- 
 sistent, as it is also the earliest. The spuriousness of the Pastoral Epistles is mainly 
 asserted on the ground that they indicate the existence of a Gnosticism which was not 
 fully developed till after the death of St. Paul. A more extensive theory was never 
 built on a more unstable foundation. 3 The one word antitheses in 1 Tim. vi. 20, seemi 
 to Baur a clear proof that the First Epistle to Timothy is a covert polemic against Marcion 
 in the middle of the second century. To an hypothesis so extravagant it is a more than 
 sufficient answer that the heretical tendencies of the false teachers were distinctly 
 Judaic, whereas there was not a single Gnostic system which did not regard Judaism aa 
 either imperfect or pernicious. Objections of this kind can only be regarded as fantastic 
 until some proof be offered (1) that the germs of Gnosticism did not exist in the apostolio 
 age ; and (2) that the phrases of Gnosticism were not borrowed from the New Testament, 
 nor those of the New Testament from the Gnostic systems. Knowing as we do that 
 " jEon" was thus borrowed by Valentinus, 3 and that " Gnosis" was beginning to acquire 
 & technical meaning even when St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Corinthians, 4 we see 
 that on the one hand Gnostic terms are no proof of allusion to Gnostic tenets, and on the 
 other, that Gnostio tendencies existed undeveloped from the earliest epoch of the 
 Christian Church. It would be far truer to say that the absence of anything like definite 
 allusion to the really distinctive elements of Marcionite or Valentinian teaching is a 
 decisive proof that these Epistles belong to a far earlier epoch, than to say that they are 
 an attempt to use the great name of Paul to discountenance those subtle heresies. In 
 the Epistle to the Colossians St. Paul had dealt formally with the pretended philosophy 
 and vaunted insight, the incipient dualism, the baseless angelology, and the exaggerated 
 asceticism of local heretics whose theosophio fancies were already prevalent. 5 In these 
 Epistles he merely touches on them, because in private letters to beloved fellow- workers 
 there was no need to enter into any direct controversy with their erroneous teachings. 
 But he alludes to these elements with the distinct statement that they were of Judaio 
 rigin. Valentinus rejected the Mosaic law ; Marcion was Antinomian ; but these 
 Ephesian and Cretan teachers, although their dualism is revealed by their ascetic 
 discouragement of marriage, their denial of the resurrection, and their interminable 
 "genealogies" and myths, 6 are not only Jews, but founded their subtleties and specula- 
 
 ! i 1 Cor. xlv. 34 ; 1 Tim. li. 1214 ; 2 Tim. iii. 6 j &c. 
 
 1 Apparently the use of the word *nyofc6MJUu> in 1 Tim. 1. 3 as compared with cTtpoji&urKoJUi 
 In Hegesippus first led Schleiennacher to doubt the genuineness of the First Epistle. 
 
 * Hippolytus (R. II. vL 20) tells us that Valeutinus gave the name of ^Eons to the emanation! 
 which Simon Magus had called Boots. 
 
 1 Cor. viii. 1. The adjective " Gnostic " is ascribed to the Ophites, or to Carpocratfls. (Ira. 
 Eaer. i. 25 ; Euseb. H. E. iv. 7, 9.) 
 
 * See Col. i. 16, 17 ; ii. 8, 18 ; and Hansel, The Gnostic Heresies, p. 54 
 
 * 1 Tim. i. 4; ir. 4 ; 3 Tim. ii. 18.
 
 752 APPENDIX. 
 
 tiona on the Mosaic law. 1 In dealing with these Paul has left far behind him tne epoch 
 of his struggle with the Pharisaic legalists of Jerusalem. Thought moves with vast 
 rapidity ; systems are developed into ever-varying combinations in an amazingly short 
 space of time, at epochs of intense religious excitement, and as the incipient Gnosticism 
 of the apostolic age shows many of the elements which would hereafter be ripened into 
 later development, so it already shows the ominous tendency of restless speculation to 
 degenerate into impious pride, and of over-strained asceticism to link itself with intoler- 
 able license. 2 These are speculations and tendencies which belong to no one country and 
 no one age. Systems and ideas closely akin to Gnosticism are found in the religions and 
 philosophies of Greece, Persia, India, China, Egypt, Phoenicia ; they are found in Plato, 
 in Zoroaster, in the Vedas, in the writings of the Buddhists, in Philo, in neo- 
 Platonism, and in the Jewish Kabbalah. In all ages and all countries they have 
 produced the same intellectual combinations and the same moral results. A writer of 
 the second century could have had no possible object in penning a forgery which in his 
 day was far too vague to be polemically effective. 3 On the other hand, an apostle of the 
 year 65 or 66, familiar with Esseno and Oriental speculations, a contemporary of Simon 
 Magus the reputed founder of all Gnosticism, and of Cerinthus, its earliest heresiarch, 
 might have had reason even apart from divine guidance and prophetic inspiration to 
 warn the disciples to whom he was entrusting the care and constitution of his Churches 
 against tendencies which are never long dormant, and which were already beginning to 
 display a dangerous activity and exercise a dangerous fascination. If there is scarcely a 
 warning which would not apply to the later Gnostics, it is equally true that there is not 
 * warning which would not equally apply to errors distinctly reprobated in the Epistles 
 to the Philippians, Corinthians, and Colossians, as well as to the Churches addressed by 
 St. Peter, St. Jude, and St. John. 4 Greek subtleties, Eastern imagination, Jewish 
 mysticism in one word, the inherent curiosity and the inherent Manicheism of unre- 
 generate human nature began from the very first to eat like a canker into the opening 
 bud of Christian faith. 
 
 Those who wish to see every possible argument which can be adduced against the 
 Pauline authorship of these Epistles, may find them marshalled together by Dr. Davidson 
 in the latter editions of his " Introduction to the Study of the New Testament." 5 To 
 answer them point by point would be tedious, for many of them are exceedingly 
 minute ; ' nor would it be convincing, for critics will make up their minds on the 
 question on the broader and larger grounds which I have just examined. But to sum 
 up, I would say that, although we cannot be as absolutely certain of their authenticity 
 us we are of that of the earlier Epistles, yet that scarcely any difficulty in accepting 
 their authenticity will remain if we bear in mind the following considerations. (1) In 
 times like those of early Christianity, systems were developed and institutions consoli- 
 dated with extraordinary rapidity. (2) These letters were written, not with the object 
 
 i 1 Tim. L 7 ; Tit. L 10, 14 ; iii. . 
 
 1 Tim. i. 7, 19 ; iv. 2 ; 2 Tim. ii. 17 ; 111. 17 ; Tit. 1. 11, 15, 16. 
 
 The vagueness is due to the still wavering outlines of the heretical teachings. The "Gnos- 
 tic-ism" aimed at has been by various critics Identified with Kabbalism (Baumgorten) ; with 
 Pharisaism (Wiesinger) ; with Esseuism (Mangold) ; with Marcionism (Baur)- 
 "It shape it could be called which shape had none 
 Distinguishable in vesture, joint, or limb." 
 
 But whether Gnosticism be regarded as theological speculation (Gleseler), or an aristocratic and 
 exclusive philosophy of religion (Neander), or allegorising dualism (Baur), if " it is still an accom- 
 plished task to seize amidst so much that Is indefinite, vogue, merely circumlocutory and only 
 partly true, those points that furnish a clear conception of it, then it is clearly idle to say that iti 
 undeveloped genius cannot have existed in the days of the Apostles. 
 
 PhD. iii. 18 ; 1 Cor. xv. * Vol. ii., pp. 137195. 
 
 6 I shall, however, touch on some of these In speaking of the Epistles separately. It has been 
 Baid that Paley uses the discrepancies between the Acts and the Epistles to prove their indepen- 
 dence, and the agreements to establish their truthfulness. It may certainly be said that the 
 Tilbingen school adduces un-Pauline expressions to prove non-authenticity, and Pauline expression! 
 to prove forgery.
 
 OHBONOLOOT OF THS LIFE OF ST. PAUL, 753 
 
 of entering into direct controversy, but to grade the general conduct of those on whom 
 that duty had devolved, and who were already aware of that fixed body of truth which 
 formed the staple of the apostolic teaching. (3) They abound in unusual expressions, 
 because new forms of error required new methods of stating truth. (4) Their unity ia 
 less marked and their style less logical, because they are the private and informal 
 letters of an elder, written with the waning powers of a life which was rapidly passing 
 beyond the sphere of earthly controversies. Pauline in much of their phraseology, 
 Pauline in their fundamental doctrines, Pauline in their dignity and holiness of tone, 
 Pauline alike in their tenderness and severity, Pauline in the digressions, the construc- 
 tions, and the personality of their style, we may accept two of them with an absolute 
 conviction of their authenticity, and the third the First Epistle to Timothy, which ia 
 more open to doubt than the others with at least a strong belief that in reading it we 
 are reading the words of the greatest of the Apostles. 1 
 
 EXCURSUS XXVIII. 
 CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE AND EPISTLES OF ST. 
 
 To enter fully into the chronology of this period would require a separate volume, and 
 although there is now an increasing tendency to unanimity on the subject, yet some of 
 the dates can only be regarded as approximate. As few definite chronological indications 
 are furnished in the Acts or the Epistles, we can only frame our system by working 
 backwards and forwards, with the aid of data which are often vague, from the few points 
 where the sacred. narrative refers to some distinct event in secular history. These, 
 which furnish us with our pointt de repZre, are 
 
 The Death of Herod Agrippa I., A.D. 44. 
 The Expulsion of the Jews from Rome, A.D. 52. 
 The Arrival of Festus as Procurator, A.D. 60. 
 The Neronian Persecution, A.D. 64. 
 
 How widely different have been the schemes adopted by different chronologors may be 
 seen from the subjoined table, founded on that given by Meyer. 
 
 1 Even Usteri, Liicke, Neander, and Bleek are unconvinced of the authenticity of the First 
 Epistle. Otto, Wieseler, and Beuss have said all that is to be said in favour of a single captivity ; 
 but on the assumption that the Pastoral Epistles are genuine, such a theory forces us into a mass of 
 impossibilities. The conviction at which I have arrived may be summed up thus : If St. Paul was 
 put to death at the end of his first imprisonment, the Pastoral Epistles must certainly be spurious. 
 But there is the strongest possible evidence that two of them at least are genuine, and great 
 probability in favour of the other. They therefore furnish us with a proof of the current tradition 
 that his trial, as he had anticipated, ended in an acquittal, and that a period of about two yean 
 elapsed between his liberation and his subsequent arrest, imprisonment, and death.
 
 754 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 EVENTS. 
 
 ^C 
 
 jjt 
 & 
 
 Eusebius. 
 
 Jerome. 
 
 Chronlcon 
 Paschale. 
 
 Baronius. 
 
 Petaviua. 
 
 Usher. 
 
 Spanhelm. 
 
 
 
 Tillemont. 
 
 P 
 
 Ascension of Christ 
 
 31 
 
 33 
 
 32 
 
 31 
 
 32 
 
 31 
 
 33 
 
 33 
 
 33 
 
 33 
 
 33 
 
 Stephen stoned 
 
 33 
 or 
 
 34 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 a. 
 
 Claud. 
 I. 
 
 32 
 
 31 
 
 33 
 
 38? 
 
 34 
 
 33 
 
 37 
 
 Paul's conversion 
 
 35 
 
 ... 
 
 33 
 
 a. 
 
 Claud. 
 II. 
 
 34 
 
 33 
 
 35 
 
 40 
 
 85 
 
 34 
 
 37 
 
 Paul's first journey to") 
 Jerusalem ,..) 
 
 38 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 a. 
 Claud. 
 III. 
 
 37 
 
 36 
 
 33 
 
 43 
 
 33 
 
 37 
 
 40 
 
 Paul's arrival at Antioch 
 
 43 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 a. 
 
 Claud. 
 IU. 
 
 41 
 
 40 
 
 43 
 
 43? 
 
 42 
 
 43 
 
 40 
 
 Death of Jamea ... 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 42 
 
 41 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 The famine ... ... ... ... 
 
 44 
 
 41 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 42 
 
 42 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 42 
 
 Paul's second journey to > 
 Jerusalem ) 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 46 
 
 42 
 
 41 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 42 
 
 Paul's first missionary") 
 
 45 
 to 
 
 
 
 a. 
 
 Claud. 
 
 44 
 to 
 
 42 
 
 45 
 to 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 to 
 
 44 
 to 
 
 45 
 to 
 
 
 51 
 
 
 
 V. 
 
 47 
 
 
 46 
 
 
 47 
 
 46 
 
 47 
 
 Paul's third journey to~) 
 Jerusalem, to the Apos- > 
 tolic convention ) 
 
 52 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 49 
 
 49 
 
 52 
 
 53 
 
 49 
 
 51 
 
 50 
 
 Paul commences the") 
 second missionary jour- > 
 
 62 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 19 
 
 49 
 
 53 
 
 ... 
 
 50 
 
 51 
 
 50 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Banishment of the Jews') 
 from Home S 
 
 52 
 
 ... 
 
 49 
 
 ... 
 
 49 
 
 49 
 
 54 
 
 ... 
 
 52 
 
 49 
 to 
 52 
 
 51 
 
 Paul arrives at Corinth ... 
 
 53 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 60 
 
 50 
 
 54 
 
 54? 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 
 51 
 
 Paul's fourth journey to") 
 Jerusalem (al. Caesarea) > 
 and third miss, journey ) 
 
 65 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 52 
 
 Cces 
 
 52 
 
 56 
 
 54-? 
 
 54 
 
 54 
 
 58 
 
 Paul's abode at Ephesus ... 
 
 56 
 to 
 
 58 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 53 
 to 
 55 
 
 52 
 to 
 54 
 
 56 
 to 
 59 
 
 56 
 to 
 
 58 
 
 54 
 to 
 57 
 
 54 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 53 
 to 
 
 55 
 
 Paul's fifth journey to) 
 Jerusalem, and impri- > 
 sonment ) 
 
 59 
 
 
 ... 
 
 53 
 or 
 
 51 
 
 56 
 
 55 
 
 60 
 
 59 
 
 58 
 
 58 
 
 56 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Paul is removed from") 
 Caesarea to Borne ... y 
 
 61 
 
 55 
 
 57 
 
 under 
 Nero. 
 
 56 
 
 56 
 
 62 
 
 60 
 
 60 
 
 60 
 
 59 
 
 Paul's imprisonment ol\ 
 two years' in Home ... S 
 
 62 
 or 
 61 
 
 ... 
 
 to a 
 Ner. 
 IV. 
 
 ... 
 
 57 
 to 
 59 
 
 ... 
 
 63 
 to 
 65 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 60 
 to 
 62
 
 CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 755 
 
 1 
 I 
 
 MichaellB. 
 
 Eichhorn. 
 
 Kuinoel. 
 
 Winer. 
 
 De Wette. 
 
 Schrader. 
 
 
 
 1 
 o 
 
 I 
 
 Sanclpmentel 
 and Ideler. 
 
 WIeseler. 
 
 e 
 
 a 
 
 H 
 
 Lechler. 
 
 Wordsworth.] 
 
 Alford. 
 
 30 
 
 33 
 
 32 
 
 33 
 
 30? 
 
 ... 
 
 35 
 
 33 
 
 31 
 
 29 
 Id. 
 
 30 
 
 33 
 
 
 30 
 
 30 
 
 SO 
 
 ... 
 
 37 
 
 37 
 or 
 38 
 
 37? 
 
 
 35 
 
 ... 
 
 37 
 
 ... 
 
 39? 
 
 38 
 
 ... 
 
 33 
 
 37 
 
 31 
 
 37? 
 
 37 
 or 
 38 
 
 40 
 
 38? 
 
 37 
 or 
 38 
 
 39 
 
 35 
 
 38 
 
 35 
 or 
 .38 
 
 40 
 
 38 
 
 between 
 
 37 
 
 and 
 41 
 
 34 
 
 37 
 
 S3 
 
 ... 
 
 40 
 or 
 41 
 
 43 
 
 41 
 
 40 
 or 
 41 
 
 42 
 
 38 
 
 41 
 
 38 
 or 
 41 
 
 43 
 
 41 
 
 ... 
 
 37 
 
 40 
 
 88 
 
 ... 
 
 42 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 43 
 or 
 44 
 
 43 
 
 41 
 
 43 
 or 44 
 or 45? 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 43 
 
 41 
 
 42 
 
 about 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 43 
 or 
 41 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 43 
 or 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 or 
 45 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 
 
 
 {44 
 or 
 45 
 or 
 46? 
 
 
 45 
 
 45 
 to 
 46 
 
 between 
 41 
 
 and 
 
 45 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 41 
 to 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 45 
 
 44 
 or 
 45 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 45 
 
 45 
 to 
 46 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 
 44 
 
 45 
 to 
 46 
 
 
 45 
 ff. 
 
 ... 
 
 
 ... 
 
 44 
 
 to 
 46 
 
 to 
 
 49 
 
 to 
 
 about 
 48 
 
 
 45 
 to 
 47 
 
 48 
 to 
 51 
 
 46 
 to 
 
 48 
 
 45 
 
 45 
 
 47 
 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 
 51 
 
 50 
 or 
 51 
 
 47 
 
 52 
 
 51 
 
 52 
 
 about 
 50 
 
 52 
 
 ... 
 
 49 
 to 
 
 50 
 
 50 
 
 47 
 
 
 53 
 
 ... 
 
 
 51 
 or 
 52 
 
 47 
 
 52 
 
 51 
 
 
 about 
 50 
 
 52 
 
 
 51 
 
 51 
 
 ... 
 
 54? 
 
 54 i 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 
 between 
 
 52 
 
 and 
 
 54 
 
 49 
 
 ... 
 
 51 
 or 
 52 
 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 
 
 ... 
 
 
 48 
 
 54? 
 
 aboui 
 54 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 
 52 
 or 
 53 
 
 49 
 
 53 
 
 52 
 
 
 52 
 
 53 
 
 
 53 
 
 53 
 
 49 
 
 
 56 
 
 C038 
 
 54 
 
 53 
 or 
 54 
 
 51 
 
 55 
 
 54 
 
 56 
 
 54 
 
 55 
 
 54 
 or 
 55 
 
 54 
 
 54 
 
 50 
 to 
 
 52 
 
 
 57 
 to 
 59 
 
 ... 
 
 55 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 54 
 or 
 55ff 
 
 51 
 ff 
 
 56 
 and 
 57 
 
 54 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 ... 
 
 54 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 to 
 58 
 
 55 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 54 
 to 
 
 57 
 
 55 
 
 53 
 
 60 
 
 60 
 
 57 
 
 58 
 
 58 
 or 
 59 
 
 59 
 
 60 
 
 58 
 
 60 
 
 58 
 
 59 
 
 58 
 
 58 
 
 58 
 
 55 
 
 62 
 
 62 
 
 59 
 
 60 
 
 60 
 or 
 61 
 
 61 
 
 62 
 
 60 
 
 62 
 
 60 
 
 61 
 
 60 
 
 61 
 
 61 
 
 56 
 to 
 
 58 
 
 63 
 to 
 65 
 
 63 
 to 
 65 
 
 60 
 to 
 62 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 62 
 to 
 64 
 
 62 
 to 
 64 
 
 63 
 to 
 65 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 63 
 to 
 65 
 
 61 
 to 
 61 
 
 62 
 to 
 64 
 
 62 
 to 
 64 
 
 61 
 to 
 63 
 
 61 
 to 
 63
 
 756 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I subjoin a separate list of the dates of the Epistles adopted in this volume. The 
 reasons are stated in loco, but the reader will understand that the dates in some instances 
 can only be approximate. 
 
 DATES OF THE EPISTLES. 
 
 EPISTLE. 
 
 WRITTEN AT 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1 Thessalonians. 
 
 Corinth. 
 
 62. 
 
 2 Thessalonians. 
 
 Corinth. 
 
 52. 
 
 1 Corinthians. 
 
 Ephesua. 
 
 57. 
 
 2 Corinthians. 
 
 Philippi (?). 
 
 58 (early). 
 
 Galatians. 
 
 Corinth. 
 
 68. 
 
 Romans. 
 
 Corinth. 
 
 58. 
 
 Philippians. 
 
 Rome. 
 
 61 or 6 2. 
 
 Colossians I 
 Philemon ) 
 
 Rome. 
 
 63. 
 
 Ephesians. 
 
 Rome. 
 
 63. 
 
 1 Timothy. 
 
 Macedonia (:). | 65 or 66. 
 
 Titus. 
 
 Macedonia (?). 
 
 66. 
 
 2 Timothy. 
 
 Rome. 
 
 67. 
 
 The subjoined table will give the probable dates of the chief events in the Apostle's 
 life, with those of the events in secular history with which they synchronised. 
 
 TABLE OF CONTEMPORARY RULEKS, ETC. 
 
 
 EMPERORS. 
 
 PBOOUBATOBS. 
 
 LEGATES or 
 
 Kl'UiA. 
 
 KINGS. 
 
 HIGH PRIESTS 
 
 EVBSTS ur LIFI 
 or ST. PAUJU 
 
 14 
 
 TlBEKIUS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 (sole Emperor). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 25 
 
 
 I... 
 
 *<1 
 
 ...... 
 
 Caiaphas. 
 
 
 2(5 
 
 .....< 
 
 Pontius Pilatus. 
 
 
 
 
 
 20 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 20 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 31 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 32 
 
 Retires to Capreca 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 S3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Hi 
 
 A Phronix said 
 
 * 
 
 Vitellius. 
 
 
 
 
 
 to have been 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 eeen in Egypt. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 35 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3(5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 S7 
 
 GAIUS (Caligula) 
 (March l5). 
 
 Marallus 
 
 l7r7r<xpxi)). 
 
 " 
 
 
 
 Jonathan 
 
 Martyrdom 
 of Stephen. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 St. Paul's 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Conversion. 
 
 33 
 
 ...I 
 
 
 
 
 
 Theophilus. 
 
 
 39 
 
 ' 
 
 I 
 
 Petronius 
 
 Herod 
 
 ...... 
 
 First Visit to 
 
 40 
 
 Orders his statue 
 
 !!* 
 
 TurpilianuB. 
 
 Agrippal. 
 
 
 Jerusalem. 
 At Tarsus. 
 
 
 to be placed 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 in the Temple. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Embassy of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Pbilo. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 41 
 
 CLAUDIUS 
 
 *** 
 
 
 
 Simon 
 
 At Antiocb. 
 
 
 (Jan. 24). 
 
 
 
 
 Kanthera. 
 
 
 42 
 
 DiBciplea called 
 Christians at 
 
 ~~ 
 
 VibuisMar- 
 
 bUS. 
 
 Herod 
 Agrippa I. 
 
 Matthias. 
 
 
 
 Antioch. 
 
 
 
 (dominion 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 extended). 
 
 
 
 43 
 
 MM 
 
 ,,,, 
 
 M%W 
 
 ...... 
 
 KlionetMis, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 son pf 
 
 
 __ J 
 
 
 
 
 
 Kanthera. 
 
 4
 
 CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 TABLS or CONTEMPORARY RULSBS, me, continued. 
 
 757 
 
 
 KMPEHOES. 
 
 PROCURATORS. 
 
 LEOATBS o 
 SYRIA. 
 
 KI5GS. 
 
 HIGH PBIESTS. 
 
 KVBSTS IS LlPl 
 
 o ST. PAUL. 
 
 44 
 
 Famine (Jos. 
 Antt. xx. 5, 2). 
 
 Cuspius Fadus 
 
 Cassius 
 Longinus. 
 
 Death of 
 Herod 
 
 
 
 Second Visit 
 to Jerusalem. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Agrippa I. 
 
 
 
 45 
 
 ..<>.. 
 
 ...... 
 
 MMM 
 
 ...... 
 
 Joseph 
 
 First Mission 
 
 4S 
 
 
 Tiberius Alex- 
 
 
 
 Ben Kamhit. 
 
 Journey. 
 
 
 
 ander. 
 
 
 
 
 
 47 
 
 MMM 
 
 
 ...... 
 
 ...... 
 
 Ananias, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 son of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Nebadeeus. 
 
 
 48 
 
 ...... 
 
 Ventldlus Cu- 
 
 Ummidiua 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 uianua. 
 
 Quadratus. 
 
 
 
 
 49 
 
 Expulsion of 
 Jews from 
 Rome. 
 
 ...... 
 
 
 Agrippa 
 II., King 
 of Chalcis. 
 
 
 
 50 
 
 Caractacus taken 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 to Rome. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 51 
 
 ...... 
 
 MMM 
 
 MM. 
 
 ...... 
 
 ...... 
 
 Third Visit to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Jerusalem, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 and Synod. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 At Corinth. 
 
 58 
 
 MMM 
 
 Kf* 
 
 tl ,,, 
 
 Agrippa 
 
 Ishmael 
 
 1, 2 Thesa. 
 
 
 
 
 
 II. (Bata- 
 
 BeaPhabi. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 nsea and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Tracho- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iiitis). 
 
 
 
 53 
 
 
 
 Claudius Felix 
 
 V. . 
 
 
 ...... 
 
 Fourth Visit 
 
 54 
 
 NERO (Oct 13) 
 
 
 
 
 
 to Jerusalem. 
 
 55 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 56 
 
 Birth of Trajan. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 57 
 
 Trial of Pomponia 
 Graecina (as a 
 
 M.M, 
 
 M.M. 
 
 ...... 
 
 ...... 
 
 Paul at Eph. 
 ICor. 
 
 
 Christian?). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 53 
 
 
 M. 
 
 *!** 
 
 .... 
 
 MMM 
 
 Second Ep. to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Corinthians. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Epistle to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Galatians. 
 
 59 
 
 Murder of Agrip- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 pina. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 60 
 
 
 Porcius Festoa 
 
 Corbulo 
 
 
 
 
 Cl 
 
 Revolt of Boa- 
 
 
 
 ....4. 
 
 Joseph Cabi 
 
 At Rome. 
 
 
 dicea. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 Deaths of Burma, 
 Octavia, and 
 
 Albinua 
 
 *! 
 
 ...... 
 
 Ananus 
 
 Epistle to 
 Phffippiana 
 
 
 Pallas. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Nero marries 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Popproa. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 63 
 
 Power of Tigel- 
 
 linua. 
 
 *, 
 
 ...... 
 
 
 Jesus, 
 son of 
 
 Ep. to Colos- 
 sians, Phile- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Damnoeus. 
 
 mon, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ephesus. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Paul liberated. 
 
 64 
 
 Great Fire of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Rome. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Persecution of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Christians. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 65 
 
 Death of Seneca 
 
 Gesslus Florus 
 
 MMM 
 
 MMM 
 
 MI.M 
 
 First Epistle 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 to Timothy. 
 
 G6 
 
 Beginnings of 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ep. to Titus. 
 
 
 Jewish War. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Nero in Greece. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 67 
 
 Siege of Jotapata 
 
 MMM 
 
 MMM 
 
 MMM 
 
 MMM 
 
 Second Epistle 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 to Timothy. 
 
 68 
 
 Suicide of Nero 
 
 Vespasian takes 
 
 MMM 
 
 MMM 
 
 w.. .-1 
 
 Martyrdom. 
 
 
 (June). 
 
 Jericho. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GALBA. 
 
 
 
 

 
 758 APPENDIX. 
 
 EXCURSUS XXIX. 
 TKADITIONAL ACCOUNTS OF ST. PAUL'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE. 
 
 THE traditional accounts of the personal appearance of the great Apostle are too late to 
 have any independent value, but it is far from improbable that where they coincide they 
 preserve with accuracy a few particulars. Such as they are, the reader may perhaps 
 care to see them translated ; but he must bear in min<l the sad probability that there 
 were periods of St. Paul's career at which, owing to the disfigurement wrought by the 
 ravages of his affliction, we should not have liked to gaze upon his face. 
 
 In the sixth century John of Antioch, commonly called Malala, 1 writes that "Paul 
 was in person round-shouldered (rn ^Aua<j <cov8oeiS>fa), with a sprinkling of grey on his head 
 and beard, with an aquiline nose, greyish eyes, meeting eyebrows, 2 with a mixture of 
 pale and red in his complexion, and an ample beard. "With a genial expression of coun- 
 tenance, he was sensible, earnest, easily accessible, sweet, and inspired with the Holy 
 Spirit." 
 
 Nicephorus, 8 writing in the fifteenth century, says, " Paul was short, and dwarfish in 
 stature, and, as it were, crooked in person and slightly bent. His face was pale, his 
 aspect winning. He was bald-headed, and his eyes were bright. His nose was prominent 
 and aquiline, his beard thick and tolerably long, and both this and his head were sprinkled 
 with white hairs. " 
 
 In the Acts of Paul and Thekla, a romance of the third century, he is described aa 
 " short, bald, bow-legged, with meeting eyebrows, hook-nosed, full of grace." 4 
 
 Lastly, in the Philopatris of the pseudo-Lucian, 5 a forgery of the fourth century, 8 
 he is contemptuously alluded to as " the bald-headed, hook-nosed Galilsean who trod the 
 air into the third heaven, and learnt the most beautiful things." 
 
 The reader must judge whether any rill of truth may have trickled into these accounts 
 through centuries of tradition. As they do not contradict, but are rather confirmed by, 
 the earliest portraits which have been preserved to us, we may perhaps assume from 
 them thus much, that St. Paul was short a fact also mentioned by the pseudo- 
 Chrysostom,7 and to which he may himself allude with somewhat bitter touches of 
 Irony in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians 8 that he had a slight stoop, if not a 
 positive bend, in the shoulders ; that his nose was aquiline, and that his thin hair was 
 early " sable-silvered." We may also conjecture from these notices that his face was 
 pale, and liable to a quick flush and change of expression, and that when he was not 
 absolutely disfigured by his malady, or when he was able to throw off the painful self- 
 consciousness by which it was accompanied, the grace and sweetness of his address, the 
 dignity and fire of his bearing, entirely removed the first unfavourable impression caused 
 by the insignificance of his aspect. We may conclude that this was the case from many 
 of the circumstances of his intercourse with men and churches, and also from the fact 
 that the rude inhabitants of Lystra take him before he had yet attained to middle age, 
 and before his body had been so rudely battered as it was by many subsequent miseries 
 for an incarnation of the young and eloquent Hermes. 
 
 X. 257. 
 
 This <rvvo<l>pv<ona, and the expression arcvurot, may be the sole ground for fancying that the 
 eyes of St. Paul were grey and bright. / * H. E. ii. 87. 
 
 * I can make nothing of the evKcqpo? following the ay<cuAo rats KJT//J.CUS . * Philopatr, 18. 
 
 Such is the opinion of Gesner in his dissertation De Aetate et Auctore Philopatridia. 
 6 Tpimjxvj wfywatw. 2 Cor. x. 1016, especially verse 14.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abennerig, King* Ananias' influence over hla 
 family, 429. (See Ananias.) 
 
 AlMda Zara, Quotations from, 453-4. 
 
 Abraham his wives as types, 32. 
 
 Acts of Apostles The intention and genuine- 
 ness of ; not a perfect history, 4-5 ; chief 
 uncial MSS. of, 730-1 ; its abrupt termi- 
 nation not explained, 647. 
 
 Adiabene Province of, 173 ; Eoyal family of, 
 how entangled by Judaisers, 429. 
 
 Adrian VL his remark on the statuary ol 
 the Vatican, 298-9. 
 
 Advent, Nearness of final Messianic, 343. 
 
 /JOucas healed, 148. 
 
 Agabus his prophecy, 172, 520. 
 
 Agupoe Institution of, 51 ; held with closed 
 doors, 99-100 ; in reference to the circum- 
 cision of Titus, 236 ; abuse of, at Corinth. 
 009 
 
 OOA. 
 
 Agrippa I. and II., 734-8. 
 
 Agrippa IL his desire to hear Paul, 556; 
 Paul brought before, 556 et seq. ; his use of 
 the word " Christian," 560. 
 
 Agrippa Herod. (See Herod.) 
 
 Akibha 33 rules of, 34. 
 
 Alexandria, The learning of the Jews of, 70-2. 
 
 Altar, Altars built by advice of Epimenides, 
 301 ; Paul's view of the altar at Athens to 
 the Unknown God, 301. 
 
 Ananias and Sapphira their sin and death, 
 60. 
 
 Ananias (of Damascus) his doubts about 
 Paul, 113 ; his intercourse with Paul, 114. 
 
 Ananias (Jewish merchant) his ascendancy 
 over King Abennerig and his family, 429. 
 
 Ananias (the high priest) his outrage on 
 Paul, 539-40. 
 
 Andrew Andre wand Philip, though Hellenic 
 names, yet common among the Jews, 74. 
 
 Annas his treatment of Peter and John, 60. 
 
 Antichrist Jewish and heathen influences in 
 Eome, 585-8. 
 
 Antinomies of Paul, 732-3. 
 
 Autioch (in Syria) Mission of Paul and Bar- 
 nabas, A. D. 44, 162; description of, 162-3; 
 earthquake at, 4.D. 37, 165; Christians 
 first so called at, 167 ; Church and religious 
 feelings at, 182; state of Church in, 224; 
 false brethren in Church, 224-5; Peter 
 and Paul at, 247 et seq. 
 
 Antioch (in Pisidia) Description of, 204-5; 
 Paul and Barnabas at, 205-6; synagogue 
 and worship, 205 ; Paul preaches in syna- 
 gogue, 207, 
 
 Antouiua (Emperor) and Babbi Jnda Haka- 
 dosh, 430. 
 
 Apollonius Tyaneus at Ephesus, 360. 
 
 Apollos as regards authorship of the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, 6 ; at Ephesns journey 
 to Corinth his preaching there, 361 ; un- 
 intentional cause of division in the Church 
 at Corinth, 362 ; bis report of the Corin- 
 thian Church to Paul, 376 ; results of hia 
 teaching at Corinth, 380. L. 
 
 Apostle of love, John, 1 ; of the Foundation 
 stone, Simon, 1 ; of progress, Paul, 1 ; of 
 the Gentiles, Paul, 2 : the source and vin- 
 dication of Paul's authority as an Apostle, 
 406-7 ; term of authority first used by Paul 
 in his Epistle to the Galatians, 431-2. 
 Apostles their antecedents compared with 
 those of Paul, 3 ; bold after weakness, 47 ; 
 their Lord's intercourse with them after 
 His Resurrection, and the power of Hia 
 Eesurrection on them, 47 ; the regenera- 
 tors of the world, 47 ; their last inquiry 
 of their Lord as to the promised kingdom, 
 48; their feelings after their Lord's As- 
 cension, 48 ; Jews still, only with belief in 
 Christ, 48 ; the holy women joining with, 
 them in prayer, 49 ; fill up vacancy of 
 Judas Iscariot 49, 50 ; as witnesses of their 
 Lord's Eesurrection, 49; their hope be- 
 tween Ascension and Pentecost, 50 ; the 
 promise of the Holy Ghost fulfilled, 52 ; 
 speaking with tongues, 52-3 : limit of the 
 gift of tongues, 54 ; different views of the 
 gift, 54-5 ; charge of intoxication refuted, 
 58 ; miracles and signs done by them, 59, 
 60, 148, 192, 199, 214 ; conduct under per- 
 secution, and strength of their position, 
 59 ; scourged, though defended by Gama- 
 liel, 61 ; their early failing to grasp the 
 truth, 80 ; their perception that the Mo- 
 saic Law was to be superseded, 80 ; their 
 failure to understand the teaching of their 
 Lord, 81 ; remain in Jerusalem when 
 others fly from Saul's persecuting zeal, 98; 
 tradition of twelve years as the limit fixed 
 by their Lord for their abode in Jerusalem, 
 180 ; Greece and Eome in their time, 186 ; 
 showing the superiority of Christianity 
 over Stoicism, 188 ; convinced by Paul on 
 circumcision, 230 j letter after their de- 
 cision on circumcision, 242 ; genuineness 
 of this encyclical letter, 245. 
 
 Apostolical Journeys of Paul the first, A.I>. 
 45-46, Antioch in Syria, Seleucia, Cyprus, 
 Pergu in Pamphylia, Antioch in Pisidia, 
 Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, 
 Antioch in Pisidia, Perga, Attalia, An- 
 tioch in Syria, 189-224 ; the second, A.D. 
 63-56, Antioch in Syria, Derbe, Lystra, 
 Phrygia, Galatia, Mysin, Troaa, Somo- 
 thrace, Neapolis, Philippi, Thessalonica, 
 Berom, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Coesa- 
 rea, Jerusalem, 256-353; the tliird, A. D. 
 66-60, Jerusalem, Antiock in Syria, 
 Galatia, Phrygia, Ephesus, Troas, Mace- 
 donia, Illyricum, Corinth, Troas, Assos, 
 Mitylene, Chios, Trogyllium, Miletus, 
 Cos, Ehcdes, Patara, Tyre, Ptolemaia, 
 Ctesarea, Jerusalem, 354-521. 
 
 Apotheosis of Eoman Emperors, 717-8. 
 
 Aquila and Priscilla their relation to Paul. 
 317. 
 
 Arabia, the scene of Paul's retirement on hia 
 conversion, 116, 120.
 
 760 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Aramaic Paul's knowledge of, 10) in relation 
 to the gift of tongues, 57; decay and 
 advance of among Jews, 71. 
 
 Aratns, poet of Cih'cia, quoted by Paul, 308. 
 
 Aretas, Emir of Petra, 10L 
 
 Aristorchus, Paul's companion on his voyage 
 to Borne, 563. 
 
 Art its relation to Christianity, 299. 
 
 Artemas Artemidorus, 660. 
 
 Artemis Temple at Epliesus, 357-60; wor- 
 ship at Ephesus, 360-1. 
 
 Ascension of our Lord, 47. 
 
 Athens Associations and description, 295 j 
 the statuary of, 297 ; Paul at, 29C et seq. ; 
 philosophers of, 802-4 ; Paul's preaching 
 and its results, 304 et seq. ; Paul ques- 
 tioned by the Athenians, 306 ; Athenian 
 view of the Resurrection and judgment 
 to come, 811 ; later growth of the Church 
 at Athens, 313; Paul leaves Athens, 313. 
 
 Augustus Cessar his protection of the Jews, 
 504. 
 
 Aurelius Antoninus, Morons, on Christianity, 
 721. 
 
 B. 
 
 Baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch and its 
 results, 147, 160. 
 
 Barnabas, St. with Paul at Lystra, 11 ; hia 
 early relations with Paul, 133 j his influ- 
 ence with the Apostles in Paul's favour, 
 134 ; twice secured Paul's services for the 
 work of Christianity, 134, 162 ; his need 
 of help, 162 ; bis view of the admission of 
 the Gentiles to the Christian covenant, 
 161-2; his view of Paul's character, 162; 
 commencement of their joint work, 162 ; 
 separated jointly with Paul by the Holy 
 Spirit for the work of converting the 
 world, 188 ; dispute with Paul as to the 
 companionship of Mark, 254 ; their sepa- 
 ration, 254; friendship with Paul not 
 broken, but mutual loss owing to the 
 separation, 255-6. (See Paul.) 
 
 Bar-Jesus, the sorcerer, 197. 
 
 Basil, St. his Christian education at Athens, 
 313. 
 
 Berenice Paul before her, 557: her character. 
 738. 
 
 Beroaans compared with the Thessalouians 
 as to gladness in receiving the word of 
 God, 293. 
 
 Bethany, the scene of our Lord's Ascension, 
 47. 
 
 Books and Parchments of Paul at Troas, 
 21, 68 et seq. 
 
 Burdens laid on Proselytes, 718-19. 
 
 Burros, Af raniua his character, 577 ; in charge 
 of Paul, 578 ; as formerly Prtetorian Pre- 
 fect. 668 
 
 C. 
 
 Cffisar. (See distinctive names.) 
 
 Caiaphas Peter and John before, 59, 60 1 aa 
 
 guilty of the blood of Christ, 93. 
 Caligula. (See Gains.) 
 Captivity, Paul's Epistles in, 588 et teq. 
 Carpus of Troas, Paul's cloak, books, and 
 
 parchments left with, 21, 681-2. 
 Castor and Pollux, ship in which Paul sailed 
 
 from Melita, 575. 
 Cenchrero, Church at, 820. 
 
 Cephas. (Se Peter.) 
 
 Chamber of the Last Supper and of assembly 
 of the Apostles, 48, 181. 
 
 Charity, 395. 
 
 Chastity, 389. 
 
 Chief Priests. (See Priests.) 
 
 Chosen People. (See Jews. ) 
 
 Chrestian and Christian, 169. 
 
 Christ. (See Jesus.) 
 
 Christendom founded by St. Paul, 2. 
 
 Christian, Christians Origin of thenaiae,and 
 where first used, 167-9; "Christian" and 
 "Nazarene," 169; Christian character aa 
 opposed to Jewish character, 406; con- 
 trast brought out in Paul's Epistles to the 
 Corinthians, 407 ; the life of the Christian 
 a life in Christ, 507; Christian and Cbrea- 
 tian, 169 ; Christian unity (see Unity) ; at 
 first not in disfavour with the Pharisees, 
 but used by them against the Sadducees, 
 78 ; their observances and their position, 
 79; charged with blasphemy rather than 
 with idolatry, 96 ; first so called at Antioch 
 in Syria, 167 ; their endurance under per. 
 se-cution, 186 ; living sacrifice required of, 
 502; dangers dreaded by Paul for the 
 Christians of Borne, 503. 
 
 Christianity Conditions of, to the Jews, 184 ; 
 views of, by Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius, 
 186 ; compared with Stoicism, 187-8 ; rela- 
 tion of, to art, 299; judgments of early 
 Pagan writers on, 720-1 et seq. ; its intro- 
 duction into Borne, 447 et seq. 
 
 Chronology of the lifo and Epistles of St. 
 Paul, 753. 
 
 Chrysostojn, St. his estimate of St. Paul, 3, 
 689. 
 
 Church, The Its vitality from early timea, 
 47 ; the early days of, 59 et seq. ; Paul twice 
 secured for work of, by Barnabas, 13i, 
 162; rest and progress, 144 et seq. ; work 
 begun by Stephen, advanced by Philip, 
 completed by Paul, 160-1; the early 
 Church at Antioch in Syria, 182; fake 
 brethren in the Church at Antioch iii 
 Syria, 225 ; peril to, from the difference on 
 circumcision, 228 ; growth of, at Athens, 
 813 ; Church founded by Paul at Corinth, 
 319 ; Church at Cenchrete, 320; danger to, 
 at Corinth, 377; the heathen not judges 
 in Church questions, 389; qualifications 
 for office in, 653-6 et seq. ; regulations for 
 rulers in. 654, 656. (See names of the 
 several Churches.) 
 
 Cicero his views of: Athenian philosophy, 
 303. 
 
 Circumcision disputed point at the Church 
 at Antioch in Syria, 225 et seq. ; disputes 
 dangerous to the Church, 228; question 
 submitted to Church at Jerusalem, and 
 especially to the Apostles as having known 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, 228 ; decision and 
 encyclical letter of the Apostles, 242-3 ; of 
 Timothy and Titus, 261; absence of ne- 
 cessity for, the key-note of Paul's Epistle 
 to the Galatiaus, 428; Defence or, by 
 Judaisers, 428 ; its use to Judaisers, 430 ; 
 as required by the Jews, 738. 
 
 Civil Governors. (See Governors.) 
 
 Claudius, his accession, and consideration for 
 the Jews, 143; his attempt to eject the 
 Jews from Rome, 446; his persecution of 
 the Jews, 504. 
 
 Clement, St. writing of Paul, 6,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 761 
 
 Clementines, Attacks on Paul in tlie, 724-6. 
 
 Cloak, Paul's, Looks, and parchments loft at 
 Troas, 21 ; 681-2. 
 
 Coleridge, Opinion of, on Paul's Epistle to 
 the Romans, 456. 
 
 Colossse, Account of, 607. 
 
 Colossians Paul's Epistle to, 603 et seq. ; 
 causes of, 60S; fctate of Church described 
 to Paul by Epaphras, 608 ; false teachers 
 In Church at Colosss, 609; objects of 
 Epistle to, 610; genuineness of Epistlo 
 to, 614 ; account of Epistlo to, 615 et seq. ; 
 Jesus the remedy against the Phrygian 
 mysticism of, 6i; waruiug to, against 
 false teachers, 618; future of the Church, 
 622. 
 
 Conscience, Happiucss of e:<5ar, 507-8. 
 
 Corinth Paul visits, 314 ; description of, 
 314-5; Church founded at, by Paul, 319; 
 Paul's pain at the immorality of Corinth, 
 382-3; dangers to Church, 377-8; results 
 of Apollos 1 teaching at, 380 ; false teachers 
 in Church at, 381; further division iii 
 Church at, 381 ; disputes in Church at, 
 381-2 ; incest in Church at, 383 ; here Paul 
 wrote Epistles to Galatians and Romans, 
 423 ; Paul's rejoicing in Church of, 423. 
 
 Corinthian, Corinthians Epistles to, S43 ; 
 wherein different from rest in plan and 
 divisions, 343 ; relapse of Corinthian Chris- 
 tians into sensuality, 377; causes of Paul's 
 First Epistle to, 378 ; sins at the Lord's 
 Supper, 383 ; account of 1 Corinthians, 
 884-401 ; Paul's warnings against false 
 teachers and divisions in Church, 386-7; 
 Paul's dealing with cases of incest, 388-9 ; 
 on chastity, meat offered to idols, and re- 
 Burrection from the dead, 389 et seq. ; sel- 
 fishness the origin of disorders in Church, 
 397; Paul's self-defence to, 403; restora- 
 tion of Mark, 404; punishments for pro- 
 fanation of the Lord's Supper, 404; account 
 of 2 Corinthians, 402-19 ; 2 Corintliians, 
 Paul's self-vindication not self-commen- 
 dation, 408-10 ; Church behind Macedonian 
 Church, which, though poor, collected for 
 necessities of the saints, 414. 
 
 Cornelius and his friends converted to the 
 Christian faith, 158. 
 
 Covering of the head for women, 394. 
 
 Cretans, Account of, by Epimenides, 661. 
 
 Crispus baptised by Paul, 319. 
 
 Cyprus, Paul and Barnabas at its share in 
 the propagation of Christianity, 195; the 
 Jews of, 1 1 JC. 
 
 D. 
 
 Damaris, 312. 
 
 Damascus State of feeling between Jewa antl 
 Christians, 126 ; Paul's escape from, 128 ; 
 under Hareth, 708-9. 
 
 David, poetry of Psalms compared with St. 
 Paul's Epistles, 10. 
 
 Deacons Cause for and appointment of, 74-5} 
 their names, 75 ; results of their appoint- 
 ment, 76. 
 
 Death overcome by lif e, 476-8. 
 
 Denys, St., of France, 312. 
 
 Derbe, Paul and Barnabas at, 21$. 
 
 .Diana. (Se Artemis.) 
 
 Diaspora. (See Dispersion.) 
 
 Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Denys, 812. 
 
 Disciples. (See Apostles.) 
 
 Dispersion of the Chosen People. 65-6; re- 
 sults of, on Jews, Greeks,; and Romans, 
 66 et seq. 
 
 Dorcas raised from the dead, 148. 
 
 Drasilla with Felix hearing Paul, 550. 
 
 E. 
 
 Earthquake at Antioch, A.D. 37, 165. 
 
 Ebionites and Nazarenes, 725. 
 
 Effort, Human, necessary but ineffectual, 732. 
 
 Elymas, his blindness, 199 ; his resistance of 
 Paul, 197-9. 
 
 Emperors, Roman, Apotheosis of, 717-18. 
 
 Epaphras of Colosste Visit to Paul, and its 
 results, 593 ; his messages to Paul on the 
 Church at Colossro, COS. 
 
 Epaphroditus of Philippi Visit to Paul, and 
 its results, 594 ; his work at Rome : illness, 
 recovery, return to Philippi, 594-5. 
 
 Ephesus Ephesians visited by Paul, 854 ; 
 description of, 354-5; A development of 
 Christianity at, 354 ; sketch of its history, 
 355-6; reputation of its inhabitants, 356; 
 Temple of Artemis at, 357-300; super- 
 stition of, 359; Christians burn magical 
 books, as the results of Paul's labours, 
 365-6 ; outbreak which occasioned Paul's 
 departure, 368-376 ; Sketch of Church at, 
 375-6 ; Paul's Epistle to the Romans pro- 
 bably also sent to Ephesus, 450; Paul's 
 interview with elders of the Church at 
 Miletus, 515-17 ; sketch of Paul's Epistle 
 to the Ephesians, 630 et seq. ; phraseology 
 and doctrines of the'.Epistle, 739-40. 
 
 Epictetus on Christianity, 721. 
 
 Epicureans, 303-4. 
 
 Epimenides Altars built by his direction, 
 301 ; Paul's quotation from, in Epistle to 
 Titus, 661. 
 
 Epistle Epistles Paul's value and power 
 of, 2; Genuineness of, 4-6; to Hebrews 
 as work of Apollos, 6 ; Undesigned coin- 
 cidences in, 6 ; compared with poetry of 
 Psalms of David, 10; their testimony to 
 Paul's " stake in the flesh," 121 et seq. ; 
 Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians, 289 ; 
 1 Thess., account of, 325 et seq.; Paul's 
 Epistles compared with our Lord's Sermon 
 on the Mount, 327 ; Paul's intense feelings 
 conveyed in his Epistles, 327 ; their 
 character, 327; salutation and opening, 
 828-9 ; characteristics of 1 Thess., 329 et 
 8617. ; 2 Thess., account of, 340 et seq. ; 
 object of this Epistle, 343 ;. difference of 
 the plan and the division of 1 and 2 Cor. 
 from Paul's other Eoistles, 343 ; explana- 
 tion of 2 Thess. 112, 346 et seq. 1 Cor. 
 written during latter part of stay at 
 Ephesus, 876 ; cause of this Epistle, 378 
 et seq. ; account of ditto, SS4 et seq. ; sub- 
 jects of several, 403; 2 Cor., account of, 
 406 et seq.; Epistles to Galatians and 
 Romans written at Corinth, 423 ; cause of 
 the Epistle to the Galatians, 426 ; object, 
 viz., to prove circumcision unnecesary, 
 427-8 ; lasting results of the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, 431 ; account of ditto, 431 et 
 eeq.; cause of Epistle to the Romans, 445 ; 
 account of ditto, 445 et seq. ; conclusion of, 
 as probably intended originally, 509 ; actual 
 conclusion of, 510; epistles written at 
 Corinth made the subject of Paul's
 
 IKDEZ. 
 
 preaching in that city, 511 ; their bearing 
 on Paul's life division into groups, 688 
 et seq. ; order in which written, 591 ; of 
 the captivity, 692 et seq.; to Colossians, 
 608 et seq. ; to Philemon, 623 et seq. ; the 
 Christology of the epistles of the captivity, 
 613-14; to Ephesians, 630 etseg.; causes of 
 this epistle; its genuineness, subject, 
 style, compared with Epistle to Colossians, 
 631 et seq. ; pastoral, 647 etseg. ; 1 Timothy, 
 650 t seq. ; to Titus, 660 et seq. ; genuine- 
 ness of the pastoral epistles, 664, 743 et 
 seq. ; Paul's account to Timothy of his 
 loneliness in prison ; the support of him 
 by his God, and his Boman trial; his 
 approaching end, 676 et seq. ; 2 Timothy, 
 account of, 676 et seq. ; Chief uncial MSS. 
 of, 730-1 ; Paul's Epistles, division into 
 groups of Eschatological, Anti- Judaic, 
 Christological or Anti-Gnostic, Pastoral, 
 733-4 ; phraseology and diction of Epistle 
 to the Ephesians, 739-40 ; chronology of 
 Paul's Epistles, 753-5 ; dates of ditto, 756. 
 
 Etesian winds, 563-4. 
 
 Eunice and Lois visited by Paul, 258. 
 
 Eunuch, Ethiopian, baptised by Philip, 147; 
 results of baptism to infant church, 160. 
 
 Enoclia and Syntyche as Christian women of 
 Macedonia, 277 ; exhorted to unity by 
 Paul in Epistle to Ephesians, 595. 
 
 Euroaquila Euroclydo, 566-7. 
 
 Eutychus, fall and restoration to life, 513-14. 
 
 Evodius, Bishop of Antioch, tradition of, as 
 inventor of the name of " Christian." 
 169. 
 
 P. 
 
 Faith revived by writings of Paul, 2 ; Justi- 
 fication by, first taught by Paul, 2; 
 Power of justification by, 461, 464, 472 et 
 seq. ; difference between justification by 
 faith and justification by the Law, 486; 
 relation of hope to, 490. 
 
 Feasts, Love Feasts, 51. (See Agapze.) 
 
 Felix, his judicial impartiality, 323, 504 ; made 
 Procurator of Judma A.D. 52, 530; his 
 estimation among the Jews, 547-8; de- 
 ferred completion of Paul's trial for 
 evidences of Lysias, 549; trembles at 
 Paul's reasoning, 550; his attempts to 
 procure bribes for Paul's release, 551; 
 cause of his disgrace his hist act of 
 injustice to Paul, 552 et seq. 
 
 Pcstus his judicial impartiality, 323, 504; 
 succeeds Felix as Procurator of Judrea 
 A.D. 60, 552 ; brings Paul before Agrippa, 
 556 et seq. ; his treatment of Paul, 553-5. 
 
 Flaccus, Governor of Alexandria, arrest and 
 death, 140. 
 
 Food, Paul's rules as to use of, 505-6. 
 
 Forgiveness of the redeemed, Paul's view of, 
 732. 
 
 Foundation stone, Peter the Apostle of, i. 
 
 Free will, Paul's view of, 732. 
 
 a. 
 
 Oaius (Caligula) succeeded Tiberius as 
 Emperor of Borne, 137; friend of Herod 
 Agrippa, 138; intended profanation of the 
 Temple at Jerusalem, and death, 142-3. 
 
 Qaius (convert of St. Paul) baptised by PaoL 
 320. 
 
 Galatia Galatians Paul's visit to, 263 et 
 seq.; their kindness to Paul, 266-7; 
 Churches in, founded by Paul, 268. 
 
 Galatians, Paul's Epistle to Cause of, 426; 
 object, to prove circumcision unneces- 
 sary, 427-8; lasting results of, 431; ac- 
 count of, 431 et seg. ; apostolic authority 
 in the opening salutation first Assumed in 
 this Epistle, 431-2 ; sense of wrong in the 
 mind of the writer abrupt plainness 
 charge of perverting the Gospel vindi- 
 cation of the Apostolic character com- 
 mission and labours recognition by the 
 other Apostles dispute with Peter, 433-4; 
 who are sons of Abraham from what 
 Christ has ransomed us use of the law, 
 436 ; concord of law and promise-^all free 
 in Christ and Abraham's seed difference 
 between old and new covenants old cove- 
 nant fulfilled its oflace, 437-9; allegory of 
 Sarah and Hagar and their sons Gala- 
 tians can combine neither law and gospel 
 nor flesh and spirit the question not of 
 circumcision or uncircumcisiou, but of a 
 new creature, 440-3. 
 Galen on Christians, 721. 
 
 Gallic, Lucius Junius Anneeus, brother of 
 Seneca, uncle of Lucan, made Pro-consul 
 of Asia, 321 ; character (generally misun- 
 derstood) among his friends, 321 ; his in- 
 difference when Paul is brought before 
 him, 322 ; his reason for refusing to com- 
 mit Paul, 322 ; his judicial impartiality, 
 323 ; result of his justice to Paul while in 
 Corinth, 351 ; protecting Paul by his dis- 
 dainful justice, 504. 
 
 Gamaliel as instructor of Paul, 3, 15, 25 ; his 
 views of the wisdom of the Greeks, 21 ; 
 Rabbi, Babban his parentage liberality 
 of his views, 25 ; his character, 26 ; as a 
 Pharisee, 26 ; value of his teaching to 
 Paul, 27 ; defence of Paul, 61-2 ; Gamaliel 
 and the school of Tubingen, 704-6. 
 
 Gentiles Deliverance and admission of, to 
 the Church of Christ, 145; commence- 
 ment of their reception into the Church, 
 160; their generous help of Jewish 
 Christians, 172 ; Simeon's prophecy, 183 ; 
 of Pisidia gladly accept Gospel preached 
 by Paul on its rejection by the Jews, 211 ; 
 Paul's future care, 223; moderation of 
 the Gentile Christians of Rome towards 
 Jewish Christians when Paul wrote the 
 Epistle to the Romans, 452; their sin 
 of denying" and abandoning God, their 
 punishment, 465 ; Gentiles and Jews 
 equally guilty before God and equally 
 redeemed, 470. 
 
 Ghost, Holy. (See Holy Ghost) 
 
 Glossolalia, 30, 54-7. (See Tongues.) 
 
 God Peace only in His Love, 40; His deal- 
 ings with men, 51; visions from, 109; 
 His warnings, 112; universal worship 
 prophesied by Zephaniah, 183 ; only giver 
 of blessing on ministerial labours, 386 ; 
 effect of His righteousness on man, 461 ; 
 truth to His promise proved by Paul, 
 471-2; manifestation of His Righteous- 
 ness, 473 ; His infinite love the solution of 
 predestinarian difficulties, 494 ; His grace, 
 wisdom, i udgments, 501 ; kingdom of God 
 denned, 507; God working in man, and
 
 INDEX. 
 
 763 
 
 fudging through Christ, 733. (Set Un- 
 known God.) 
 
 Gospel Witness to our Lord, 184 ; women's 
 part in dissemination of, 184 ; the power 
 of, 460; for Jews and Gentiles alike, 465. 
 
 Governors, Civil Duties to, 503; Functions 
 of, 503 ; Paul's teachings of obedience to, 
 504-5. 
 
 Grace Relation to sin, 479-80; Abundance 
 of, above sin, 404 ; wisdom, and judgments 
 of God, 501 : source of grace, mercy, and 
 pity, 502. 
 
 Greece Character of, in time of the Apostles, 
 186. 
 
 Greeks Their " wisdom," 21 ; Besulta on, of 
 the dispersion of the Jews, 66 ; contact 
 with Jews, 66-7; conversion of Greek 
 Proselytes, 161 ; their violent treatment 
 of Sostheues before Gallio, 324. 
 
 Gregory of Nazianzus his Christian educa- 
 tion at Athens, 313. 
 
 Habakkuk, quoted by Paul, 464. 
 
 Hagada and Hagadist, 33 et seq. 
 
 Halacha and Halachist, 33 et seq. 
 
 Hallel studied by Paul when a boy, 25. 
 
 Heathendom in the time of the Apostles, 186. 
 
 Hebraism aud Hellenism, 65 et seq, 
 
 Hebrew Paul's knowledge of, used by our 
 Lord in Paul's conversion, 10. 
 
 Hebrews, Epistle to, as work of Apollos, 6. 
 
 Helena, Queen Her protracted vows, 429. 
 
 Hellenism and Hebraism, 65 et seq. 
 
 Herod Agrippa His character, 139 : impri- 
 soned by Tiberius, released by Gaius on 
 his accession to the Empire, and appointed 
 successor as Tetrarch to Herod Philip and 
 Lysanias, 139 j beginning of his reign, re- 
 ception at Alexandria, 139 ; his influence 
 and promotion, 174; observance of the 
 Mosaic Law, 175; slays James arrests 
 Fetor, 175-7 et seq. ; his death, 179 et seq. 
 
 Herods in the Acts, 734-8. 
 
 Hillel grandfather of Gamaliel, 25, 26, 73; 
 The seven rules of, 34 ; dealing with bur- 
 densome Mosaic regulations, 39. 
 
 Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit Promise of, to 
 Apostles. 47 ; Gift of, at Pentecost, 52 ; 
 eltocts of gift, 53. 
 
 Hope Its power unto salvation, its relation 
 to faith, 490-1. 
 
 Hope and Peace, the result of justification by 
 faith, 475-6. 
 
 Hymn at first Pentecost, after gift of tongues, 
 57. 
 
 Iconiain (Konieh) visited by Paul and Bar- 
 nabas, 212. 
 
 Idolatry Influence of, on Jewish and other 
 communities, 69. 
 
 Idols Meats offered to, 3S9, 391. 
 
 Incest in Corinthian Church Paul's dealing 
 with, 388-9. 
 
 Inspiration. (See Verbal Inspiration.) 
 
 Islimael Thirteen rules of, 34. 
 
 Israel the restoration of, 500. (Set Jews.) 
 
 Issachar, High Priest, 735. 
 
 Izates, son of Abennerig, circumcised, 173, 
 429. 
 
 J. 
 
 James the Greater, his death, 176. 
 
 James the Less, cause for his respect by the 
 people, 80; compared with Paul, 131; con- 
 vinced by Paul as to circumcision, 230 ; 
 description of, 239 ; on circumcision, 240 
 et seq. ; error in his view of Paul's work, 
 426 ; with elders of the Church receives 
 Paul at Jerusalem, 522. 
 
 Jason Name identical with Jesus, 14 ; charge 
 against Jason by Jews of Thessalonica, 
 291. 
 
 Jerome," St. Fragments of traditions of Paul, 
 9: on Paul, 689; compared with Paul, 
 496. 
 
 Jerusalem crowd at first Pentecost, 57 1 
 birthplace of Christianity, 354 ; its dun- 
 
 fers to Paul, 444 ; state of feeling among 
 ews at time of proposal of James and 
 elders to Paul, 527-8. 
 
 Jesus Christ the Lord speaking to Paul in 
 Hebrew at his conversion, 10 ; His notice 
 of beauties of nature not the subject of 
 Paul's language, 12 ; name identical with 
 Jason, 14 ; love manifested in His death, 
 risen, glorified, known to Paul by revela- 
 tion, 42 ; intercourse with disciples after 
 Eesurrection not continuous, 47 ; promise 
 of Holy Spirit to Apostles ; power of 
 His Eesurrection, 47; His Ascension, 
 48; His mission to found a kingdom, 
 81 ; His purposes to supersede the 
 Law not seen in His observance of it, 
 81; significance not seen at the time of 
 His teaching on the Sabbath, 81 ; univer- 
 sality of spiritual worship, ic., 81; 
 fulfilled the Law in spiritualising it, 81 ; 
 as Messiah, an offence to the Jews, but 
 still that which Stephen undertook to 
 prove, 83-4 ; why He declared Himself to 
 Paul as " Jesus of Nazareth," 111 ; all in 
 all to Paul, 114 ; second special revelation 
 to Paul, 135 ; deeper meaning underlying 
 many of His words, 150; tradition that 
 twelve years was the limit laid down by 
 Him for abode of His disciples in Jeru- 
 salem, 180 ; light to Gentiles, 183 ; errone- 
 ous view of Him by Suetonius, 186; the 
 fundamental conception of all Christianity 
 in John and Paul, 724; undivided, 385; 
 object of all preaching, 386; the only 
 foundation, 387 ; common foundation for 
 Jew and Gentile, 456 ; bond of human 
 society, 456 ; this is the basis of all Paul's 
 epistles, 456 ; Power of life in, 490 ; His 
 sacrifice and exultation, 599, 600; the 
 Divine Word the remedy for Phrygian 
 mysticism, &c., in the Colossian Chris- 
 tians, 616; as judge, 732. 
 Jews as persecutors of Paul, 5; their care 
 for youths as to " dubious reading," 22 ; 
 marriage customs, 25, 46, 95 ; value of the 
 Scriptures among them, 29 ; their litera- 
 ture, 32-3; TOWS, 40; as originators of 
 discord among Christians, 42 ; underrating 
 the apostolic dignity of Paul, 42; cus- 
 toms of Christian Jews in synagogues, 49 ; 
 persecuting the apostles, 60 et seq.; the 
 dispersion of, 65 et seq.; result of the dis- 
 persion on themselves and on Greeks and 
 Romans, 66-8; result of contact on the 
 Greeks, 66-7; violent outbreaks, 67: 
 causes which led to their commercial
 
 IN-DEX. 
 
 character, 69-70; of Alexandria, their 
 learning, advance in literature, more en- 
 lightened than the Rabbis of Jerusalem as 
 to the purposes of God's gifts, 70-2; 
 change of language on dispersion, and 
 results of contact with Aryan race, 71 ; 
 ordinances to prohibit relations with 
 heathen, and bloodshed resulting from 
 them, 73-i ; their Greek names, 75 ; their 
 Messianic hopes, S3; their reverence for 
 Moses, 85; infuriated at Stephen's view 
 of the law of Moses, 86 ; not naturally 
 persecutors, 96; the forbearance of the 
 Christian Jews of liorne to Gentiles 
 when Paul wrote his Epistle to the 
 Eomans, 452 ; of Damascus their feeling 
 towards Christians their reception of 
 Paul's preac-iiing, 126-7 ; their scourginga of 
 Paul, 127 ; relief at death of Tiberius, 
 138 ; allegiance to Gaius, 138 ; how re- 
 garded in Alexandria barbarities prac- 
 tised on them, 139 141; contributions for 
 brethren in Judcea, 172 ; Jewish Christians 
 helped by Gentiles in return for spiritual 
 wealth, 172 ; of Antioch in Syria, 181 ; con- 
 ditions_ on which alone they could accept 
 Christianity, 184 ; two Jews (Paul and 
 Barnabas) on a journey for the conver- 
 sion of the world, 188 ; of Cyprus, and 
 of Salamis, 195 ; their lectionary, 207 ; 
 jealousy of tho Jews at Antioch in Pisidia, 
 against the Gentiles at Paul's preaching, 
 211; Paul stoned at Lystra by Jews of 
 Antioch and Iconium, 217 ; their hitred 
 of Paul, 218; their hatred of Paul and 
 Christ, 290 ; disturbance caused by them 
 against Paul at Thessaionica, 291 et seq. ; 
 belief of Jews of Beroea, 293 ; Paul's inter- 
 course with, and teaching of the Jews of 
 Athens, 302 ; Paul's complaints of the Jews 
 of Corinth, 321 ; their animosity against 
 Christians, even to bringing false accusa- 
 tions against them, 323 ; of Thessaionica, 
 331 ; their calumnies against Paul, 331 ; 
 their persecution of Paul, 332 ; soourgings 
 715-7; Hatred of, in classical antiquity, 
 719-20 ; of Ephesus, 361 ; their opposi- 
 tion to Paul, 361 ; introduced into Home 
 by Pompey, 445 ; his treatment of them, 
 445 ; useless as slaves, 445 ; consequent 
 emancipation, 446 ; multiply and flourish, 
 446; cause of their position in the world, 
 446; attempts of Sejanus and Claudius to 
 eject them from Eome, 446 ; Seneca's ac- 
 count of the Jews in Borne, 446 ; convicted 
 by Paul of the Eame sin as the Gentiles, 
 in forsaking and denying their God, 467 
 et seq. ; equally redeemed with the Gen- 
 tiles, but their hope vain while on wrong 
 foundation, 492 ; Eejection of, from pri- 
 vileges, 495 ; Love of Paul for, 496 ; not 
 naturally, but spiritually alone, heirs of 
 the promises, 497 ; their want of faith in 
 rejection of the Gospel, 498-9; their rejec- 
 tion by their God neither entire nor final, 
 499-500 ; their restoration, 500 ; their pro- 
 tection by Boman law, 504 ; their plofc 
 against Paul's life, 511; causes of their 
 plot, 511; its discovery and prevention, 
 511; customs as to Nazarite vows, and 
 proposal of elders at Jerusalem to Paul, 
 523-4; disposition at time of Paul's fifth 
 visit to Jerusalem, various outbreaks, 528 
 et seq.; of Ephesus, outbreak against 
 
 Paul, 531 et eeq. ; charge against Paul of 
 defiling the temple, 531 et seq. ; Division 
 among, at Paul's answer as to the resur- 
 rection, 543; contest with the Greeks ja 
 market-places of Ctesarea, 551-3 : edict of 
 banishment by Claudius, 579 ; their reply 
 to Paul's appeal to Ctesar, 579; Number 
 of, in Rome, 680; thoy hear Paul, O&O; 
 influence and trade at liorae, 5S5-6. 
 
 Joel, Fulfilment of prophecy of, at Peutecost, 
 54. 
 
 John As a "son of thunder," 1 ; it&presa 
 of individuality on Church, 1 ; Martyrdom 
 of life, his miracles, 58 ; description of 
 Borne in Apocalypse, 1S6; convinced by 
 Paul on circumcision, 230 ; compared with 
 Paul, 723-4. 
 
 John and Peter Two chief apostles, 1 ; be- 
 fore the chief priests, 60*; their know- 
 ledge of the mind of Christ, 724. 
 
 John Mark. (See Mark.) 
 
 Jonathan, High Priest at death of Stephen, 
 88, 93. 
 
 Joseph, the Levite of Cyprus his early rela- 
 tions with Paul, 132. 
 
 Joseph Barsabbas, surnanied Justus chosen 
 with Matthias at election of au aoostle, 
 49. 
 
 Josephus his allusion to death of Herod 
 Agrippa, 179. 
 
 Journeys Apostolical, of Pa\il. (See Apos- 
 tolical.) 
 
 Juda Hakkodosh, Rabbi, and the Emperor 
 Antoninus. 430. 
 
 Judaiscrs, Judaising Teachers Judaism -- 
 Paul's controversy with, in 2 Corinthians, 
 Galatians, and Romans, 406; success in 
 undoing Paul's work in Antioch, Coriuth, 
 and Galatia, hence Epistla to Golatiaui. 
 425-6; their charges against Paul, 427; 
 circumcision the ground of their conten- 
 tion with Paul, 428 ; their motive in de- 
 fending circumcision, 430 ; their hostility 
 at Jerusalem dangerous to Paul, 444. 
 
 Judas Iscariot his fall by sin and his end, 
 49 ; antitype of Ahitophel, 49. 
 
 Jude, misapprehension of his Epistle, 726. 
 
 Judgment, Paul on, 732. 
 
 Julian, attempt to substitute the term " Naza- 
 rene " for " Christian," 169. 
 
 Julius (Centurion) his judicial impartiality, 
 823 ; placed in charge of Paul to take him 
 to Rome, 561 et seq. ; gives up his charge 
 of Paul, 577. 
 
 Julius Caasar, his protection of the Jews, 
 504. 
 
 Justification by faith. (See Faith.) 
 
 Juvenal, his description of Borne, 187. 
 
 Kephas. (See Peter.) 
 
 Kingdom of God erroneous ideas of, 36-7; 
 
 foundation of, Christ's mission, 81 ; defini> 
 
 tion of, 507. 
 Koiiieh. (Sec Iconium.) 
 
 L. 
 
 Languages. (See Tongues.) 
 
 Last Supper, Upper room of, 48, 181. 
 
 Law The righteousness of, and what
 
 INDEX. 
 
 765 
 
 pended on it, 36 ; its 248 commands and 
 865 prohibitions, 37 ; Oral, nullity of, 37 ; 
 its traditions and glosses injurious, 37-9 ; 
 requirements before God, 38-9 ; require- 
 ments impossible for man to satisfy, 39 ; 
 Hypocrisy in observance of, 39 ; of Moses, 
 our Lord a explanation of its destiny, 85 ; 
 Use, objects, and end of, 478, 651 ; its posi- 
 tion in the scheme of salvation, 480 ct scq. ; 
 why not justifying, 482 ; multiplying 
 transgressions, 482-3; difference between 
 justification by the Law and justification 
 oy faith, 485; position further defined, 
 487 ; illustration from marriage, 487 ; its 
 relation to sin, 483 et seg. 
 
 Lectionary, Jewish, 207. 
 
 Levanter, 566. 
 
 Lex Porcia, 23. 
 
 Life overcoming death, 479-80; in Christ, 
 490; its power, 490. 
 
 Lois and Eunice visited by Paul, 258. 
 
 Longinus on the style of Paul, 15, 689. 
 
 Lord. (See Jesus.) 
 
 Love John, the Apostle of, 1 ; infinite love 
 of God the solution of predestinarian diffi- 
 culties, 494; ths debt of all, 505. (See 
 Charity.) 
 
 Love Feasts, 51 ; held with closed doors, 99- 
 100. (See AgapjB.) 
 
 Lucan, his relation to Gallic, 321. 
 
 Lucian on Christianity, 721. 
 
 Luke possible errors and minute exactness, 
 64 ; not professing to give a complete bio- 
 graphy of Paul, 116; Paul's companion 
 from Troaa on second Apostolic journeys, 
 271 ; his fidelity to him, 271 ; antecedents 
 and history his character as physician, 
 and in his relation to Paul, 272 ; with Paul 
 at Philippi, 511; his companion on his 
 royage to Rome, 663 ; as historian of the 
 Apostles, 617 ; abrupt ending of the Acts 
 not explained, 647-8; his faithfulness to 
 Paul in his imprisonment, 670. 
 
 Luther, Martin, compared with Paul, 2, 431, 
 496 ; Opinion of, Epistle to the Romans, 456. 
 
 Lydia baptised, 276; entertains Paul, 27t>: 
 and friends at Philippi, their care for Paul 
 in his imprisonment at Rome, 594. 
 
 Lysias his judicial impartiality, 823; pro- 
 tecting Paul by his soldier-like energy, 
 504; rescues Paul from the Jews in the 
 Temple, 533 ; his error abeut Paul, 533 ; 
 permits Paul to speak to the Jews, 534 ; 
 Informed by Paul's nephew of plot of the 
 Jews to take Paul's life rescues him 
 and sends him from Jerusalem to Csesa- 
 rea, 544 et seq. 
 
 Lystra visited by Paul and Barnabas, 214 ; 
 Paul's sufferings there rewarded by his 
 conversion of Timothy, 217 ; visited asraia 
 by Paul, 25& 
 
 M. 
 
 Macedonia Influx of Jews and Greeks, but 
 without mixing with each other, 67; 
 visited by Paul on second apostolic 
 journey, 273 et eeq. ; position of women 
 in, 276-7. 
 
 Malta, in connection with Paul's shipwreck, 
 571-3. 
 
 Man Three great epochs in the religious 
 history of, 476; four phases of, 483; not 
 under the law but under grace, 483. 
 
 " Man of Sin," 726-9. 
 
 Manaen (Meuahera), foster-brother of Herod 
 An tip as, 182. 
 
 Manuscripts Chief uncial MSS. of the Acta 
 of the Apostles and the Epistles of St 
 Paul, 730-L 
 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus on Christianity, 
 721. 
 
 Mark interpreter to St. Peter, 55; com- 
 panion of Paul and Barnabas, 181, 194; 
 relationship to Barnabas, 201 ; leaves 
 Paul and Barnabas at Perga, 202; as 
 the cause of separation between Paul 
 and Barnabas, 254 ; result to him of tho 
 difference between Paul and Barnabas, 
 256 ; again welcomed by Paul as a fellow- 
 labourer, 256. 
 
 Marriage Age for, and customs among 
 Jews, 25, 46, 95; Rabbinical injunction 
 to marry young, 46 ; in reference to Paul, 
 46 ; Paul's view of marriage and virginity 
 as given to the Corinthian Church, 39L 
 
 Mary, the mother of our Lord Worship of, 
 in Cyprus, 197. 
 
 Mary, owner of the house in which was the 
 upper chamber in which the Apostles 
 met, and possibly in which the Last 
 Supper had taken place, 181. 
 
 Masters and Servants Mutual duties, 657. 
 
 Matthias chosen an Apostle, 49, 50. 
 
 Meat and other food, Paul's rules as to tho 
 use of, 505-6. 
 
 Melancthon's opinion of Paul's Epistle to the 
 Romans, 456. 
 
 Melita. (See Malta.) 
 
 Menaheia. (See Manaen.) 
 
 Mercy, Vessels of, 498. 
 
 Messiah Rabbinical idea of conditions of His 
 coming, 37 ; fulfilling many prophecies, 85. 
 
 Miletus, Paul's interview at, with elders of 
 the Church of Ephesus, 515. 
 
 Miracles wrought by Apostles, 59,60, 148, 192, 
 199, 214. 
 
 Mishna rules for marriages, 46 ; marriage tha 
 first of its 613 precepts, 46. 
 
 Missionary journeys of Paul. (See Apos- 
 tolical.) 
 
 Mnason entertains Paul at Jerusalem, 521. 
 
 Monastic life compared with Pharisaism, 38. 
 
 Monobazus, Zing of Adiabene, and his family, 
 173. 
 
 Monobazus, sou of Abennerig and Helena, 
 circumcised, 429. 
 
 Mosaic Law. (See Law.) 
 
 Moses Jewish reverencs for, 85; his claim 
 on mankind, 85-6; Relation of Paul to, 
 before and after his conversion respec- 
 tively, 120 ; his marriage, 183. 
 
 Mount of Olives, scene of our Lord's Ascen- 
 sion, 47. 
 
 N. 
 
 "Nazarene" Julian's attempt to get thia 
 word substituted for " Christian," 169. 
 
 Nazarenes and Ebionites, 725. 
 
 Nazorite vows, Jewish customs aa to, and 
 proposal of elders at Jerusalem to PauL 
 523-4 
 
 Nero Points with, in Paul's favour, 561 ; per- 
 secution, 585, 668; the direction of his 
 influence at Rome, 587-S; his govern- 
 ment, 668 ; Paul before Nero, 671 et teq. ; 
 his character, 672.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 New Testament. (See Testament.) *4 
 Nicodemus as a Pharisee, 26. 
 Nicolas Significance of his appointment as a 
 deacon, 75 ; evidence connecting him with 
 
 the Nicolaitans insufficient, 75. 
 
 O. 
 
 Offertory, Paul on the, 414, 419, 420, 421, 444. 
 
 Old Testament. (See Testament.) 
 
 Olives, Mount of. (See Mount of Olives.) 
 
 Onesimus Visit to Paul and conversion, 58 ; 
 subject of Paul's Epistle to Philemon, 
 
 . 608; his offence and its legal conse- 
 quences, 623 et scij. 
 
 Onesiphorus his search for Paul and visits to 
 him in prison at Rome, 666-7 ; his kindness 
 to Paul, 670. 
 
 Oral Law. (See Law.) 
 
 Our Lord our Bedeemer our Saviour. (Se 
 Jesus.) 
 
 P. 
 
 Paganism and its results, 466. 
 
 Paphos, Soothsayers of, 198. 
 
 Paraclete. (See Holy Ghost.) 
 
 Parchments and hooks of Paul at Troas, 21, 
 681 et seq. 
 
 Parthenon dedicated to Virgin Mary, 313. 
 
 Pascal, antecedents of, and compared with 
 Paul, 3. 
 
 Passover, Upper room of, 48, 181. 
 
 Pastoral Epistles, Paul's genuineness of, 664, 
 743. 
 
 Paul Apostolical journeys of (see Apos- 
 tolical) ; Apostle of Progress, 1 ; "in 
 deaths oft," 1 ; Apostle of the Gentiles, 2 ; 
 teacher of justification by faith, 2 ; under 
 God the founder of Christendom, 2 ; value 
 of his Epistles, 2 ; power of his writings, 
 2, 3 ; his character, 2-4 ; antecedents and 
 life compared with those of Luther, Wes- 
 ley, and others ; antecedents compared 
 with those of other Apostles, 3, 7; his 
 education, 3, 7 ; his history gathered 
 from the Acts and the Epistles but frag- 
 mentary, 5, 6 ; genuineness of his Epistles, 
 4-6 ; his account of his own sufferings, 
 compulsory, 5; sufficiency for materials 
 of bis life and character, 7 ; undesigned 
 coincidences in his Epistles, 7: "Paul 
 the aged," 7, 8 ; birthplace and boyhood, 
 8 et seq. ; parentage and descent, 9, 
 20 ; power in his nationality, 9, 20 ; 
 languages known to him, 9, 10 ; languages 
 in which he spoke, 10 ; his inner life, 11, 
 12 ; unobservant of such beauties of nature 
 as were frequently mentioned by our 
 Lord, 12 ; early impressions at Tarsus, 13 ; 
 influencing causes of his trade, 13; in- 
 fluence of his trade on his character, 14 ; 
 his parents, 14 ; their privileges as Roman 
 citizens inherited by him, 14 ; his kinsmen, 
 15 ; his education under Gamaliel, 15 ; a 
 Hebraist, though writing in Greek, 15; 
 Longinus' criticisms on his style, 15; 
 Cilicisms in his style, 16; influence on 
 him of his residence in Tarsus, 16 et seq. ; 
 his preference of folly with God over the 
 wisdom of heathendom, 19 ; not of Hellenic 
 culture, his style peculiar and his Greek 
 provincial, his thought* Syriac, his dia- 
 
 lectic method Babbinic, 21; his books 
 and parchments at Troas, 21, 681 et seq. ; : 
 those books, not Greek literature, 21-2 ; ! 
 acquaintance with Greek literature, 22; 
 classic quotations and allusions, 22; 
 Boman citizenship, 23-4 ; scourgings, 24 ; 
 Roman citizenship not inconsistent with 
 Jewish descent, 24; early studies, 25; 
 claims to be a Pharisee, 26 ; knowledge of 
 the Old Testament, quoting the LXX., 
 27 ; value to him of Gamaliel's teaching, 
 28; his views of inspiration, 28; use of 
 the Old Testament and of Scriptures 
 generally, 28-9 ; his style of argument to 
 Jews, 29 ; as Hebrew and Hellenist, 33 ; 
 endeavours to keep the Law, 37 ; miscon- 
 ception of the Oral Law, 37 ; extent of hia 
 obedience to the Law, 38 ; early anxieties, 
 88-9 ; compared with Luther, Bunyan, and 
 Johu Newton, 40 ; early inward struggles, 
 40-1 ; saw the Lord Jesus Christ, 41-3 ; 
 knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ by 
 faith, 43 ; not at Jerusalem at the time of 
 our Lord's ministry and crucifixion influ- 
 ence on him of Stephen's dying words, 44, 
 97 ; his marriage, 44-6 ; early dealing with : 
 the infant Church, 47 ; cause for his hatred 
 by the people, 80 ; his part in the dispute 
 with Stephen in the Synagogue of the 
 Libertines, 82 ; his feelings on listening to 
 him, 82 ; holding the clothes of those who 
 stoned Stephen, 94 ; aged thirty years at 
 Stephen's martyrdom, 95; member of 
 the Sanhedrin, and so a married man, 
 95; his fury against Christians, 96; 
 even under-rated as a persecutor, 97; 
 his confession of erring obstinacy in per- 
 secuting the Church, 98 ; under persecu- 
 tion, 99 ; his commission for Damascus, 
 100 ; reflections on his way to Damascus- 
 conversion, 101-9 ; inward struggles, 105-6 ; 
 knowledge that he had been spoken to by 
 his God, 109; result of having seen the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, 109, 110 ; his blindness, 
 109 ; the two accounts of his conversion, 
 111-12; immediately after his conversion 
 led blind into Damascus, 113 ; entry into 
 and departure from Damascus, 113 ; ori- 
 ginal mission to Damascus, 114 ; his con- 
 version 'as an evidence of Christianity, 
 114 ; Christ all in all to him, and hia 
 witness to Christ, 114 ; a preacher of the 
 cross and the Crucified, 115 ; a Nazarene, 
 115 ; the training necessary for his great ! 
 work, 117 ; retirement into Arabia his , 
 need of retirement, 116-17 ; source of his j 
 Apostleship, 118 ; frame of mind after his 
 conversion, 118-19 ; his relation to Moses 
 and Mosaism, 120; his "thorn in thai 
 flesh" here called "stake in the flesh" | 
 121 et seq.; traces of his "stake in the 
 flesh," 122 et seq. ; object of his " stake in 
 the flesh," 125 ; return to and preaching 
 at Damascus, 125 et seq. ; how his preach- 
 ing was received by the Jews of Damascus, 
 126 ; scourged by the Jews, 127 ; escape 
 from Damascus, 128; journey from Da- 
 mascus to Jerusalem, and reception there, 
 128-30; meeting with Peter at Jerusalem, 
 130; compared with James, 181; early 
 relations with Joseph, Hark, and Barna- 
 bas, 132-4 ; early trials, 135 ; twice secured 
 by Barnabas for the work of Christianity, 
 134, 162 ; his recognition by the Apostles
 
 INDBX. 
 
 767 
 
 through. Barnabas, 134; early ministry, 
 perils, escapes second vision of a mission 
 from the Lord Jesus to the Gentiles, 134 
 et seq. ; again at Tarsus, 136 ; shipwrecks, 
 136; as Apostle of the Gentiles. 145; 
 influence in Church advancement of Paul, 
 Stephen, and Philip, respectively, 161 ; 
 supplying the help needed by Barnabas 
 with Barnabas at Antioch in Syria their 
 joint work begun, 162; preaching at 
 Antioch in Syria and its results, 166 et 
 seq. ; separated with Barnabas by the 
 Holy Spirit for the work of converting 
 the world, 188; Apostle of the Gentiles, 
 188 ; first Apostolic journey, 189, 219 ; 
 description of Paul, 191-2; strikes Ely- 
 mas blind, 199; his miracles, 199, 214; 
 a widower and childless, 192; defects 
 more than counterbalanced by his gifts, 
 192-3 ; at Cyprus, 195 et seq. ; at Salamis, 
 196-7 ; reason for change in his name, 200; 
 Mark leaves Paul and Barnabas at Perga, 
 202 ; at Antioch in Pisidia, 204-5 ; preaches 
 there, 207; results, 210-11 ; there also, on 
 rejection of the Gospel by the Jews, 
 turns to the Gentiles, 211 ; at Iconium, 
 212; preaches at Iconium, 213; results, 
 213 et seq. ; at Lystra, 214 ; Paul preaches, 
 214 ; heals a cripple, 214 ; taken for gods, 
 214-15; disclaim the honours offered to 
 them, 215-16; stoned by Jews at Lystra, 
 217 ; converts Timothy, 217 ; with Barna- 
 bas leaves Lystra, 218; at Derbe, 218; 
 work and success, 218 ; Gaius and other 
 friends and converts, 218 ; return from 
 Derbe to Antioch in Syria, completing 
 first Apostolic journey, 219; results of 
 first Apostolic journey, 221 ; convictions 
 after first Apostolic journey, 221-2; con- 
 scious of special mission to Gentiles, 
 223-4; with Barnabas goes to Jerusalem 
 on question of circumcision, 228; con- 
 verts Titus who (joes with him to Jeru- 
 salem, 229; convinces John, Peter, and 
 James on circumcision as unnecessary, 
 230 ; zeal for poor of Church at Jerusalem, 
 231 ; circumcises Timothy, 232 ; Nazarite 
 now, 235 ; with Peter at Antioch in Syria, 
 247 et seq. ; his prominence as a guide of 
 the Church, 247 ; influence at Antioch, 
 where he is joined by Silas, 247; rebukes 
 Peter for change of bearing towards 
 Gentiles, 250 et seq. ; result of rebuke on 
 Peter, 252 et seq. ; dispute with Barnabas 
 as to the companionship of Mark, 254: 
 separation, 254 ; mutual loss to Paul and 
 Barnabas, though friendship not broken, 
 254 ; the welcome of Mark again as fellow, 
 labourer, 256, 681; second Apostolic 
 Journey, 256-353; visits Churches of Syria 
 and Cilicia, Tarsus, Derbe, and Lystra, 
 257 et seq. ; love for Timothy, 259 ; love 
 for his churches, 259; circumcision of 
 Timothy and Titus, 261 ; goes through 
 Phrygia and Galatia, 262 ; visits Iconium, 
 262 ; Antioch and Pisidia, 262 ; visits Jews 
 on Eusiuc, Galatia, and results, 263 ; ill- 
 ness in Galatia, 264 et seq. ; cause of illness, 
 266 ; kindness of Galatians, 265-6 ; founds 
 churches in Galatia, 268 ; visits Bithynia, 
 Troas, Alexandria, 269 et seq. ; >eet8 with 
 Luke, 271 ; Luke's fidelity to him, 271 ; 
 takes Luke with him from Troas, 271 ; in 
 his relations with Luke, 272 ; at Philippi, 
 
 274 et seq. ; ministry at Philippi, 276 ; bap- 
 tises Lydia of Thyatira, 276 ; lodges with 
 Lydia, 276; reason for accepting pecu- 
 niary aid from Philippi only of all hia 
 churches, 276 ; his fellow-workers at Phi- 
 lippi, 277; casts out spirit of divination 
 from possessed damsel, 278-9; anger of 
 owners, 279 ; charge against Paul and 
 Silas, 279 ; imprisoned and scourged, 
 281-2 ; conversion [and baptism of jailor, 
 283-4 ; fear of the magistrates, 284 ; Paul 
 and Silas leave Philippi, 285 ; leave Luke 
 behind them, 285 et seq. at Thessalonica, 
 286 ; poverty when there, 287 ; ministry 
 there, 288 ; preaches Christ in synagogue, 
 288 ; believers chiefly among the Gentiles. 
 288; Epistles to the Thessalonians, 289 
 et seq. ; dangers, 291 ; hatred of Paul by 
 the Jews, 290 ; in concealment, 292 j 
 escape from Thessalonica, 292-3 ; with. 
 Silas leaves Thessalonica for Bereea, 293 > 
 Athens, 295 et seq. ; his feelings at Athens. 
 296, 300 ; intercourse with the Jews of 
 Athens, 302 ; altar to the Unknown God, 
 301 ; preaches at Athens, 304 ; result, 305. 
 et seq. ; view of, in society, 305 ; answers 
 questions of the Athenians, 306 ; declares 1 
 true God and the resurrection of the 
 dead, 308-311; tact in addressing Athe- 
 nians, 309 ; leaves Athens, 312 ; apparent 
 failure, 312 ; germ of victory in all hia 
 apparent failures ,'312-13 ; at Corinth, 314 > 
 Epistles to the Corinthians and Thessa- 
 lonians, 315; grief at the wickedness of 
 Corinth, 316 et seq. ; will accept nothing 
 from the Corinthians lest it be used as a 
 handle, 317 ; relation to Aquila and Pris- 
 cilla, 317 ; works as a tent-maker, 318; 
 joined by Silas and Timotheus, 318; re- 
 ceives contributions from Philippian 
 Christians, 318; founds Church at Corinth, 
 819-20; complaints of Paul by Jews of 
 Corinth, 322; not allowed by Gallic to 
 defend himself, 322 ; dismissed by Gallio, 
 322-3 ; his supposed correspondence with 
 Seneca, spurious, 325; writes 1 Thess., 
 probably his earliest Epistle, 325 ; account 
 of 1 Thess., 325 et seq. ; his intense feelings 
 conveyed in his writings, 326 ; anxiety as 
 to reception and result of his Epistles, 
 827 } salutation and introduction in 
 Epistles, 328 ; thankfulness on behalf of 
 Thessalonian Christians in 1 Thes., 329, 
 830 ; dangers at Thessalonica and Philippi, 
 830-1 ; calumnies from Jews and Gentiles, 
 331 ; answer to Thessalonian calumnies in 
 his life and disinterestedness, 331 ; taking 
 nothing from them, 331 ; persecution by 
 the Jews, 332; joy in the Christians of 
 Thessalonica, 333; visit of Timothy to 
 Thessalonica, 333 ; his report of the faith 
 which he finds there, 333; enjoins prac- 
 tical Christian duties on the Thessa- 
 lonians, 333-5 ; on the resurrection of the 
 dead, 335 et seq.; corrects error and sloth 
 caused by idea of day of the Lord as near 
 at hand, 340 ; account of 2 Thessalonians, 
 840 et seq. ; view of day of the Lord, 341 ; 
 object in 2 Thessalonians, 343; stay at 
 Corinth, 351 ; at Ephesas, 352, 354 et seq.; 
 In his character as a Jew, 352 ; his tem- 
 porary Nazarite vow and its conditions, 
 851-2 ; preaches Christ at Ephesus, 852 ; 
 goes to Jerusalem for the fourth time,
 
 INDEX, 
 
 853; his four visits enumerated, 838; end 
 of second Apostolic journey, 853 ; recep- 
 tion at Jerusalem, 853 ; third Apostolic 
 journey, 854-521 ; goes again to Antioch 
 and again visits Churches of Phrygia and 
 Galatisf, 354 ; peril at Ephcsus, 360 ; testi- 
 mony to Apollos, 362 ; labours at Ephesus, 
 862 ; withdraws his disciples from Jews of 
 Ephesus, and disputes daily in the school 
 of Tyrannus, 363 ; success at Ephesus, 
 363; perils outbreak at Ephesus from 
 worshippers of Diana, 371 et seq.; leaves 
 Ephesus, 375: joined by two Epheaians, 
 Tychicus and Trophimus, 375 ; care for 
 Corinthian Churches, 376-7; distress at 
 news of Church from Corinth, 380 ; begins 
 1 Corinthians, 334; declaration to the 
 Corinthians of purpose of his mission, 
 385 ; declares doctrine of crucified Saviour, 
 385 ; exhorts to unity in Christ, 386 ; con- 
 demns divisions in the Church, 387 ; warns 
 against false teachers, 387 ; case of incest 
 in Corinthian Church, 388 ; on chastity, 
 389-391 ; meat offered to idols, 391 ; re- 
 surrection of the dead, 398-400; on 
 marriage and virginity, 390-1 ; his own 
 struggles, 392; examples of those who 
 have fallen . through want of self -disci- 
 pline, 392; on the head covered or un- 
 covered at prayer, 394; condemnation 
 of practices in Corinth at the Lord's 
 supper, S94 ; on charity, 396 et seq. ; 
 leaves Ephesus for Troas, and goes 
 thence ( in consequence of a vision) 
 to Macedonia, 401; subjects of several 
 Epistles, 403; self-defence to the Corin- 
 thians, 403 et seq., 408 et seq. ; controversy 
 (in three phases) with Judaism in 2 Corin- 
 thians, Galatians, and Romans, 406 ; source 
 and vindication of his authority as an 
 Apostle, 407 et seq. ; character of his 
 preaching described by himself, 411 et seq. ; 
 his ministry a ministry of reconciliation, 
 413; himself an ambassador for Christ, 
 413; no burden to the Corinthians, 414; 
 the plainness of speech, indignation and 
 irony, and yet meekness and gentleness 
 of 2 Corinthians, from end of Chapter ix., 
 414 et seq. ; warning against false teachers 
 416-17 ; his own labours and perils, 417 et 
 seq. ; visions and revelations, 418 et seq. ; 
 not burdensome to Corinthian Church, 
 but caught them with guile, 419; route 
 and work iu Macedonia, 420 et seq. ; pledge 
 to the Apostles at Jerusalem, 421 ; leaves 
 Macedonia and returns to Corinth, 422; 
 his companions, 422-3 ; absence of infor- 
 mation as to his intercourse with the 
 Church at Corinth on his return thither, 
 424-5 ; ground for inferring his success in 
 dealing with Corinthian difficulties, 425 ; 
 his inmost thoughts revealed in Galatians 
 and Epmans, 425; grief at success of 
 Jadaising teachers at Antioch and Corinth, 
 and in Galatia, 425-6; henoo Epistle to 
 the Galatians, 426; charges against him 
 by Judaising teachers, and his replies, 
 427 ; resistance of those who advocate the 
 necessity for circumcision, 428 et seq.; 
 compared with Luther, 431 ; Apostolic 
 authority first vindicated in Epistle to 
 Galatians, 432; determination to go to 
 Jerusalem through whatever danger, and 
 afterwards to Rome, 444; his faith in his 
 
 God, 444-5 ; doubts, as to accounte'of bis 
 martyrdom, 4)t8 ; in his character of 
 deserter of Judaism, and defender of the 
 spiritual seed of Abraham only as the true 
 Israel of God, 458; interpretation of 
 Ilabakkuk on life by faith, 464 ; cause of 
 BO me logical defects in his statements, 
 476; objections to his arguments in 
 Romans, 484 ; his use of different methods 
 in argument, 484 ; apparent contradictions 
 in his writings, 485 ; only jealous for the 
 truth, 486-7 ; indifference to apparently il- 
 logical reasons in his teaching, 487; method 
 in enforcing truth compared with that 
 of Luther, Jerome, and others, 496 ; grief 
 for hardness of heart, 496 ; love for the 
 Jews, 496 ; protected by the Roman im- 
 partiality of Gallic, Lysios, Felix, and 
 Festus, 504 ; plot of Jews against his 
 life, 510; Sosipater, Aristarchus, Secun- 
 dus, Gains, Timotheus, Tychicus, Trophi- 
 mus, and Luke, his companions, 511 ; at 
 Philippi, 511 ; at Troas, 511 et seq. ; voyage 
 by Lesbos, Chios, Samoa, and Trogyluum 
 to Miletus, 514-15 ; interview with tho 
 elders of tho Ephesian Church at Miletus, 
 515-17; voyage from Miletus by Cos, Cnidna 
 Rhodes, Patara.andCyprua.to Tyre, 517-18; 
 at Tyre, 519 ; visits Philip the Evangelist 
 at Caesarea, 519 ; fifth visit to Jerusalem, 
 and end of the third Apostolic journey, 
 521 ; reception by James and elders of the 
 Church at Jerusalem their proposal to 
 him, 522-4 ; does as James and elders pro- 
 posed to him as to Nazarite vows, 527; out- 
 break of the Jews in the temple against 
 him, 531; charged by the Jews with defiling 
 the Temple, 531 ; rescued by Lysias from 
 the Jews in the Temple, 533 ; address to 
 the Jews after their outrage on him in the 
 Temple, 534-5 ; order to scourge him 
 declares himself a Boman citizen, 536-7; 
 before the Sanhedrin his treatment by 
 the High Priest his protest his defence, 
 538 et seq. ; encouraged by a vision, 543: 
 saved by his nephew from a conspiracy of 
 Jews against his life, 544 et seq. ; sent by 
 Lysias to Csesarea under escort, 546 ; the 
 conduct of Lysias, 546 ; letter of Lysias to 
 Felix, 546 ; preparations for his trial before 
 Felix, 547 et seq. ; defence before Felix, 
 548-9 ; trial not concluded, but again 
 summoned before Felix, 550 ; power of 
 his arguments with Felix, 550 ; attempts 
 of Felix to procure bribes for Paul's re- 
 lease, 551; beforeFestus appeal to Cesar, 
 554 t seq.; before Festus and Agrippa, 558 ; 
 his defence, 558 et seq. ; sent in charge of 
 Julius the centurion to Borne with Luke 
 and Aristarchus as his fellow-voyagers, 
 561-3 ; voyage to Borne by Sidon, Cyprus, 
 Myra, Cnidus, Fair Havens, where waited 
 long: his courage in danger Melita, 563 
 et seq.; shipwreck at Melita, 572 et seq.; 
 the viper at Melita, 574 ; declared a god, 
 574; heals Publius' father, 574: voyage 
 and journey to Borne from Melita by Sy- 
 racuse, Rhegium, PnteoU, Bale, Capua, 
 A.ppii Forum, Three Taverns, 577-8 ; treat- 
 ment at Rome, 678 ; his bonds, 678 ; appeal 
 to C.'esar, 519 ; addresses the Jews at Rome, 
 680 ; his companions and friends in Rome 
 Timotheus, Luke, Aristarchus, TV- 
 cliicus, Epaphroditus, Ep.iphras/j Mark,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 769 
 
 Demaa, 680-1} two years <tf sojourn" and 
 unliindered preaching 1 in Borne, 581} bis 
 abode, 582 ; discouragements, 582-3 ; post- 
 ponement of Ms trial, 582 ; means of liv- 
 ing, 583; success of his preaching, 583 
 et seq. ; position at Rome, 585 ; varying 
 characteristics of his Epistles, 588 et seq. f 
 Epistles of the captivity, 592 et seq. ; lov- 
 ing care for him of Lydia and other Phi- 
 lippian friends when a prisoner at Home, 
 591 ; indifference of the Roman Christians, 
 594; his own account of himself to the 
 Philippians, 597-8; humility in his minis- 
 try and warning to the Colossian Church 
 against false teachers, 617-18 ; probable 
 trial, acquittal, release, and course of 
 events till death, 648 ; his intended visit 
 to Spain, 650 ; visit to Crete, 659 ; founds 
 the Cretan Church, 659 ; closing days, 664 
 et seq. ; fear of Gnosticism, 666 ; desire to 
 strengthen the Churches against it, 666} 
 relations between Paul and Timothy, 667 } 
 companions in his hist imprisonment, 668 ; 
 writes to Timothy of his loneliness in 
 prison, the support of his God, his trial, 
 671; hardships of second imprisonment 
 in Rome, and change in his position, 668-9 } 
 left in his loneliness by friend after friend, 
 Luke only faithful to him, 670 ; kindness 
 of Onesiphorus in searching him out and 
 visiting him in prison gratitude to him, 
 6G6-7, 670 ; his last trial the little that he 
 says of it strengthened by his God, 670-2, 
 675 ; his desire once more to see Timothy, 
 676; hist letter, 676 et seq.; farewell of 
 Timothy, 680 ; personal matters, 680 ; 
 significance of his request for his cloak, 
 books, and parchments, from Troas, 681-3 ; 
 final trial, condemnation, death, 686; ap- 
 parent failure real greatness and success, 
 687 ; lasting results of his life and work, 
 688 ; crown of righteousness, 6&8 ; style il- 
 lustrative of writer's character, 689-693 ; 
 various writers in testimony of, 689 et seq. ; 
 Rhetoric of, 693-6 ; classic quotations and 
 allusions, 696-701 ; a Hagadist, 701 ; Paul 
 and Philo, 701 et seq. ; in Arabia, 709 ; " stake 
 in the flesh," 710-15 ; Paul and John, 723-4 ; 
 attacks on Paul in the Clementines, 724-6 ; 
 theology and antinomies of, 732-3 ; evidence 
 as to liberation, 741-2 ; chronology of his 
 life and Epistles, 753-7 ; dates of his Epistles. 
 756 ; traditional account of his personal 
 appearance, 758. 
 
 Faulus, Sergius, Proconsul of Cyprus, 197, 
 721-2. 
 
 Peace and Hope, results of justification by 
 faith, 475-6. 
 
 Pentecost, the first, after the Resurrection 
 of our Lord, 50 ; beginning of final phase 
 of God's dealings with men, 51 ; crowded 
 state of Jerusalem at, 57 ; events of, 68-9. 
 
 People, Chosen. (See Jews.) 
 
 Perishing, Paul's view of the, 732, 
 
 Persecutions and results, 59 et seq., 160. 
 
 Peter, as Cephas, Apostle of the Foundation 
 Stone, 1; impress of individuality on 
 Church, 1; Peter and First Pentecost, 
 46 et seq. ; discourse at first Pentecost and 
 its effect, 58-9; miracles, 59, 60, 148; his 
 reception of Paul at Jerusalem, 130 ; his 
 admission of Gentiles into the Church, 
 145 ; rebukes Simon Magus, 146 ; lodging 
 with Simon the tanner at Joppa, 148} 
 
 vision at Joppa and its significance, 152-6 ; 
 sent for by Cornelius to Ceesarea, 156 ; 
 address to the Gentiles at Caesarea and its 
 results, 157-8 ; address at Jerusalem and 
 its results, 158-9 ; in prison, 176 ; released 
 from; prison by an angel, 177 ; convinced 
 by Paul on circumcision, 230 ; his address 
 on circumcision, 238; independence of 
 Judaism, and free intercourse with Gen- 
 tiles, 248-9 ; rebuked by Paul for change 
 of bearing towards Gentiles, 250 et seq. ; 
 spirit in which he received Puul's rebuke, 
 252-3; doubts as to accounts of his 
 martyrdom, 448 ; not the founder of the 
 Roman Church, 448. 
 
 Peter and John Two chief Apostles, 1 ; 
 before the chief priests, 59, 60 ; kncivlcdgo 
 of the mind of Christ, 724. 
 
 Peter and Paul at Antioch in Syria, 248. 
 
 Pharaoh His hardness of heart explained, 
 493. 
 
 Pharisaism, Its various aspects, 26 ; compared 
 with the monastic life, 36. 
 
 Pharisees, Life and observances of, 35 et seq, ; 
 minute points of observance, 33-9 ; scrupu- 
 lous observance of Sabbath, 39 ; baptised, 
 but understand Christ less than the 
 Saddncees, who had handed him over to 
 the secular arm, 85. 
 
 Philemon, Causes of Paul's Epistle to, 622-7 ; 
 account, subject of, &c., 623 et seq. 
 
 Philip (Apostle) and Andrew Hellenic names, 
 but still common among the Jews, 74. 
 
 Philip (Evangelist) appointed deacon, 75 ; 
 evangelist as well as deacon, 78 ; ministry, 
 78 ; baptises Simon Magus, 146 ; baptises 
 the Ethiopian eunuch, 147; the respec- 
 tive influence in Church advancement of 
 Philip, Stephen, andfPaul, 161: work in 
 the (Jhurch, 160} Paul's visit to him at 
 Csesarea, 519. 
 
 Philippi, Description of, 274 et seq.; Church 
 or, alone ministering to Paul's necessities^ 
 276 ; Paul's fellow_- workers at, 276. 
 
 Philippians ministering to Paul's necessities 
 at Corinth, 318; Epistle to, 502; causes 
 of, 594; loving care for Paul and his 
 necessities, 594. 
 
 Philippians, Epistle to Exhortation to unity 
 in, 595, 599 ; characteristics of, 595-6 ; 
 account of, 596 et se<j.; writer's lencouraje- 
 ments to Philippians, 598; digression of 
 special warnings, 601 et seq.; conclusion, 
 603-4 ; gratitude for help in necessities, 
 601; future of Fhilippian Church, 605. 
 
 Philosophers of Athens, 302 ct seq. 
 
 Pilate his judicial impartiality, 323. 
 
 Pliny on tests of Christians, 186; his 
 account of Christians in Bithynia, 186; 
 letter to Sabinianus, 734. 
 
 Pliny the Younger on Christianity, 721. 
 
 Pompeii, Morals of, typical of those of Tarsus, 
 Ephesus, Corinth, and Miletus, 21. 
 
 Pompey introduction of Jews into Rome, 
 445 ; his treatment of them and its results, 
 445-6. 
 
 Pontius Pilate. (See Pilate.) 
 
 Pope Adrian. (See Adrian VI.) 
 
 Porcia Lex, 23. 
 
 Porcius Festus. (Sc Festus.) 
 
 Predestination Definition of, 492 ; consis- 
 tent with man's free will, 493 ; difficulties 
 of, solved by the infinity of God's love, 
 494; Paul's view of , 732,
 
 770 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Priests, Chief, in Judgment on Peter and John, 
 
 60-1 ; many Jewish, " obedient to the 
 
 faith " of Christ, 76. 
 Priscilla and Aquila, their relation to Paul. 
 
 317. .. ^ 
 
 Progress, Paul the Apostle of, 1. 
 Prophecy fulfilled in Messiah, 84. 
 Prophets foretold the calling of the Gentiles, 
 
 150. 
 Proselytes, Greek their conversion, 161 ; 
 
 burdens laid on, 718-19. 
 Psalms the -poetry of the, compared with 
 
 Paul's Epistles, 10. 
 Public "Worship. (See Worship.) 
 Publius' father healed by Paul at Melita, 57i. 
 Punishments, Capital, 706-7. 
 
 Babban, Eabbi, 25. 
 
 Eabbi, Rabbis School of the, 23 et uq. ; mis- 
 conception of the oral law, 37 j " strain 
 gnats and swallow camels," 39; of Jeru- 
 salem, their ignorance of the intent of 
 God's gifts, 70. 
 
 Ealiab an ancestress of our Lord, 183. 
 
 Eecompense, Paul's view of, 732. 
 
 Eedeemed, The, Paul's view of the forgiveness 
 of, 732. 
 
 Eedeemer. (See Jesus.) 
 
 Eestoratiqn, Universal, Paul's view of, 732. 
 
 Resurrection Power of Christ's, 47; and 
 Judgment, Athenian view of, 311; faith 
 in the, confirmed, 398 et seq. 
 
 Eighteousness of God its effect on man, 461 ; 
 of the law and what depended on it, 37. 
 (See God.) 
 
 Borne character of, in the time of the 
 Apostles, described by St. John, Seneca, 
 and Juvenal, 186-7 ; Jews introduced into, 
 by Pompey, 445 ; introduction of Chris- 
 tianity into, 447 ; Jewish and Gentile 
 elements in early Church of, 447-50; im- 
 partiality of its law favourable to Paul, 
 504 ; Paul's confidence in the Christiana 
 of, 508 ; Paul at, 577 et seq. ; its social con- 
 dition its early Christians Paul's im- 
 munity, 582 et seq. ; prevailing influences 
 in, during Paul's residence there, 585 
 et seq.; indifference of the Christians of, 
 to Paul and his necessities compared with 
 the kindness of the Philippians, 594, 650. 
 
 Boman, Eomans Result to, of the dispersion 
 of the Jews , 66 ; their early vie ws of Chris- 
 tianity, 323 ; their judicial impartiality 
 k when Christians were brought before 
 
 them, 323 ; apotheosis of their emperors, 
 717-18 ; Paul's position among, as a de- 
 serter of Judaism, and asserter of spiri- 
 tual seed of Abraham as alone the true 
 Israel of God, 453; superiority of Paul's 
 Epistle to, above the frivolity of the 
 Alkoila Zara, 453-4 ; Paul's confidence, 
 459 ; trials, votes in, given by tablets, 671, 
 685. 
 
 Somans, Paul's Epistle to cause of, 445 ; ac- 
 count of Epistle, 445 et seq.; addressed to 
 both Jews and Gentiles, 449 ; probably 
 copied and sent to other churches, as 
 Ephesus and Thessalonica, 450-1; object 
 of, 451 etseq. ; character and style of, 451 et 
 eeq. ; character of Church when Paul wrote 
 Epistles, 452 ; causes of , 452 ; spirit in which 
 
 written, 452-3 ; how probably originated, 
 455 ; deductions thence in writer's mind, 
 455-6 ; Jesus Christ as common foundation! 
 for the Jew and Gentile the basis of this] 
 and of every one of Paul's Epistles, 456 ; 
 opinions of Luther, Melancthon, Cole- 
 ridge, and Tholuck, 456 ; outline of, 456 etj 
 teq. ; salutation and introduction, 458-9 j 
 comprehensiveness, 459 ; thanksgiving fort 
 faith of, 459; Roman Christians, 459;' 
 God's righteousness revealed in the Gos-i 
 pel of the Cross to Jew and Gentile alike,' 
 460 ; justification by faith the one means' 
 of attaining to holiness the great subjects 
 of the Epistle, 461 ; God's righteousness! 
 the various sources and revelations of,, 
 461 et seq. ; the sins of Paganism, 465-6 ;j 
 Jews equally guilty with Gentiles, 467 ; 
 nselessness of circumcision, 470-1 ; justi-t 
 fication God's free gift, 474; justification! 
 establishing the law, 474 ; universality off 
 sin and of justification, 476 ; by one, sin i 
 by one, justification, 476-7 ; purpose of the' 
 law, 478; relations of sin and grace, 479;; 
 why the law was inefficacious to justify, : 
 480, 482; the law gave its strength the: 
 law, but under grace, history of man to 
 sin, 482-3; Christians not under four 
 phases, 483; writer's style of argument 
 justified against those who censure it, 484 ; 
 Christian dead to past moral condition, 
 risen to new one, because Christ in His 
 crucified body has destroyed the power of 
 sin, 487 ; predestination and free-will not 
 inconsistent with each other, 492 et se<j. ; 
 Jews, their fall, 495 et seq. ; their hopes of 
 restoration, 498 et seq. ; obedience to the 
 civil power enjoined, 503 ; Paul's respect 
 for the civil power from his own expe- 
 rience, 503-4; dues, 503, 505; observances 
 as to fasting and use of food, 505; the 
 weak and the strong, 505 et seq. ; Paul's 
 defence of his Epistles, 508 ; probable end 
 of Epistle as originally intended, 509 ; its 
 actual conclusion, 509-10. 
 
 Room, Upper. (See Upper Boom.) 
 
 Bulers contemporary with Paul, Table of, 
 756-7. 
 
 Running so as to obtain, 732.1 
 
 Buth, ancestress of Christ, 183. 
 
 Sabbath observances of Pharisees and Saddu- 
 cees, 39. 
 
 Sabbatic year, observances of, 39. 
 
 Sabinianus, Letter of Pliny to, 734. 
 
 Sacrifice, Living, required of all Christiana, 
 502. 
 
 Sadducees, scrupulous observances of Sabbath, 
 39. 
 
 St. Denys. (See Denys.) 
 
 St. Paul. (See Paul.) 
 
 Saint. (In each case see Saint's name). 
 
 Sakya Moimi, Antecedents of, 3. 
 
 Salamis Jews of, 196 ; Paul and Barnabas at, 
 195-6. 
 
 Salvation through fear, 732. 
 
 Sanhedrin not afraid of the Lord Jesus, 
 afraid of two of his disciples, 61 ; rage of 
 at Stephen's discourse, 92 ; charged with 
 laxity at the time of Stephen's martyr- 
 dom, 96; marriage a condition of member-
 
 INDEX 
 
 77T 
 
 Bhip, 95 j Paul had been a member of, 
 95-6. 
 
 Sapphira. (See Ananias.) 
 
 Sardanapalus, Statue of, at Anchiale, 17. 
 
 " Saul the Pharisee," 35 et seq. 
 
 " tiaul the persecutor," 95 et seq. (See PanL) 
 
 Saviour. (See Jesus.) 
 
 Sceva, of Ephesus, sons overcome by evil 
 spirit while using the holy name of Jesus, 
 364-5. 
 
 School of the Babhi, 23 et se$. 
 
 Scourging. Jewish, 715-17. 
 
 Scripture, Paul's use of, 27-8. 
 
 Sejonus his attempt, to eject the Jews from 
 Bomb, 446 ; persecution of the Jews, 504. 
 
 Seneca his description of Borne, 187 ; relation 
 to Gallic, 321 , his supposed correspond- 
 ence with Paul spurious, 325 ; account of 
 Jews in Borne, 446: his disgrace by 
 Nero, 587. 
 
 Septuagint, the work of the most learned 
 men of the Jewish Dispersion, 72. 
 
 Sergius Paulua, Proconsul of Cyprus, 197, 
 721-2. 
 
 Sermon on the Mount compared with Paul's 
 Epistles, 327. 
 
 Servants and masters, mutual duties of, 657. 
 
 Shammai, the school of, 25 ; his descent, 183; 
 view of the oral law, 226. 
 
 Shema in studies of Paul as a hoy, 25. 
 
 Shipwreck, Paul's, 571-3. 
 
 Silas joins Paul at Antioch in Syria, 247; 
 Paul's companion in his travels, 256-7. 
 (See Paul.) 
 
 Silvanus. (See Silas.) 
 
 Simeon his prophecy of our Lord as a Light 
 to the Gentiles, 183. 
 
 Simeon, Niger position in Church at Antioch 
 in Syria, 182. 
 
 Simon Magus, 146, 198. 
 
 Simon Peter. (See Peter.) 
 
 Sin, Belation of grace to, 479 ; relation of law 
 to, 488 et seq. ; Man of, 726 et seq. ; Paul's 
 views of, 732. 
 
 Sohermindedness, key-note of Paul's Epistlo 
 to Titus, 662. 
 
 Sosthenes beaten before Gallio, 324. 
 
 South-west and North-west explained, 565-6. 
 
 Spinoza, antecedents of, and compared with 
 Paul, 3. 
 
 Spirit, Holy. (See Holy Ghost.) 
 
 " Stake in the flesh," Paul's, 121 t seq., 710-15. 
 (See Paul.) 
 
 Stephen Influence of his last words on Paul, 
 43 ; Stephen and the Hellenists, 65 et seq. ? 
 appointed one of the seven deacons, 75 ; 
 influence on Paul, 76 ; more his teacher 
 than Gamaliel, 76 ; what he must have 
 been had he lived, 76 ; had probably heard 
 the truth from the Lord Jesus, though 
 the tradition that he was one of the 
 seventy disciples is valueless, 77 ; elected 
 deacon for his faith, 78 j the most pro- 
 minent of the seven, 78 ; equal with the 
 Apostles in working wonders among the 
 people, 78 ; his great part in the history 
 of the Church, 78 ; evangelist as well as 
 deacon, 78; compared with the twelve 
 Apostles, 78 ; his dispute in the synagogue 
 of the Libertines, 82 ; his triumph in 
 argument, 82 ; its result, 83 ; his view of 
 the law of Moses blasphemy to the Jews, 
 86 j taken by violence before the San- 
 hedrin, 86 ; his view of the oral law, 87 > 
 
 charges against him by false witnesses, 87 ; ; 
 his reply a concise history of the Jewish : 
 nation down to their own murder of 
 Christ, 89 et seq.; his vision of glory, 93 ; 
 martyrdom, 94 et seq.; prays for his mur- 
 derers, 94; burial, 97 ; respective influence 
 of Stephen, Philip, and Paul in Church 
 advancement, 161. 
 
 Stoics, stoicism, 187-8. 
 
 Suetonius his error as to our Lord, 186 j his 
 view of Christianity, 186, 720. 
 
 Snpper, Last, Upper room of, 48, 180-1. 
 
 Sword, The, as the result of our Lord's 
 mission, 325. 
 
 Syntyche and Euodia, Christian women of 
 Macedonia, 277. (See Euodia.) 
 
 T. 
 
 Tabitha raised from the dead, 148. 
 
 Tablets, Voting. (See Boman.) 
 
 Tacitus his view of Christianity, 186, 720. 
 
 Talmud, Noble characters in, 26 ; its direction I 
 of observances, 34, 36 j allegories, 37 ; 
 stories from, 735. 
 
 Tarsus, Birthplace of Paul, 8 ; description 
 and natural features, 10 ; commercial and 
 political advantages of situation, 12-13; 
 commercial prosperity, 13 ; resisting Bru- 
 tus and Cassius, 12 ; conquered by Lucius 
 Bufus, 12 ; scene of meetings of Antony 
 and Cleopatra, 13 ; its moral condition in i 
 Paul's youth, 17-18 ; morals of Tarsus and j 
 other cities judged from evidence of| 
 Pompeii, 21. 
 
 Temperance. (See Sobermindedness.) 
 
 Temple at Jerusalem scene of the great ! 
 events of the first Pentecost after our 
 Lord's resurrection, 51 ; destruction of, 
 3-12 ; Paul charged by Jews with defiling,531. 
 
 Terah, Legend of, 183. 
 
 Tertius, Scribe of Paul's Epistle to Bomans. 
 452. 
 
 Tertullus accuses Paul to Felix, 547-8. 
 
 Theology of Paul, 732. 
 
 Theophilus, high priest, 100. 
 
 Thessalonica, Description of, 286-7; Famine 
 at time of Paul's visit, 287 ; Paul's 
 ministry at, 288 et seq. ; Paul's Epistle to ' 
 Bomans probably sent to Thessalonica 
 also, 450-1. 
 
 Thessalonians sent to stir up Beneans aerainst 
 Paul, 294; Paul's Epistles to, 289-90; 
 
 1 Thess., Account of, 328 ; their faith and 
 Christian spirit commended, 329-30 ; cha- 
 racteristics of, 330-7; Paul's joy in, 333} 
 their faith reported to Paul by Timothy, 
 333; expected to advance in Christian 
 course, 333 ; brotherly love and quietness 
 commended, 331 ; second coming of Christ 
 and judgment, 335 et seq.; results of 1 
 Thess., 3o8; disturbed by idea of day of 
 the Lord as very near, 340 et seq. ; 2 Thess. : 
 Object of 2 Thess., 343i; most important 
 passage of 2 Tbess., 345-6 ; explanation of 
 
 2 Thess., 348-351. 
 
 Tholuck, his account of Paul's Epistle to th 
 
 Bomans, 456. 
 "Thorn im the flesh," Paul's, 121 et seq.. 710-1& 
 
 (See Paul; Stake.) 
 Tiberius, Death of, 137. 
 Tigellinus, Praetorian Prefect, hii charactgsi
 
 INDSX. 
 
 Timotheus. (See Timothy.) 
 
 Timothy converted by Paul at Lystra, 217 ; 
 circumcised, 232, 261 ; Paul's love for him, 
 259-60 ; Paul's Epistles to, 260 ; with Paul 
 at Ejjhesus, 260; places at which he is 
 mentioned as having been with Paul 
 character of Timothy, 259; goes with 
 Paul on his travels, 259 ; returns with 
 Silas to Paul at Corinth from Thessa- 
 louica, 326 ; sent by Paul to Thessalonica, 
 333 ; his report of the faith of the Thes- 
 salonians, 333 ; Paul's personal advice to, 
 656-7; his relation to Paul, 667; Paul's 
 account to him (in 2 Timothy) of hia 
 loneliness in prison, 671; of the support 
 of his God, 671 ; of his trial, 671 et seq. 
 
 Timothy 1 Timothy : Account of, 650 et seq. ; 
 object of Epistle, 651; warning against 
 false teachers, 651 ; injunctions to prayer, 
 quietness, sobriety, 652; qualifications 
 for offices in the Church, 653 ; of pastors 
 and deacons, 653-4 ; rules as to discipline 
 of the body, 655 ; marriage, 655 ; widow- 
 hood, 655 ; ordination of presbyters, &c., 
 656 ; 2 Timothy, account of, 664 et seq. ; 
 gratitude for the kindness of Onesi- 
 phorus, 666-7, 670 ; again warned against 
 false teachers, of whom a picture is drawn. 
 678 et seq. ; pereonal exhortations appeal 
 to him, as a pasior, to e_arnost duty, 680, 
 entreaty to come to hi Paul's cloak, 
 books, parchments conclusion, 681 et seq. 
 
 Titus converted by Paul at Cyprus, 229; 
 went with Paul and Barnabas to conference 
 at Jerusalem on circumcision, 229; the 
 question of his circumcision, 232, 261 ; 
 rejoins Paul in Macedonia, 402; Paul's 
 Epistle to, account of, 659 et seq. ; leading 
 subject of, temperance, soberminded- 
 ness, 662. 
 
 Tongue understanded of people commended 
 for use, 397. 
 
 Tongues Speaking with unknown, 53-4; de- 
 sign of gift of, at Pentecost, 54 ; different 
 view of this gift, 5i-6 ; at Jerusalem and 
 Corinth respectively, 56; power of, as 
 ivsed by Apostles, 57 et seq. 
 
 Tradition of twelve years as the limit laid 
 down by our Lord for his disciples to 
 remain in Jerusalem, 180. 
 
 Trials. (See Roman.) 
 
 Troas Paul's cloak, books, and parchments 
 left at with Carpus, 21, 681 et seq. 
 
 Trophimus of Ephesus joins Paul, 375; ill at 
 Miletus, 668. 
 
 Truth of God, (See God.) 
 
 Twelve years. (Se Tradition.) 
 
 Tychicus of Ephesus joins Paul, 375 ; Paul's 
 companion, 668. 
 
 Typos, 82. 
 
 Unbelievers not to judge in church matters, 
 
 389. 
 Uncial MSS. of Acts of Apostles and Paul's 
 
 Epistles, 730-1. 
 
 Uncleanness, Test of, In Talmud, 735. 
 Unity, Paul's exhortations to, chief snbject of 
 
 Epistle to Philippians, 595, 599. 
 Universal Restoration, Paul's view of, 732. 
 Unknown God, Altars to, 297, 301 ; Paul's 
 
 view of altar to, SOI; Paul preaches on, 
 
 308. 
 Unknown tongues, Speaking in, condemned, 
 
 397. (See Tongues.) 
 Upper room of Last Supper, and of assembly 
 
 of Apostles in house of Mary, 48, 180-1. 
 
 V. 
 
 Verbal inspiration, 341. 
 
 Vessels of wrath and mercy, 498. 
 
 Virginity and marriage Paul writes on to 
 
 Corinthian Church, 390-1. 
 Vision of man of Macedonia to Paul, 40L 
 Visions, 108-10. 
 Voting tablets. (See Roman.) 
 Vows, 40 ; Nazante, 524 et seq. 
 Voyage, Paul's to Rome, 561 et stq. (See PauL) 
 
 W. 
 
 Warnings, God's, 112. 
 
 "Wesley, John, compared with Paul, 8, 
 
 "Whitefleld, compared with Paul, 3. 
 
 Whit-Sunday, 50. 
 
 Will. (See Free will.) 
 
 Winds of Paul's voyage to Rome, Etesian, 
 
 &o., 563. 
 
 Witness of Gospel to pur Lord, 184. 
 Women their part in the dissemination of 
 
 the Gospel, 277. 
 
 Worship, Public, Regulations for, 653. 
 Wrath, Vessels of, 498. 
 Wreck. (See Shipwreck.} 
 
 T. 
 
 Team, Twelve. (Set Tradition^ 
 
 Zepbaniah Prophecy of universal worship of 
 Jehovah, 183.
 
 PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE 
 QUOTED OR REFERRED TO. 
 
 xvi. 10, p. 473; xvii. 8, p. 404; xvii. 8-16, p. 
 243; xvil 14. p. 245; xviii. 5, pp. 104, 436; 
 xviii. 26, p. 243; xviii. 29, p. 717; xviii. 30, p. 
 37; xix. 4, p. 330 ; xix. 18, p. 441 ; sir. 19, p. 
 413; xx.6, p. 278; xx. 11, p. 404; xxiv. 14, p. 
 707; xxv., p. 69; xxv. 26, p. 292; xxvii. 29, 
 p. 401. 
 
 436; xxii. 10, p. 413; xxiii. 1, pp. 147, 441; 
 xxiii. 18, p. 601 ; xxv. 2, p. 61 ; xxv. 2, 4. p. 716 ; 
 xxv. 4, pp. 666, 717 ; xxvii. 14-26, p. 618 ; xxvii. 
 
 20, p. 404 ; xxvii. 26, p. 436 ; xxviii. 25, p. 65 ; 
 xxviii. 58, 59, p. 716; -nit, 9, p. 716; xxix. 28, 
 p. 254 ; xxx. 6, p. 92 ; xxxii 15, p. 1111; xxxii 
 
 21, p. 499 ; xxxii. 43, p. 508 ; xxxiii. 2, pp. 92, 
 437, 454; xxxiii. 4, p. 223; xxxiv. 2, p. 728; 
 xxxiv. 8, p. 94. 
 
 JOSHUA i. 8, p. 22 ; ii 16, p. 128 ; vi. 17, p. 
 401; vii. 11, p. 20; vii. 14, p. 50 ; x. 26, p. 436; 
 xv. 58, p. 147; xxiii. 13, p. 711 ; xxiY. 2, p. 183; 
 xxiv. 15, p. 702. 
 
 JUIXJES iii. 31, p. Ill ; ir. 27, p. 381 ; is. 55 S 
 p. 49; xvia. 21, p. 521. 
 
 I. SAMUEL iv. 22, p. 496; viii. 15, p. 30 ; x. 
 
 10, 11, p. 58 ; x. 11, p. 57; x. 20, p. 50 ; xii. 18, 
 p. 243; xiv. 24, p. 544; xv. 22, p. 227; xviii. 10, 
 
 P. 57, 58; xviii. 22, p. 619; xix. 12, p. 128; xix. 
 3, 24, p. 57 ; xxi 5, p. 334 ; xxviii. 3, 9, p. 365. 
 IL SAMDEL v. 33, p. 575 ; vii. 8, 14, p. 413 ; 
 xxii. 48, p. 344; xxiv. 1, p. 333. 
 
 I. KINGS ii. 38, p. 120 ; v. 9, p. 178 ; vi. 1, p. 
 208; vii. 13, 14, p. 14 ; viii. 27, p. 90 ; xii. 2, p. 
 13 : xv. 22, p. 4 ; xvii. 21, p. 514 ; xvii 22, p. 521 ; 
 xviii. 26, p. 373; xix. 11, p. 52; xix. 14, p. 153; 
 xx. 35, p. 336; xxii. 11, p. 520; xxii. 24, p. 417. 
 
 II. KINGS ii 3, p. 26 ; iii. 9, p. 575 ; iv. 34, 
 p. 514 ; iv. 38, p. 26 ; xix. 37, p. 391 ; xxiii. 13 
 eg., p. 469. 
 
 I. CHRONICLES xxi. 1, p. 333 ; xxix. 11, p. 90. 
 
 II. CHEOHICLES vi 32, 33, p. 310; vii. 1, p. 
 844. 
 
 EZRA ii. 36-39, pp. 65, 77; iiL 3, p. 64G ; 
 iii. 7, p. 178 ; vi. 1C, p. 66. 
 
 NEHEMIAH iii. 16, p. 147; ix. 16, p. 92. 
 
 JOB i. 6, p. 417 ; v. 9, p. 640 ; v. 10, p. 11 ; 
 v. 13, p. 19 ; v. 24, p. 46 ; xii. 23, p. 308 ; xiii. 7, 
 8, p. 487 ; xiii. 27, p. 282 ; xiv. 2, p. 497 ; xxv. 4, 
 P. 445; xxxiii 11, p. 282; xxxiii. 19, p. 10; xii. 
 
 11, p. 310. 
 
 PSALMS ii., pp. 84, 209 ; ii 3, p. 454 ; ii. 
 7, p. 209 ; ii. 12, p. 145 ; vii 13, p. 646 ; xiv. 
 p. 29 ; xvi. 10, p. 85 ; xviii. 31, p. 646 ; xviii. 
 49, p. 508 ; xix 4, p. 499 ; xxii. 18, p. 50 ; 
 xxii. 21, p. 672 ; xxii. 31, p. 242 ; xxiv. 4, p. 
 653 ; xxvi. 6, p. 653 ; xl. 7, p. 490 ; xii. 9, pp. 
 49, 85; xlviii. 12, p. 385; L 11-12, p. 310; liii. 
 
 ?. 29 ; Iviii. 8, p. 398 ; lix. 10, p. 308 ; Ixiii. 
 , p. 651; Ixvi. 1-2, p. 90; Ixvi. 18, p. 4tJ9; 
 Ixvii. 18, p. 92 ; Ixvii. 19, p. 496 ; Ixviii, p. 
 643 ; Ixviii 11, p. 211 ; Ixviii. 12, pp. 92, 385, 
 437 ; Ixviii. 31, p. 147 ; Ixxi. 1, t>. 651 ; Ixxviii. 
 2, p. 85 ; Ixxviii. 38-39, p. 716; Ixxix. 14, p. 97 ; 
 Ixxxi. 12, p. 473 ; Ixxxii. 6, p. 397 ; Ixrxiv. 7, 
 p. 464; Ixxxvi. 9, p. 242; Ixxxviii. 15, p. 646; 
 Ixxxix. 7, p. 333 ; IrariT. 27, p. 616 ; xci. 7, p. 
 702; xciv. 11, p. 19; xcv. 7, p. 343; cii., p. 
 479 ; cii. 18, p. 242 ; civ. 15, p. 11; cv. 15, p. 
 170 ; cvi. 28, p. 379 ; cvii. 23, p. 69; cix. 8, p. 
 49; ex. 1, p. 85; cxiii.-cxviii., p. 25; cxvii. 
 1, p. 508 ; oxviii. 22, p. 85 ; cxxxviii. 1, p. 394 ; 
 cxxxix. 7, p. 333 ; cxliii. 2, p. 435 ; cxlv. 13, p. 
 652 ; cxlvh. 2, p. 65 ; cxlvii 8-9, p. 11. 
 
 PKOVEUBS ii. 4, p. 617; ii. 17, p. 46; iii 3, 
 pp. 410, 414 ; v. 18, p. 46 : vi. 12, p. 413 ; vii. 3, 
 p. 410 ; viii 30, p. 410 ; n. 24, p. 414 ; xiv. 9, p. 
 311; xiv. 14, p. 657; xiv. 34, p. 157; xvi 20, 
 p. 466 ; xvi. 33, p. 50; xx. 25, p. 539 ; xxi. 18, 
 p. 388; xxii 9, p. 414; xxiii 6, p. 266; xxv. 19, 
 p. 255 ; xxv. 21, 22, p. 503. 
 
 ECCLF.SIASTES v. 18, p. 304 ; vi. 6, p. 49 ; vii. 
 20, p. 105 ; ix. 18, p. 345 ; x. 8, p. 181 ; xi. 6, p. 46.
 
 774 
 
 PASSAGES OF SCBIPTUS3 
 
 CAMTICLSS iii. 7, 8, p. 702 ; vii. 12, p. 256. 
 
 ISAIAH i. 1-22, p. 207; L 2, p. 207; i. 3, p. 
 716; i.9, p. 498; 1. 11-15, p. 34 ; L 22, p. 410; 
 ii. 2, 3, p. 125 ; iii. 10, p. 240 ; v. 24, p. 52 ; viii. 
 
 p. 520 ; xxiv. 18, p. 84 ; xxvi. 12, p. 267 ;' xxviii". 
 4, p. 396 ; xxviii 11, pp. 30, 53 ; xxviii. 16, pp. 
 33, 479, 498, 499; xxix. 14, p. 19; xxx. 7, p. 
 334; xxxii. 2, p. 105 ; xxxiii. 12, p. 70 ; radii. 
 18, pp. 19, 385, 386 ; 3d. 3, p. 85 ; xliii. 6, p. 413 ; 
 xliii 7, p. 242 ; xliii. 9, p. 454; xliv. 25, p. 19 ; 
 3dv. 9, p. 497 ; xiv. 14, p. 147 ; xlix. 6, p. 125 ; 
 Iii. 10, p. 183 ; Iii. 14, p. 104 ; Iii. 15, p. 386 ; liii., 
 
 p. 84 ; liii 4, p. 104 ; liii 4-6, p. 104 ; 
 
 5, pp. 343, 469 ; liii. 7, 8, p. 147: Bii. 9, p. 85 ; 
 
 liv. 1, p. 32 ; Ivi. 3, 8, p. 147 ; Ivii 20, p. 466 ; 
 
 Iviii. 3, p. 34 ; Iviii. 5-7, p. 34 ; lix. 10, p. 308 ; 
 lix. 16-19, p. 646 ; lix. 20, p. 501 ; IT. 1, 2, p. 
 645 ; Ix. 3, 9, p. 183; Ixi 1, p. 85; Iriii 9, 207; 
 ixiv. 4, p. 386 ; Ixv. 1, 2, p. 499 ; Ixv. 4, p. 154 ; 
 Ixv. 17, p. 386 ; Ixvi. 1, 2, p. 90 ; Ixvi. 3, p. 154 1 
 Ixvi. 16, p. 221. 
 
 JEBEMIAH i. 6, p. 153 ; vii. 21, p. 84 ; vii. 22, 
 
 23, p. 485; viii. 9, p. 19; viii. 16, p. 616; ix. 23, 
 
 24, p. 386; ix. 26, p. 92; 3dii. 1, p. 520; xvii 16, 
 p. 387 ; xviii. 6, p. 497 ; xix. 13, p. 151 ; xxiii 
 6, p. 462 ; xxii. 7, p. 720 ; xxix. 26, p. 282 ; TYTJ. 
 3-33, p. 413 ; mi. 29, p. 485 ; xrxiii. 16, p. 462; 
 xxxiii. 25, pp. 226, 428; xxxviii 7, p. 147 ; xxxix. 
 16, p. 147. 
 
 EZEKIEL i. 24, p. 52 ; xi 19, p. 410 ; xvi 12, 
 p. 333; xviii. 2, p. 485; xx. 25, pp. 227, 485; 
 xxiv. 6, p. 50; xxvii. 17, p. 178; xxviii 24, 
 p. 711 ; xxxiii. 4, p. 319 ; xxxvi. 21-23, p. 469 ; 
 xxxvi. 28, p. 413 ; xxxviii. 16, 17, pp. 351, 728; 
 xliii 2, p. 52 ; 3div. 7, pp. 92, 531, 602 ; xiv. 7, 
 p. 274. 
 
 DANIEL i. 8, p. 241; i. 8-12, p. 240; i. 12, 
 p. 30; v. 6, p. 539 ; v. 12, p. 886 ; vii 9, p. 344 ; 
 i vii. 10, 11, 23-26, p. 351 ; ix. 23, p. 110 ; ix. 24, 
 'p. 833; x. 7, p. 108; 3d., p. 727; xi. 31-36, 
 !p. 351; xi 36, p. 346; xii. 10, p. 349; xii. 13, 
 P. 49. 
 
 HOSEA i. 9, 10, p. 498 ; ii. 6, p. 711 ; ii. 23, p. 
 498 ; iv. 14, p. 96 ; vi. 6, pp. 227, 485 j xii. 8, p. 
 69 ; xiii 14, p. 501. 
 
 JOEL ii. 32, p. 499, 
 
 AMOS ii. 10, p. 207 ; iii. 12, p. 672; viii. 4-6, 
 p. 69 ; ix. 11, 12, p. 241. 
 
 JONAH i. 3, p. 152; i. 7, p. 50; iv. 1, 9, p. 
 
 MICAH iv. 2, p. 125; v. 12, p. 365; vi. 8, p. 
 227 ; vi. 12, p. 48-1. 
 
 HABAKKUK i. 5, p. 210; ii. 4, pp. 29, 436, 457; 
 iii 3, p. 454; iii. 6, p. 510. 
 
 ZEPHANIAH i. 5, p. 151; ii. 11, p. 183; iii 
 10, p. 147. 
 
 HAGGAI ii. 8, p. 454. 
 
 ZECHAEIAH xi. 7, p. 240 ; xi. 12, p. 85 ; xii. 
 10, pp. 84, 85; xiv. 11, p. 496; xiv. 16, p. 454; 
 Jtiv. 21, p. 69. 
 
 MALACHI i. 2, 3, p. 497 ; i. 7, p. 241 ; i. 8, p. 
 469 ; iii. 1, p. 85 ; iii. 8-10, p. 469. 
 
 II. E3DRAS xiii. 45, p. 65. 
 
 TOBIT i. 10-14, p. 379; i. 11, 12, p. 240; T. 
 18, p. 388; xi. 13, p. 114; xii. 12, p. 394; xii. 
 15, v. 656. 
 
 ESTHER (Apocr.) xiv. 13, p. 672. 
 
 WISDOM OF SOLOMOK i. 13-16, p. 478; Ii 
 7-9, p. 804; ii. 24, p. 704; iii. 8, p. 697, 704; 
 iii. 10, p. 409 ; iii. 14, 15, p. 144 ; v. 4, p. 559 ; 
 T. 17, p. 697; T. 17-20, p. 646; v. 18, p. 336; v. 
 
 19, p. 646; v. 23, p. 419 ; vii. 22, stq., p. 73; ix 
 15, pp. 412, 704; x.-xii, p. 73; xi, xvi-xviiL 
 p. 33; xi 20, 21, p. 346; xl 23-26, p. 704; xiii.. 
 xix., p. 73 ; xiv. 15, p. 330 ; xv. 7, pp. 497, 697 j 
 xxv. 24, p. 653. 
 
 SIBACH xxiii. 13, p. 497. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICUS vii. 25, p. 46; xiv. 6, p. 
 266; xxv. 22, p. 414; xxx. 11, p. 311; xxxvi. 
 29, p. 334; xxxviii. 1, p. 675; xxxviii. 25, p. 
 Ill ; xiii. 9, p. 46. 
 
 BABUCH v. 12, p. 336 ; vi 43, p. 246. 
 
 I. MACCABEES i. 15, pp. 72, 390, 470; ii. 48, 
 62, p. 627; ii. 52, p. 474; iii. 37, p. 165; x. 36, p. 
 
 II. MACCABEES i. 27, p. 66; iii. 10, p. 74; 
 iii. 15, p. 717; iv. 7-9, 33, p. 165; iv. 10, 15, 
 p. 71; iv. 13, p. 71; iv. 13, seq., p. 72; iv. 33, 
 p. 166 ; iv. 40, p. 363 ; v. 9, p. 179 ; v. 21, p. 165 ; 
 vi. 1, p. 538 ; vi. 9, p. 71 ; vi. 18, 19, p. 15 i ; vii. 
 27, p. 207; vii 81, p. 466; xi. 36, p. 165; xiv. 
 35, p. 310. 
 
 III. MACCABEES (Extra-Apocryphal Book), 
 p. 140. 
 
 ST. MATTHEW iii. 10, p. 387; iv. 14, p. 85; 
 V. 10-12, p. 476; v. 14, p. 175; v. 17, p. 149; v. 
 18, pp. 81, 149 ; v. 32, p. 81 ; v. 37, p. 409 ; v. 39, 
 p. 417 ; v. 47, p. 435 ; vi. 2, p. 36 ; vi. 5, p. 36 ; 
 vi. 7, p. 373 : vi. 13, p. 433 ; vi. 24, p. 497 ; vii 
 6, p. 680 ; vii. 17, p. 644 ; viii 4, p. 149 ; ix. 10, '. 
 11, p. 435; ix. 13, pp. 81, 150; ix. 29, 30, p. 238; 
 3C. 14, p. 212; x. 17, p. 98 ; x. 23, p. 98 ; x. 25, p. 
 
 212 ; x. 27, p. 151 ; x. 37, p. 497 ; xi 3, p. 234 ; 
 , pp. 85, 304 ; xi. 25, p. 600 ; xi. 27, pp. 
 151, 495 ; xi 29, 30, p. 238 ; xii. 7, pp. 81, 150 ; 
 
 xii 10, p. 150 ; xii. 19, 20, p. 679 ; xii. 39, p. 96; I 
 xii. 40, p. 85; xii 46, p. 131; xii. 55, p. 48; 
 xiii. 35, p. 85 ; xiii. 44, p. 617 ; xiii. 46, pp. 
 48, 468 ; xiii. 52, p. 302 ; xiv. 2, p. 267 ; xv. 2- 
 6, p. 87 ; xv. 13, p. 62 ; xv. 17, p. 150 ; xv. , 
 20, p. 150; xv. 26, p. 601; xvi. 4, p. 96; xvi. 
 22, p. 153 ; xvi. 27, p. 333 ; xvii. 9, p. 271 ; 
 xviii. 8, p. 390 ; xviii. 17, p. 157 ; xix. 3, 6, 8, 
 p. 81 ; xix. 8, pp. 150, 469, 626; xx. 21, p. 724; 
 xxi 13, p. 469 ; xxi. 31, 32, p. 455 ; xxii. 4, p. ; 
 888; xxii 17, pp. 36, 504; xxu. 21, p. 503; xxii. ', 
 28, p. 541 ; xxii. 40, pp. 150, 441 ; xxiii. 5, p. 36; i 
 xxiii 6, p. 206 ; xxiii. 13-25, p. 469 ; xxiii. 15, 
 pp. 36, 44, 185, 601, 738; xxiii. 25-27, p. 542; . 
 xxiii. 27, p. 539 ; xxiii. 27-29, p. 333 ; xxiii 87, 
 pp. 345, 708 ; xxiii. 37-39, p. 333 ; xxiv. 6, 16, 
 p. 333 ; xxiv. 17, p. 151 ; xxiv. 23, 24, p. 198 ; 
 xxiv. 29, 30, 34, p. 342 ; xxiv. 31, pp. 336, 345 ; 
 xxiv. 37, p. 336 ; xxv. 27, p. 75 ; xxvi. 15, p. 85 ; 
 xxvi. 24, p. 390 ; xxvi. 28, p. 711 ; xxvi. 49, p. 
 517 ; xxvi. 74, p. 401 ; xxvii. 9, 10, p. 85 ; xxvii. 
 13, p. 490; xxvii. 25, p. 332; xxvii. 28, p. 711. 
 
 ST. MAEK i. 3, p. 85 ; i. 4t, p. 149; ii. 23, p. 
 150; ii 27, p. 81; iii 31, p. 131 ; iv. 16, p. 410; 
 v. 26, p. 430 ; vi. 3, p. 48 ; vii. 1-23, 619 ; vii. 8, 
 5, 8, 9, 13, p. 87; vii. 4-8, p. 36 ; vii 14, 16, p. 
 155; vii. 19, pp. 150, 155; ix. 14, p. 228; x. 5-9, 
 p. 150; xii. 33, p. 150; xiii. 9, p. 98; xiv. 15, p. 
 48 ; xiv. 52, p. 43 ; xv. 7, p. 228 ; xv. 16, p. 597 ; 
 xv. 22, p. 509 ; xv. 41, p. 561 ; xvi 15, p. 184 ; 
 xvi. 17, p. 54. 
 
 ST. LUKE i. 3, p. 198 ; i. 9, p. 50 ; i 22, p. 
 109 ; i. 23, p. 182 ; i. 36, p. 680 ; i. 52, p. 207 ; ii. 
 34, pp. 33, 85; ii 37, 602; iii. 22, p. 52; 
 iv. 18, p. 85 ; iv. 20, pp. 75, 194, 207, 538, 715 ; 
 iv. 23, p. 272 ; v. 17, p. 663 ; vi. 29, p. 539 ; vi. i 
 82, 33, p. 435; vii. 45, p. 509; viii. 3, p. 561;; 
 viii. 19, p. 131; viii 27, p. 220; ix. 53, p. 529; 
 ix. 54, p. 724; x. 1, p. 50 ; x. 7, p. 656 ; x. 21, 
 p. 600; x. 41, p. 391; xii. 15-21, p. 657; xii.50
 
 QUOTED OB EEFEEKED TO. 
 
 775 
 
 17, p. 50; i. 19, p. 272 ; i. 22, p. 47 ; i. 25, p. 49 ; 
 ii. l,p. 79; ii 2, pp. 51, 57 ; ii. 2, 3, pp. 52, 53; 
 ii. 4, p. 53 ; ii. 6, p. 57 ; ii. 9, pp. 317, 448 ; ii. 
 14, p. 58 ; ii. 15, p. 58 ; ii. 17, p. 110 ; ii. 22, p. 
 59; ii. 27, pp. 85, 209 ; ii. 32, p. 47; ii. 33 p. 
 
 14, 30, p. 79; x. 10, p. 152; x. 12, p. 153; 
 x. 13, p. 388 ; x 23, p. 157 ; x. 28, p. 157 ; 
 x. 30, p. 79 ; x. 36, p. 158 ; x. 38, p. 169 ; 
 x. 40, 41, p. 47; x. 46, p. 54; xi. 2, p. 159; 
 xi. 3, p. 71 ; xi. 5, p. 110 ; xi. 12, p. 157 ; xi. 
 
 15, pp. 54, 238 ; xi. 17, p. 238 ; xi. 18, p. 159; 
 xi. 20, pp. 71, 160, 195; xi. 25, pp. 44, 190; - 
 
 28. n. 272? -ri. 20 rm IfiP 9S1 . YI 9Q TVT, 9 
 
 xii. 23, pp. 179, 272 ; xiii 2, pp. 182, 459; xiii. 
 2-3, p. 79 ; xiii. 3, pp. 188, 652 : xiii. 5, pp. 194, 
 196 ; xiii. 6, p. 197 ; xiii. 7, p. 722 ; xiii. 9, pp. 
 538, 715; xiii. 11, p. 199; xiii 12, p. 199; xin. 
 
 16, p. 9; xiii. 16-22, p. 208 ; xiii. 17, p. 207; 
 xiii. 18, p. 207; xiii. 19, p. 207 ; xiii. 20-21, p. 
 701 ; xiii. 23-31, p. 208 ; xiii. 25, p. 208 ; xiii 26, p. 
 208; xiii. 27, p. 208 ; xiii. 32-41, p. 208 ; xiii 33- 
 34, p. 208 ; xin. 35-37, p. 209 ; xiii. 38, 39, 46, p. 
 125 ; xiii. 39, p. 208 ; xiii. 41, pp. 85, 210 ; xiii. 
 42, p. 210; xiii. 43, pp. 68, 210; xiii. 45, p. 
 211 ; xiii. 46, p. 211 ; xiii. 49, p. 211 ; xiii. 50, p. 
 817; xiii. 51, p. 212; xiv. 1, p. 161; xiv. 
 3, p. 220 ; xiv. 4, p. 509 ; xiv. 4, 14, p. 188 \ 
 xiv. 9, p. 214; xiv. 14, p. 194; xiv. 15, pp. 4, 
 216; xiv. 16, pp. 215, 216, 473 ; xiv. 17, pp. 11, 
 216,697; xiv. 19, p. 317; xiv. 22, p. 219; xiv. 
 23, pp. 219, 749; xv., p. 448; xv. 1, pp. 169, 
 225, 226, 243 ; xv. 2, pp. 227, 228, 234 ; xv. 4, 
 p. 230; xv. 5, p. 542; xv. 6, pp. 230,241; xv.7, 
 p. 229 ; xv. 7-11, p. 238 ; xv. 9-11, p. 150 ; xv. 12, 
 P. 262; xv. 10, pp. 235, 243; xv. 19, p. 241; xv. 
 
 20, p. 241 ; xv. 22, pp. 50, 242 ; xv. 22, 32, 34, 
 P. 328; xv. 23, 41, p. 136; xv. 24, pp. 242, 253, 
 435; xv. 25, p. 194; xv. 29, p. 241; xv. 32, pp. 
 258, 652; xv. 37, p. 254; xv. 38, pp. 201, 681; 
 xv. 39, pp. 228, 254; xv. 41, p., 190; xvi pp. 
 221, 346 ; xvi. 1, pp. 217, 655, 749 ; xvi. 1, 2, p. 
 259; xvi. 2, p. 259; xvi. 3, pp. 235, 260; xvi. 6, 
 pp. 221, 262, 607 ; xvi. 6, 7, p. 333 ; xvi 7, pp. 269, 
 712; xvi. 8, p. 269; xvi 9, p. 110; xvi 10, pp. 
 270, 271; xvi 11, p. 512; xvi. 13, p. 275; xvi. 
 
 14, pp. 68, 276 ; xvi 15, p. 283 ; xvi. 16, pp. 
 198, 278, 279 ; xvi 16, 17, 18, 19, p. 279 ; xvi. 
 
 17, pp. 279, 283, 512; xvi. 19, pp. 279, 371; 
 xvi 20, pp. 279, 280 ; xvi. 20, 37, p. 257 ; 
 xvi. 21, p. 284 ; xvi 24, p. 282 ; xvi 25, p. 
 620 ; xvi 26, p. 283 ; xvi 30, p. 283 ; xvi. 32, 
 p. 311; xvi 33, p. 2S3; xvi 34, 35, p. 284; 
 xvi. 37, p. 284 ; xvi. 39, p. 285 ; xvi 40, p. 277; 
 xvii. 1, pp. 285, 287 ; xvii. 2, 3, p. 288 ; xvii. 4, 
 pp. 288, 330, 332 ; xvii. 5, pp. 86, 290, 291 ; xvii. 
 6, p. 533 ; xvii. 9, p. 291 ; xvii. 11, p. 293 ; xvii. 
 13, pp. 294, 317; xvii. 14, pp. 260, 285; xvii. 14, 
 
 15, p. 715 ; xvii. 15, p. 296 ; xvii. 16, p. 301 ; xvii. 
 17, p. 302 ; xvii. 18, p. 305 ; xvii. 21, p. 306 ; xvii. 
 
 21, p. 311 ; xvii. 22, pp. 307, 556 ; xvii. 23, pp. 
 297, 301 ; xvii. 24, pp. 10, 90, 92 ; xvii. 27, p. 697 ; 
 xvii. 28, p. 696 ; xvii. 30, pp. 216, 473 ; xvii. 32, 
 p. 311; xviii. 2, pp. 279, 446; xviii. 3, p. 13; 
 xviii. 4, p. 161 ; xviii. 5, pp. 260, 318 ; xviii. 6, 
 p. 319; xviii. 8, p. 320; xviii. 9, pp. 42, 110; 
 xviii. 12, p. 509 ; xviii. 13, 14, 15, p. 322 ; xviii. 
 17, pp. 71, 385 ; xviii. 18, 21, p. 79 ; xviii 18, 
 26, p. 317; xviii. 19, p. 285; xviii 22, p. 228; 
 xviii 23, pp. 263, 607 ; xviii. 25, p. 361 ; xviii 
 26, p. 317 ; xviii. 27, p. 361 ; xix. 6, p. 54 ; xix. 
 9, 23, p. 169 ; xix. 10, p. 262 ; xix. 10-26, p. 607 ; 
 xix. 11, p. 363; xix. 14, p. 364; xix. 15, p. 365 J 
 xix. 19, p. 198; xix. 21, pp. 270, 3G9, 591 ; xix. 
 
 22, p. 260 ; xix. 29, pp. 218, 259, 288 ; xix. 32, p. 
 509 ; xix. 33, pp. 534, 652 ; xix. 35, p. 356 ; xix. 36, 
 p. 374; xix. 36, 37, p. 469; xix. 37, p. 358; xx. 1,
 
 776 
 
 PASSAGES OF 6CSIPTUBB 
 
 p. 375; S3. 1, 2, p. 270; xx. 3, p. 510; xx. 4, pp. 
 218, 259, 260, 288, 872, 663 ; xx. 5, pp. 271, 285, 
 
 612; xx. 6, pp. 270, 273, 512; xx. 6, 16, p. 79; 
 
 . 13, p. 
 211; xx. 16, p. 515 ; xx. 17, 28, pp. 749, 750; 
 
 . , . 
 
 9, p. 513 ; xx. 11, 12, p. 514 ; xx. 13, 
 
 xx. 18-35, pp. 366, 368 ; xx. 19, p. 366 ; xx. 19, 
 81, 87, p. 516 ; xx. 20, p. 515 ; xx. 20, 31, 34, 
 p. 367 ; xx. 22, p. 515 ; xx. 22, 27, 28, 32, p. 
 630; xx. 23, p. 868; xx. 24, pp. 208, 210; xx. 
 24,32, p. 630; xx. 27, p. 515; xx. 28, p. 515; 
 xx. 29, p. 728 ; xx. 31, pp. 272, 866, 375, 607 ; 
 xx. 32, p. 208; xx 33, p. 331; xx. 34, p. 318; 
 xx. 37, p. 677 ; xx. 38, p. 517 ; xxi. 1, p. 517 ; xxi. 
 1, 4, 5, p. 519 ; xxi. 2, p. 136 ; xxi. 3, p. 318 ; xxi. 
 
 4, pp. 333, 512, 519, 712; xxi. 5, pp. 241, 519; 
 xxi. 8, p. 75 ; xxi. 8, 9, p. 148 ; xxi. 15, p. 521 ; 
 xxi. 16, pp. 195, 238, 578 ; xxi. 18, p. 271 ; xxi. 
 19, p. 523; xxi. 20, p. 536; xxi. 20, 24, p. 79; 
 xxi. 21, pp. 485, 523 ; xxi. 24, p. 249 ; xxi. 25, 
 p. 241 ; xxi. 29, pp. 71, 511, 663 ; xxi. 30, p. 
 532 ; xxi. 33, p. 537 ; xxi. 33, 38, p. 533 ; xxi. 
 39, pp. 7, 534; xxi. 40, pp. 10, 207, 534; xxii 
 
 1, p. 92 ; xxii. 2, p. 534 ; xxii. 3, pp. 3, 8, 25, 
 26, 35, 38, 79, 534; xxii. 4, p. 98; xxii. 6, p. 
 108; xxii. 8, pp. 43, 111; xxii. 12, p. 125; xxii. 
 
 14, 15, p. 114; xxii. 16, 17, p. 116 ; xxii 17, pp. 
 110, 135, 712 ; xxii. 17-21, p. 135; xxii. 18, p. 42; 
 TTii 19, p. 153 ; xxii. 21, pp. 109, 182, 372 ; xxii 
 22, pp. 536, 620 ; xxii. 23, p. 536 ; xxii. 25, pp. 
 281, 536; xxii. 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, p. 537; xxii 
 28, p. 24; xxiii 1, pp. 199, 538, 715 ; xxiii. 1, 6, 
 p. 38 ; xxiii. 2, p. 417 ; xxiii 3, pp. 8, 539 ; xxiii 
 
 5, p. 715 ; xxiii. 6, pp. 3, 15 ; xxiii. 11, p. 591 ; 
 xxiii. 12, p. 401 ; xxiii. 16, p. 15 ; xxiii. 26, p. 
 243 ; xxiii. 29, p. 323 ; xxiii. 35, p. 597 ; xxiv. 
 
 2, p. 548 ; xxiv. 5, pp. 78, 168 ; xxiv. 6-8, p. 
 548 ; xxiv. 9, 10, 22, p. 548 ; xxiv. 10, p. 694 ; 
 xxiv. 11, p. 521 ; xxiv. 17, pp. 231, 522 ; xxiv. 
 21, pp. 208, 542; xxiv. 22, 23, p. 549; xxiv. 25, 
 p. 312 ; xxv. 8, p. 554 ; xxv. 9, p. 554 ; xxv. 14, pp. 
 234,434; xxv. 15, p. 60; xxv. 19, pp. 307, 556 ; 
 xxv. 22, p. 556; xxv. 24, p. 553 ; xxv. 26, p. 557 ; 
 xxvi. 1, p. 207; xxvi. 2, 3, p. 694; xxvi. 4, p. 
 8; xxvi. 5, pp. 8, 25, 35, 534; xxvi. 7, pp. 
 65, 272; xxvi 10, p. 95; xxvi. 11, pp. 98, 100; 
 xxvi. 14, p. Ill ; xxvi. 15, p. 43 ; xxvi 16, 
 p. Ill ; xxvi 17, p. 188 ; xxvi. 17, 18, p. 109 ; 
 xxvi. 18, p. 50 ; xxvi. 19, p. 109 ; xxvi 20, pp. 
 128, 519; xxvi. 23, p. 84; xxvi. 24, pp. 412, 683; 
 xxvi 26, p. 560 ; xxvi. 28, p. 168 ; xxvi. 29, p. 
 692 ; xxvii. 1, pp. 271, 561; xxvii. 2, pp. 372, 511, 
 670; xxvii. 3, pp. 136, 563 ; xxvii. 7, pp. 564, 602 ; 
 xxvii 9, p. 220; xxvii. 10, p. 566 ; xxvii 13, pp. 
 614, 566, 568 ; xxvii. 14, p. 567 ; xxvii 16, p. 
 568: xxvii. 17, p. 568; xxvii. 19, pp. 568, 569; 
 xxvii. 27, p. 573; xxvii. 30, p. 571; xxvii 39, p. 
 519 ; xxvii. 40, pp. 570, 572 ; xxvii. 41, p. 573 ; 
 xxviii. 2, 3, p. 573 ; xxviii. 6, p. 347 ; xxviii. 8, 
 p. 272 ; xxviii. 13, p. 575 ; xxviii. 14, pp. 317, 
 448, 512 ; xxviii. 16, p. 577 ; xxviii 17, pp. 318, 
 823 ; xxviii 21, 22, p. 459 ; xxviii, 22, p. 78; 
 rrviii. 23, p. 578; xxviii. 29, p. 580. 
 
 KOMANS i. 1, pp. 182, 279, 443; i. 1-7, p. 
 459 ; i. 4, pp. 208, 459, 655 ; i. 5, 6, p. 449 ; i. 7, 
 
 15, p. 450; i 8, pp. 336, 579; i. 8-11, p. 592; 
 L 8-15, p. 400; i. 11-14, p. 459 : i. 13, pp. 270, 
 425, 419 ; i. 14, p. 71 ; i 15, p. 369 ; i. 16, pp. 71, 
 125, 739; i 16, 17, pp. 460, 733; i 16-32, p. 466; 
 i. 16-iii. 20, p. 457 ; 1. 17, pp. 29, 472 ; i. 18, p. 333; 
 i. 18-20, p. 456 ; i. 18-32, p. 18 ; i 19, 20, p. 216 ; 
 i. 20, pp. 216, 308, 694, 697, 698 ; i. 21, p. 308 ; i. 
 21, 22, p. 19 ; i 21-32, p. 318 ; i. 22, p. 695 ; i. 24, 
 pp. 27. 811 ; i 24, 25, p. 419 ; L 24, 26, 28, p. 
 466] L 25. pp. 463, 496; i. 27, p. 466; 
 
 L 27, 28, 29-31, p. 466 ; i 28, pp. 465, 694, 695 j 
 i 29, pp. G51, 695 ; i SO, pp. 466, 695 ; i. 30, 32, 
 p. 466; ii, pp. 463, 542; ii. 1, p. 695; ii. 1-16, 
 p. 468 ; ii 4, p. 467 ; ii. 5-12, p. 732 ; ii. 6, pp. 
 486, 493 ; ii. 6-10, pp. 486, 732, 748 ; ii. 6, 10, p. 
 694 ; ii. 6, 10, 14, 15, p. 158 ; ii 6-13, p. 484 ; u. 
 6-15, p. 507 ; ii 7-10, p. 698; ii 8, pp. 16, 463 ; 
 ii 9, p. 71 ; ii. 13, p. 486 ; ii 13-14, p. 485 ; ii 
 14, p. 468 ; ii 15, p. 216 ; ii. 16, pp. 193, 468, 
 732; ii 17, 18, 21, 22, p. 469; ii. 17-21, p. 694; 
 ii 17-24, p. 469 ; ii. 18, p. 592 ; ii 21, p. 469; ii 
 22, pp. 374, 539 ; ii 24, p. 27 ; ii. 25-29, p. 470 ; 
 ii. 29, p. 92 ; iii 1-4, p, 471 ; iii. 2, p. 20, 27, 452, 
 471; iii 3-20, p. 471, 472; iii. 4, 6, 31, p. 471, 
 487; iii. 5, p. 471 ; iii 5-8, p. 472 ; iii 6, p. 27 ; 
 iii. 8, pp. 486, 487 ; iii 9, pp. 71, 472, 694 ; iii. 
 9-20, p. 472 ; iii. 10-18, p. 27 ; iii. 16, p. 646 ; iii. 
 19, p. 472 ; iii. 20, pp. 480, 481, 525, 694; iii. 21, 
 p. 461 ; iii 21-26, pp. 663, 732 ; iii. 21-30, 457; iii. 
 22-27, p. 473 ; iii. 24, p. 474 ; iii 24, 25, p. 463 ; iii 
 25, pp. 412, 473, 739; iii. 25-29, p. 602 ; iii. 27-30, 
 p. 474 ; iii 28, p. 474 ; iii. 31, p. 474 ; iii. 31-iv. 25, 
 p. 457 ; iv. 1, p. 474 ; iv. 1-25, p. 475; iv. 4, pp. 484j 
 732 ; iv. 5, 13, p. 702 ; iv. 9, p. 92 ; iv. 10-19, p. 92 ; 
 iv. 11, p. 475 ; iv. 12, p. 89 ; iv. 13, p. 702 ; iv. 
 13, 16, 18, p. 31 ; iv. 15, pp. 410, 482, 483 ; iv. 16, 
 p. 452 ; iv. 17, p. 27 ; iv. 18, p. 463 ; v., pp. 410, 
 483 ; v. t vii, xl, p. 483 ; v. 1, p. 475 ; v. 1-11, p. 
 457 ; v. 1-12, p. 476 ; v. 8-5, p. 694 ; v. 6, p. 114 ; 
 v. 7, 11, p. 476 ; v. 9, p. 208 ; v. 10, p. 652 ; v. 11, 
 p. 336 ; v. 12, pp. 33, 476, 651, 704; v. 12-20, p. 
 
 478 ; v. 12-21, pp. 457, 490, 732 ; v. 13, p. 482 ; i 
 v. 13,14, 15-18, 18, 19, p. 477 ; v. 14, pp. 477, ' 
 480 ; v. 15-20, p. 468 ; v. 16, p. 477 ; v. 18, p. 478 ; ! 
 
 v. 20, pp. 399, 437, 478, 480, 482 ; v. 20, 21, pp. : 
 479, 494 ; vi, pp. 457, 474; vi-viii, p. 41 ; VL 1, ; 
 p. 471 ; vi. 1-15, p. 480 ; vi. 1-23, p. 490 ; vi. 2, 15. 
 pp. 471, 487 ; vi. 3-23, p. 436 ; vi. 4, p. 679; vi. 
 4, 9, p. 115 ; vi. 4, 11, p. 410 ; vi. 5, p. 479 ; vi. 7, 
 p. 208; vi. 8, pp. 479, 480, 678 ; vi 9, p. 208; 
 vi. 13, 16, p. 480 ; vi 14, p. 483 ; vi 15-23, p. 
 480; vi. 18, p. 480; vi 23, p. 336; vii, pp. 471, i 
 483; vii 1-6, p. 487 ; vii. 1-6, 7-25, p. 490 ; vii < 
 1-11, p. 435 ; vii. 1-viii. 11, p. 457 ; vii 2, p. j 
 699; vii. 2, 3, p. 653; vii. 6, 7, 10, 11, p. 410; 1 
 Vii 7, pp. 471, 482, 487 ; vii. 7 seq., p. 475 ; vii. ! 
 7-12, p. 488 ; vii 7, 13, pp. 437, 471 ; vii. 8-10, p. \ 
 102 ; vii 10-13, p. 483; vii. 12, p. 651 ; vii 13, '< 
 p. 408; vii 13-viii 11, p. 490; vii 14, p. 489; l 
 vii 24, p. 698 ; vii. 25, pp. 489, 692 ; viii, p. 482;! 
 viii. 1, pp. 41, 489; viii 2, 10, p. 410 ; viii 3, 1 
 pp. 2, 208; viii 3, 11, p. 114; viii. 4, p. 474; viii 
 6, p. 490 ; viii 11, pp. 115, 490 ; viii 12-39, p. ; 
 457 ; viii 18-25, p. 490 ; viii. 19-23, pp. 399, 491, i 
 495, 732 ; viii 19-24, p. 494 ; viii. 22-24, p. 498 ; ' 
 viii 23, p. 409 ; viii 24, p. 203 ; viii 26-30, p. 
 490 ; viii. 27, p. 169 ; viii. 29, pp. 592, 599, 680 ; 
 viii. 29, 30, p. 694; viii 31-39, p. 491 ; viii 34, 
 p. 695 ; viii. 36, pp. 123, 368, 445 ; viii. 38, pp. 
 345, 433 ; viii 39, p, 491 ; ix., pp. 236, 455, 499, 
 732; ix.-xi, pp. 454, 455, 457; ix. 1, p. 449} 
 ix. 1-3, p. 124 ; ix. 1-5, pp. 20, 332, 694; ix. 3, pp. 
 14, 20; ix. 4, p. 9 ; ix. 4, 5, p. 471 ; ix. 5, pp. 
 114, 610; ix. 9, p. 497; ix. 8, p. 31 ; ix 9, p. 
 702 ; ix. 11, p. 732 ; ix. 14, p. 471 ; ix. 14-18, p. 
 497 ; ix. 14, 30, p. 471 ; ix. 15, p. 27 ; ix. 16, pp. 
 600, 732; ix. 19-22, p. 497; ix. 22-30, p. 498; 
 ix. 26, p. 216 ; ix. 28, p. 498 ; ix. 30, pp. 435, 695 ; 
 ix. 30-x. 4, p. 498; ix. 80-x. 21, p. 732; ix.31,' 
 p. 105 ; ix. 33, pp. 27, 33, 498, 499 ; uc. 34, p.85 ; x., 
 pp. 455, 499, 692 ; x. 1, pp. 20, 449, 616 - x. 3, p. 592; 
 x. 4, p. 498 ; x. 4-12, p. 499; x. 5, pp. 39, 104; 
 x. 6, p. 115 ; x. 6-8, p. 808 ; x. 6-9, p. 27 ; x. 8, 
 p. 463; x. 11, p. 499; x. 12, p. 468; x. 14, 15,
 
 QUOTED OR REFERRED TO. 
 
 777 
 
 p. (94; x. 14-21, p. 499 ; x. 15, p. 646; x. 15-21, 
 p. 17 ; x. 18, pp. 27, 193 ; xi., pp. 449, 483 ; xi. 
 1, pp. 20, 592, 652 ; xi. 1, 11, p;. 471, 500 ; xi. 6, 
 p. 732 1 xi. 8, p. 27 ; xi. 12, 25, p. 616 ; xi. 15-36, 
 p. 495 ; xi. 16-24, p 500; xi. 1(3 25, p. 12 ; xi. 17, 
 p. 695 ; xi. 22, p. 419 ; xi. C ', p. 12 ; xi. 2A-27, 
 p. 342 ; xi. 25, p. 459 ; xi. :: i, pp. 452, 494 ; xi. 
 26, 32, p. 494 ; xi. 30-36, pp. t>99, 732 ; xi. 30, 31, 
 p. 501; xi. 32, pp. 399, 494, 495, 704; xi. 33, 
 p. 640; xi. 36, p. 495; xii., p. 457; xii-xiv., 
 
 ?. 510 ; xii. 1, p. 501 ; xii. 1, 10, p. 592 ; xii. 
 21, p. 503; xii. 2, p. 502, 599; xii. 3, pp. 
 463, 502, 695 ; xii. 1, 3, 10, 16, p. 592 ; xii 5, p. 
 479 ; xii. 6, p. 502 ; xii. 7, pp. 654, 749; xii. 9, 
 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, p. 503 ; xii. 11, pp. 361, 
 694 ; xii. 13, p. 442 ; xiii., p. 458 ; xiii, xiv., p. 584 ; 
 xiii. 1, p. 475 ; xiii. 3, p. 748 ; xiii. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, p. 
 503 ; xiii. 8, p. 441 ; xiii. 10, pp. 474, 616 ; xiii. 
 11-14, p. 336 ; xiii. 12, pp. 48, 336, 480, 505, 652 ; 
 xiii. 14, p. 479; xiv., p. 244 ; xiv.-xv., p. 415; xiv.- 
 xv. 13, p. 458 ; xiv. 1, p. 224 ; xiv. 1-4, p. 655 ; xiv. 
 1-12, p. 507 ; xiv. 2, p. 657 ; xiv. 5, pp. 25, 79, 513 ; 
 xiv. 6, pp. 505,592 ; xiv. 9-11, p. 592; xiv. 10, pp. 
 485, 732 ; xiv. 13-21, p. 507; xiv. 15, p. 115 ; xiv. 
 21, p. 723 ; xiv. 22, 23, p. 508 ; xiv. 23, pp. 435, 
 450 ; xiv. 24, p. 450 ; xv. 1, pp. 261, 507 ; xv. 1-8, 
 p. 508 ; xv. 3, p. 115 ; xv. 4, pp. 203, 436 ; xv. 5, 
 p. 266 ; xv. 9, 10, 11, p. 150 ; xv. 9-33, p. 509 ; xv. 
 14-21, p. 458; xv. 15-20, p. 450; xv. 16, pp. 182, 
 221, 508 ; xv. 18, p. 193 ; xv. 19, pp. 402, 660 ; 
 xv. 22, pp. 333, 459 ; xv. 23, pp. 270, 422, 459 ; xv. 
 23-28, p. 369 ; xv. 24, pp. 459, 508, 715, 742 ; xv. 
 24, 28, p. 648 ; xv. 24, 32, p. 425; xv. 25, p. 169 ; 
 xv. 25, 26, p. 354 ; xv. 25-32, p. 422 ; xv. 26, 27, 
 p. 172 ; xv. 27, pp. 231, 459 ; xv. 29, p. 616; xv. 
 31, p. 523; xv. 32, pp. 459, 509; xv. 33, pp. 450, 
 
 652; xvi. 1, p. 320; xvi. 1, 2, pp. 319, 
 xvi. 3, pp. 317, 318, 352, 511 ; xvi. 3-16, p. 458 ; 
 xvi. 3-20, p. 375; xvi. 4, pp. 371, 511; xvi. 5, 
 pp. 319, 363, 511; xvi. 5, 14, 15, p. 447; xvi. 4, 
 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, p. 509 ; xvi. 7, pp. 317, 432, 621 ; 
 xvi. 7, 9, 12, 13, p. 450 ; xvi. 7, 11, 21, p. 14 ; 
 xvi. 16, p. 337 ; xvi. 17-20, pp. 450, 458, 509 ; xvi. 
 17-20, 19, 20, 24, 27, p. 500 ; xvi. 18, p. 592 ; xvi. 
 20, 24, p. 450 ; xvi. 21, pp. 287, 319, 423. 511 ; 
 xvi. 21-24, p. 458; xvi. 22, 23, 27, 32, p. 459 ; 
 xvi. 23, pp. 218, 259, 369, 372 ; xvi. 24, p. 338 ; 
 xvi. 25, pp. 119, 450 ; xvi. 25-27, pp. 508, 694 ; 
 xvi. 27, pp. 450, 652. 
 
 I. CORINTHIANS i-iii., p. 692 ; i. 1, pp. 193, 
 323 ; i. 1-3, p. 385 ; i. 2, p. 313 ; i. 4-9, 10, 20, 
 p. 385 ; i. 7, p. 342 ; i. 10, p. 386 ; i. 12, p. 253 ; 
 I. 13, 14, p. 386 ; i. 13-17, p. 194 ; i. 14, p. 218, 
 259, 319 ; i. 16, p. 283 ; i. 17, p. 320 ; i. 18-25, 
 p. 19 ; i. 18-27, p. 19 ; i. 19, p. 386 ; i. 21, pp. 19, 
 301, 386. 661 ; i. 21, 23, 24, p. 386 ; i. 22, 23, 
 P. 71; l. 23, pp. 114, 320; i. 23, 24, p. 695; 
 i. 27, 28, p. 188 ; i. 28, p. 411 ; i. 29, p. 694 ; 
 i. 30, p. 462 ; ii. 1-5, p. 320 ; ii. 2, pp. 114, 
 320, 334 ; ii. 3, pp. 123, 192, 315, 319 ; ii. 5, 
 p. 386 ; ii. 6, p. 411 ; ii. 6-16, p. 386 ; ii. 7, p. 617 ; 
 ii. 13, p. 695; ii. 14, p. 19; iii. 2, pp. 45, 386, 
 694 ; iii. 4, p. 387 ; iii. 6, pp. 362, 653 ; iii. 8. p. 
 493; iii. 9, p. 333; iii. 10, p. 193; iii 12, p. 
 315 ; iii. 13, pp. 387, 463, 732 ; iii. 17, p. 69 1 ; 
 iii. .18-20, p. 19 ; iii. 19, pp. 10, 19 ; iii. 22, p. 345 ; 
 iii. 23, p. 496 ; iv., p. 698 ; iv. 1-4, p. 387 ; iv. 3, 
 pp. 16, 123, 387, 680 ; iv. 3, 4, p. 387 ; iv. 5, pp. 
 411, 617, 732 ; iv. 6, pp. 387, 440, 489 ; iv. 6-21, 
 p. 388 ; iv. 7, 9, p. 3S7 ; iv. 8. p. 692 ; iv. 8-10, 
 p. 303; iv. 8-11, p. 416, 694; iv. 8-13, p. 368; iv. 
 9, pp. 293, 316, 372, 698 ; iv. 10, pp. 19, 123 ; iv. 
 11, 12, p. 318 ; iv. 12, 13, p. 691 ; iv. 13, pp. 123, 
 698; iv. 15, pp. 45, 193, 388 ; iv. 17, p. 260; iv. 
 
 18-19, p. 387 ; v. 1, pp. 246, 316 ; v. 1-2, pp. 331, 
 694; v. 1-9, p. 389 ; v. 2, p. 703; v. 5, pp. 401, 
 652, 710; v. 6, p. 388 ; v. 7, pp. 114, 388, 392; 
 v. 9. p. 325 ; v. 9, 10, p. 317 ; v. 10, 11, p. 389 ; v. 
 9-13, p. 389 ; v. 10, p. 389 ; v. 11, pp. 383, 389 ; 
 v. 16-21, p. 337; vi. 1-20, p 389; vi. 2, pp. 
 27, 333, 697, 704 ; vi. 3-8, p. 416 ; vi. 7, p. 
 507 ; vi. 9, p. 651 ; vi. 9-11, pp. 193, 317 ; vi. 
 9-20, p. 316 ; vi 11, pp. 171, 389, 663 ; vi. 
 13, p. 411 ; vi. 14, p. 343 ; vi 15, pp. 471, 487 ; 
 vi. 15-18, p. 383; vi. 17, p. 463; vii.,p. 746; 
 vii. 1, p. 390 ; vii. 1-7, p. 390; vii. 1-40, p. 391 ; 
 vii. 2, p. 334 ; vii. 3, 5, 7, 9, 18, 19, p. 390; vii. 
 7, 8, 9, p. 713 ; vii. 8, pp. 45, 96 ; vii. 9, 36, p. 
 46 ; vii. 10, p. 347 ; vii. 10-24 (17-24), 23, p. 391 : 
 vii. 12, p. 169; vii. 14. p. 45; vii. 18, p. 72; 
 vii. 18, 19, p. 390 ; vii. 19, p. 697 ; vii. 21, pp. 390, 
 657; vii. 25, p. 391; vii 26, p. 390; vii. 29-31, 
 pp. 391, 691 ; vii. 31, pp. 599, 695, 698 ; vii. 36, 
 p. 46 ; vii. 39, p. 653 ; viii, pp. 244, 395 ; viii. 1, 
 pp. 379, 751 ; viii. 1-13, p. 391; viii. 6, pp. 348, 
 495,496, 610; viii. 8, p. 655; viii. 10, pp. 22, 
 695 ; viii. 13, pp. 507, 723 ; ix., 442 ; ix. 1, pp. 41, 
 109, 111, 407; ix. 1, 3, 7, p. 253 ; ix. 1-16, p. 416 ; 
 ix. 1-27, p. 392 ; ix. 4, p. 318 ; ix. 4, 11, p. 33 ; 
 ix. 5, pp. 45, 134, 253 ; ix. 6, p. 255 ; ix. 7, pp. 
 27, 392; ix. 8-10, 11, 12, 13, 14, p. 392; ix. 
 
 9, pp. 33, 481, 656 ; ix. 10, pp. 33, 250 ; ix. 12 
 318; ix. 12, 18, p. 391; ix. 15, p. 331; ix. 1(3 
 p. 193 ; ix. 17, pp. 119, 403, 493; ix. 19, pp. 19.5 
 221; ix. 20, p. 261; ix. 21, pp. 221, 265, 435 
 ix. 24, pp. 316, 600, 699, 732; ix. 24-27, 
 p. 699; ix. 25, pp. 316, 352; ix. 25-27, p. 
 48i; x. 1, pp. 459, 617; x. 1, 2, p. 481; x. 
 1-4, p. 27; x. 1-14, p. 378; x. 1-xi. 1, p. 392; 
 x. 4, p. 481; x. 6, p. 33; x. 6, 11, p. 33 ; x. 7, p. 
 389 ; x. 7, 8, pp. 316, 723 ; x. 8, pp. 383, 392 ; 
 x. 11, p. 33 ; x. 15, p. 123; x. 16, p. 114; x. 20, 
 p. 655 ; x. 20, 21, p. 244 ; x. 26, p. 616 ; x. 32, 
 pp. 71, 723 ; xi. 1, p. 38 ; xi. 1-17, p. 394 ; xi. 
 2, p. 378 ; xi. 8, 9, p. 653 ; xi. 10, pp. 656, 701 ; 
 xi. 14, pp. 316, 352; xi. 17, p. 347; xi. 17-34, p. 
 395 ; xi. 19, p. 663 ; xi. 21, p. 317 ; xi. 22, pp. 
 694, 698 ; xi. 23, p. 282 ; xi. 24, 27, 29, p. 395 ; 
 xi. 29, p. 695; xii, p. 698; xii.-xiv. 33, p. 54; 
 xii. 1, p. 459 ; xii. 1-31, p. 396 ; xii. 3, pp. 382, 
 196 ; xii. 4-6, p. 80 ; xii. 8-10, p. 395 ; xii. 10, pp. 
 2(57, 337 ; xii. 11, pp. 334, 423 ; xii. 12, 13, 27, p. 
 479 ; xii. 12-27, p. 502 ; xii. 13, p. 396 ; xii. 28, 
 pp. 182, 654, 749 ; xii. 29, 30, p. 617 ; xii. 31, p. 
 408; xii. 31-xiii. 13, p. 396; xiii., p. 744 ; xiii. 
 
 I, pp. 56, 463 ; xiii. 2, p. 395 ; xiii. 3, 4, p. 692 ; 
 xiii. 4, pp. 16, 396 ; xiii. 4, 5, 7, 8, p. 396 ; xiii. 
 5, pp. 297, 396 ; xiii. 8, pp. 56, 396, 497 ; xiii. 8, 
 
 II, p. 411 ; xiii. 9, p. 80 ; xiii. 9-12, p. 222; xiii. 
 
 10, p. 151 ; xiv. 1-26, p. 397; xiv. 2, p. 57 ; xiv. 2, 
 4, 11, p. 56 ; xiv. 4, 13, 14, 27, p. 54 ; xiv. 7, 8, p. 
 56 ; xiv. 9, 11, 17, 20, 23, 26-28, 33, 40, p. 57 ; xiv. 
 16, p. 396 ; xiv. 18, p. 55 ; xiv. 19, p. 56 ; xiv. 21, 
 pp. 27, 30, 397 ; xiv. 22, p. 55 ; xiv. 23, p. 57 ; 
 xiv. 26-40, p. 398 ; xiv. 27, p. 56 ; xiv. 32, p. 58 ; 
 xiv. 34, p. 751 ; xiv. 39, p. 337 ; xv., pp. 43, 
 115, 752; xv. 1-12, p. 398; xv. 3, 318 ; xv. 6, p. 
 416 ; xv. 7, p. 48 ; xv. 8, pp. 109, 111, 398, 412; 
 xv. 9, pp. 43, 98, 124, 640 ; xv. 10, pp. 123, 210, 
 407; xv. 10-29, p. 109; xv. 12, p. 679; xv. 
 12-35, p. 398; xv. 18, p. 109; xv. 19, p. 368; 
 xv. 22, pp. 119, 336, 456, 495 ; xv. 23, pp. 333, 
 339 ; xv. 24, p. 411; xv. 24, 25, p. 732 : xv. 25- 
 28 ; p. 495 ; xv. 28, pp. 16, 463 ; xv. 30-32, p. 
 483 ; xv. 31, pp. 1, 123, 678 ; xv. 32, pp. 17, 
 316, 372 ; xv. 33, p. 696; xv. 33, 34, p. 383; xv. 
 35-50, p. 399 ; xv. 36, p. 33 ; xv. 37, 45, p. 303 ; 
 xv. 38, p. 31; xv. 41, p. 10 ; xv. 43, p. 695; xv.
 
 778 
 
 PASSAGES Off SCRIPT UK E 
 
 p. 491; xv. 66, pp. 437, 483; xv. 58, p. 484; 
 xvi. 1, 2, p. 364 ; xvi. 1-4, p, 405 ; xvi. 1, 15, p. 
 640; xvi. 3, p. 231 ; xvi. 3, 4, p. 511 ; xv. 5-7, 
 p. 3iJ9 ; xvi. 5-S, p. 401 ; xvi 6-9, p. 270 ; xvi. 
 9, pp. 361, 402; xvi. 10, pp. 260, 388; xvi. 10, 
 11, p. 656 ; xvi 11, p. 200; xvi. 12, pp. 362, 400, 
 694 ; xvi. 15, pp. 319, 749 ; xvi. 19, pp. 317, 366, 
 450; xvi. 20, p. 337; xvi. 22, pp. 48, 49S, 601, 
 727 ; xvi. 23, p. 338. 
 
 , , . . , . , . , . . , . 
 617; i. 8, pp 368, 408, 459 ; i. 8, 15, p. 408 ; i. 
 
 10, p. 375 ; i. 11, 12, 13-17, p. 42 ; i. 12, p. 408 ; 
 i. 12-ii. 11, p. 410; i. 14, p. 408; i. 15, 16, 
 p. 367; i. 15, 23, p 122 ; i. 16-23, p. 309 ; i. 
 
 17, pp. 122, 402 ; i. 18, p S20 ; i. 22, p. 13 ; i 23, 
 p. 409 ; ii., p. 698 ; ii. 1, 409 ; ii. 1, 12, 13, p. 408 ; 
 
 11. 2, p. 695 ; ii. 4, pp. 124, 327, 403 ; ii. 5, p. 265 ; ii. 
 5-10, p. 402 ; ii. 6, p. 409 ; ii. 7, p. 423 ; ii. 10, 11, p. 
 410; ii. 12, p. 270; ii. 12, 13, p. 401 ; ii. 12-17, p. 
 410 ; ii. 13, pp. 191, 512 ; ii. 11, pp. 109, 407, 411, 
 619, 652, 692 ; ii. 14-16, pp. 316, 368, 092, 700 ; ii. 
 15, p. 732 ; ii. 16, pp. 42, 703 ; ii. 17, pp. 18, 
 122, 331, 410, 484 ; iii. 1, pp. 253, 361, 402, .410, 
 416, 692; iii. 1-3, p. 410; iii. 1-18, p. 407; iii. 2, 
 p. 407 ; iii. 3, p. 411 ; iii. 4-iv. 6, p. 411 j iii. 6, 
 pp. 410,452,482,652; iii. 7, p. 411; iii. 7-13, 
 p. 481 ; iii. 10, 11, p. 411 ; iii. 16, 18, p. 411 ; iii. 
 
 18, pp. 464-479; iv. 1, p. 652; iv. 1-7, p. 484; 
 iv. 2, pp. 13, 122, 331, 411, 416, 481; iv. 4, 
 pp.342, 484, 49ti, 610, Gi8; iv. 6, p. 109; iv. 
 6, 7, p. 80; iv. 6-8, p. 5P8; iv. 7-vi. 10, 
 p. 413; iv. 7, pp. 123, 192, 334; iv. 8, pp. 403, 
 ,*/*Q OK . ;,- Q o ,^ .}o . ;., o in 10*3 . ; 
 
 vi. 9, p. 694 ; vi. 9, 10, p. 691 ; 'vi. 10, p. 695 ; 
 vi. 11,- vii. 16, p. 414 ; vi. 14, pp. 316, 393, 724 ; 
 
 14, 15, p. 40:4; vii. 8, pn. 327, 401; vii. 8-12, 
 p. 415 ; vii. 11, pp. 3;!4, 6U1 ; vii. 11, 12, p. 404, 
 vii. 12, pp. 411, 423 ; viii. -end, p. 733 ; viii , ix., 
 pp. 231, 406 ; viii. 1 ,-ix. 15, p. 414 ; vi,i. 1. p. 408 ; 
 viii. 2, pp. 403, 408, 693 ; viii. 6, pp. 402, 423 ; 
 viii. 9, p. 636; viii. 13, p. 403; viii. 15,' p. 10; 
 viii. 17, p. 402 ; viii. 18, pp. 271, 415; viri. 18, 
 23, p. 402; viii. 19, p. 219 ; viii. 20, pp. 414, 515 ; 
 viii. 21, p. 347 ; viii. 22, p. 695 ; viii. *3, pp. 432, 
 509; viii. 24, p. 422; ix. 1, pp. 334, 691; ix. 2, 
 pp. 402, 408; ix. 5, p. 239; ix. 6, p. 414; ix. 8, 
 pp. 303, 657, 695 ; ix. 10, p. 414 ; ix. 11, 13, p. 
 408; ix. 12, p. 182; ix. 12-15, p. 422; ix. 1-1, 
 p. 422; ix. 15, p. 652; x.-xiii.. pp. 406, 693; 
 x. 1, pp. 413, 415; x. 1, 2, p. 122; x. 1, 10, pp. 
 320, 415; x. 1-11, p. 416; x. 2, pp. 122,415; 
 x. 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 18, p. 415; x. 3, 4, p. 643; 
 x, 5, p. 652; x. 7, pp. 253, 415; x. 7, 10, 11, IS, 
 
 p. 713; x. 7, 10, 11, 12, p. 416; x. 9, p. 325; 
 x. 10, pp. 122, 192, 265, 402; x. 10-16, p. 758; 
 x. 12-18, pp. 415, 416; x. 12, 16, 17, 18, p. 41U ; 
 x. 14, p. 758; x. 15, p. 416, 463; x. 18, p. 416; 
 x. 20-23, p. 407; xi, pp. 398, 692, 698; xi. 1, 
 pp. 405,416; xi. 1, 4, 16, 17, 19, 20, p. 416; xi. 
 19, 21, p. 416 ; xi. 1-33, p. 418; xi. 2, p. 193, 42 J, 
 487; xi. 2, 20, p. 423 ; xi. 3, pp. 403, 416, fc53: 
 xi. 4, pp. 405, 415, 416, 423, 433, 702 ; xi. 4, 20, 
 p. 713; xi. 5, pp. 124, 417; xi. 6, pp. 122, 
 192, 411, 415, 417, 423, 691 ; xi. 6-21, p. 417 ; 
 xi. 7, pp. 16, 122, 207; xi. 8, pp. 331, 692, 713; 
 si. 8, 20, p. 416; xi. 9, pp. 16, 276, 318, 331; 
 xi. 10, p. 417 ; xi. 10, 12, 18, 30, p. 416 ; xi. 13, 
 pp. 331, 410, 525, 601; xi. 14, p. 33; xi. 16, p. 
 405 ; xi. 16-19, pp. 19, 123 ; xi. 16, 17, 19, p. 415 ; 
 
 367; xi. 28, p. 418; xiT 29, pp. 191, 367, 723; 
 xi. 29-34, p. 398; xi. 31, pp. 496, 652; xi. 32, pp. 
 101, 128 ; xi. 33, p. 128 ; xii. 1, pp. 42, 108, 109 ; xii. 
 1-3, 12-16, p. 692 ; xii. 1-10, pp. 417, 710 ; xii. 1, 
 6, 6, 11, p. 416 ; xii. 1-11, p. 418; xii. 2, p. 33; 
 xii. 2, 4, p. 703; xii. 3, p. 418 ; xii. 5, p. 405 ; xii. 
 5, 9, p. 320 ; xii. 6, 11, p. 416 ; xii. 6, 16, p. 405 ; 
 xii. 7, pp. 121, 124; xii. 9, p. 418; xii. 10, p. 
 695 ; xii. 10, 11, p. 476 ; xii. 11, pp. 123, 124, 423 ; 
 xii. 11, 12, p. 417 ; xii. 12, p. 320 ; xii. 13, p. 16 ; 
 xii. 13, 14, p. 461 ; xii. 13-xiii. 10, p. 419 ; xii. 
 14, pp. 331, 419; xii. 16, pp. 122, 331; xii. 18, 
 p. 415; xii. 20, pp. 3SO, 387, 466; xii. 20, 21, p. 
 423; " "' """" ""'" " " """" "' "'" 
 
 p. 338. 
 
 GALATIAXS i., ii., p. 432; i. 1, pp. 118, 182, 
 423, 485; i. 1-5, p. 433; i. 1,6, 10, p. 423; i. 
 1-10, p. 433; i 4, pp. 345, 433; i. 6, m 
 268, 423, 696 ; i. 6-9, p. 525 ; i. 7, p. 618 ; i. 
 
 ii. 1-10, p. 435; ii. 2, pp. 434, 712; ii. 2-6, p. 
 229; ii. 2, 7, p. 119; ii. 3, pp. 71, 660, ii. 4, pp. 
 224, 225, 478, 525 ; ii. 4-5, p. 551 ; ii. 6, pp. 423, 
 434, 694 ; ii. 6, 9, p. 525 ; ii. 6, 20, p. 423 ; ii. 7, 
 pp. 228, 230, 468 ; ii. 7-8, p. 13i ; ii. 7, 9, p. 229 ; 
 
 ii. 9, pp. 1, 2TO, 255, 382, 448, 654 ; ii. 8, 10, p. 
 
 p. 84, 408 ; ii. 14, pp. 248, 250, 525 ; ii. 14, 
 16, 18, p. 525 ; ii. 15, p. 467 ; ii. 15 21, p. 
 251 ; ii. 16, pp. 463, 525, 6'j5 ; ii. 16, 20, p. 695, 
 ii. 17, pp. 265, 471, 487 ; ii. 19, p. 618 ; ii. 20, pp. 
 4, 252, 423, 463, 479, 695, 711 ; ii. 21, p. 481 ; iii., 
 pp. 471, 483, 508 ; iii., iv., p. 4S3; iii. 1, pp. 1^4, 
 241, 266, 436, 713 ; iii. 1-5, p. 432 ; iii. 1-14, p. 43o; 
 iii. 2, p. 463 ; iii. 3, 13, p. 423 ; iii. 4, pp. 433, 639, 
 695 ; iii. 5, p. 414 ; iii. 6-18, p. 432 ; iii. 6-29, p. 42 1 ; 
 iii. 7, p. 02 ; iii. 10, pp. 39, 410, 482, 490 ; iii. 11, 
 pp. 29, 20S, 457 ; iii 12, p. 104 ; iii. 14, p. 183 ; 
 iii. 15, p. 437; iii. 15-18, p. 437; iii. 15, 19, p. 
 437; iii. IS, pp. 28,30; iii. 17, 18, p. C99; iii.
 
 QUOTED OB .REFERRED TO. 
 
 779 
 
 19, pp. 33. 91, 92, 487, 478, 482, 651, 701 ; iii. 19, 
 
 20, pp. 437, 438 ; iii. 19-29, p. 432 ; Hi. 21, pp. 
 471,481,487; iii. 21-29, p. 438; iii. 22-26, p. 
 474 ; iii. 24, p. 438 ; iii. 26, p. 463 ; iii. 27, pp. 
 479, 505 ; iii. 27, 28, p. 269 ; iii. 28, pp. 20, 49, 
 148, 348, 620, 653, 657 ; iii. 28, 29, p. 31 ; iv. 
 
 I, 2, p. 699 ; iv. 1-11, pp. 432, 439 ; iv. 3, pp. 
 439, 452, 663 ; iv. 3, 9, p. 618 ; iv. 4, pp. 496, 
 616 ; iv. 4, 5, p. 439 ; iv. 5, pp. 617, 700 ; iv. 7, 
 p. 680 ; iv. 8, pp. 269, 330 ; iv. 9, pp. 2, 269, 
 618; iv. 10, pp. 25, 79, 513; iv. 11, p. 695; iv. 
 12, pp. 123, 253; iv. 12-14, p. 264; iv. 12- 
 16, pp. 440, 710 ; iv. 13, pp. 123, 192, 262, 265, 
 738; iv. 14, pp. 123,265,440, 713; iv. 15, p. 
 265 ; iv. 16, pp. 253, 265, 354 ; iv. 17, pp. 124, 
 234, 423, 440, 692, 697; iv. 17-20, p. 440 ; iv. 19, 
 pp. 124, 193, 599 ; iv. 20, p. 556 ; iv. 21-31, 
 p. 441 ; iv. 22, p. 302 ; iv. 24, p. 481 ; iv. 
 24-31, p. 27; iv. 25, p. 709; iv. 29, pp. 
 33, 702; v. 1-6, p. 441; v. 1-9, p. 506; v. 
 1-12, p. 432 ; v. 1, 13, 14, p. 252 ; v. 2, p. 79, 
 244, 269, 410, 415 ; v. 3, p. 238; v. 3, 6, 12-11, p. 
 430 ; v. 6, pp. 330, 697, 748; v. 7-12, p. 441 ; v. 
 7, 15, 21, 26, p. 268; v. 8, p. 330; v. 10, p. 441; 
 v. 11, pp. 44, 221, 433 ; v. 12, pp. 235, 431, 525, 
 533, 602; v. 13-15, p. 441; v. 13-18, p. 432; v. 
 14, p. 441 ; v. 15,20, 21, p. 423 ; v. 16-26, p. 4t2 ; 
 v. 20, p. 365; v. 16- vi. 10, p. 432; v. 17, p. 482 ; 
 v. 19, pp. 466, 651 ; v. 20, p. 663 ; v. 21, p. 354 ; 
 vi. 1, pp. 423, 695 ; vi. 1-5, p. 442 ; vi. 1, 4, 8, 15, 
 p. 423; vi. 2, p. 442; vi. 5, p. 442; vi. 6-10, p. 
 412; vi. 7, pp. 463,484,485; vi.7-12, p. 713; vi. 
 
 II, p. 15; vi. 11-18, pp. 432, 443; vi. 12, pp. 99, 
 269; vi. 12, 13, pp. 442, 506 ; vi. 13, p. 252; vi. 
 14, pp. 413, 487 ; vi. 15, pp. 20, 601, 697 ; vi. 16, 
 p. 443, 651 ; vi. 17, pp. 221, 368, 433, 443, 711 ; 
 vi. 18, pp. 338, 4J3 ; vi. 19, p. 114. 
 
 EPHESIANS i, p. 698; i. 1, p. 169; i. 1, 2, p. 
 637 ; i. 1, 5, 9, 11, p. 636 ; i. 2, 6, 7, p. 636 ; i. 3, 
 638 ; i. 3-6, p. 637 ; i. 3-14, pp. 632, 637 ; i. 3, 13, 17, 
 p. 636 ; i. 3, 20, p. 636 ; i. 4, pp. 346, 740 ; i, 5, pp. 
 636, 700, 740 ; i. 5, 9, p. 315 ; i. 6, p. 740 ; i. 6, 12, 
 14, 17, 18, p. 636 ; i. 7, pp. 473, 615, 739 ; i. 7-12, p. 
 637 ; i. 7-18, p. 636 ; i. 8, p. 638 ; i. 9, p. 636 ; i. 9 
 seq., p. 640 ; i. 10, pp. 50, 616, 617, 635, 636 ; i. 11, 
 pp. 630, 636, 740 ; i. 11, 14, 18, p. 630 ; i. 13, pp. 
 13, 740 ; i. 13, 14, p. 637 ; i. 14, pp. 630, 740 ; i. 15, 
 18, p. 330 ; i. 15-23, pp. 637, 638 ; i. 17, pp. 496, 
 638, 639, 740 ; i. 18, pp. 630, 633 ; i. 19, 21, p. 
 636; i. 20 22, pp. 495, 610; i. 21, p. 701; i. 23, 
 p. 606, 616, 633, 636 ; ii., pp. 636, 663; ii. 1-6, p. 
 740 ; ii. 1-22, pp. 637, 639 ; u. 2, pp. 411, 505, 638, 
 701 ; ii. 3, pp. 739, 740; ii. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19, 22, p. 
 636 ; ii. 6, pp. 115, 201, 610, 612, 636 ; ii. 8-10, p. 
 748 ; ii. 9, 10, p. 638 ; ii. 10, p. 636 ; ii. 11, p. 633 ; 
 ii. 13, p. 114 ; ii. 13 seq., p. 640 ; ii. 14, pp. 429, 
 531, 532, 703 ; ii. 15, p. 618 ; ii. 16, p. ,640 ; ii. 18, 
 22, p. 636 ; ii. 19-22, p. 479 ; ii. 20, pp. 85, 640, 654, 
 739 ; ii. 20, 22, p. 740 ; ii. 21, p. 632 ; iii. 1, pp. 415, 
 630 ; iii. 1, 8, p. 633 ; iii. 1-19, p. 610 ; iii. 1-21, p. 
 637 ; iii. 2, pp. 630, 635; iii. 2-4, p. 630 ; iii. 2, 7, 8, 
 p. 636 ; iii. 2-9, p. 617 ; iii. 3, pp. 119, 266, 439, 560, 
 638 ; iii. 3, 4, 9, p. 636 ; iii. 3-6, p. 118 ; 3, 8, p. 
 617 ; iii. 3, 9, p. 638 5 iii. 4, p. 638 ; iii. 5, pp. 
 253, 739, 740 ; iii. 5, 16, p. 636 ; iii. 6, pp. 221, 
 479, 636, 640, 740; iii. 8, p. 640; iii. 8, 16, p. 
 636 ; iii. 9, p. 638 ; iii. 10, pp. 394 ; 636, 701 ; iii. 
 11, p. 636 ; iii. 16, p. 640 ; iii. 16-21, &c., p. 636 ; 
 iii. 17, 18, 20, p. 330; iii. 19, pp. 606, 616, 636, 
 638 ; iii. 19, 20, p. 636 ; iii. 20, 21, pp. 510, 641 ; 
 iv. 1, p. 630; iv. 1-16, pp. 637, 643; iv. 2, p. 
 740 ; iv. 3-13, p. 612 ; iv. 3, 16, p. 636 ; iv. 4, p. 
 630; iv. 3, 4, 23, 30, p. 636; iv. 5-15, p. 632 ; iv. 
 6, pp. 343, 490 ; iv. 7, 32, p. 636 ; iv. 8, pp. 33, 
 
 496, 739 ; iv. 8-11, p. 692 ; iv. 10, pp. 636, 638, 
 703 ; iv. 10-13, p. 636 ; iv. 11, pp. 182, 739, 749 ; 
 iv. 12, p. 221 ; iv. 12-16, p. 740 ; iv. 13, pp. 606, 
 616, 638; iv. It, p. 740; iv. 15, p. 643; iv. 16, 
 pp. 414, 479, 606 ; iv. 17-v. 21, p. 637 ; iv. 17-24, 
 p. 643 ; iv. 21, pp. 630, 639 ; iv. 22, p. 633 ; iv. 
 24, p. 479 ; iv. 25-v. 2, p. 644 ; iv. 27, pp. 333, 
 651 ; iv. 29, p. 644 ; iv. 30, p. 13 ; iv. 32, p. 644; 
 v., p. 712 ; v. 3, 4, p. 466 ; v. 3, 12, p. 334 ; v. 3-17, 
 p. 645 ; v. 4, p. 694 ; v. 4, 6, p. 644 ; v. 6. pp. 387, 
 620 ; v. 7-14, 23-31, p. 6 *2 ; v. 12-15, p. 692 ; v. 14, 
 pp. 620, 739 ; v. 17, p. 636 ; v. 18, pp. 58, 636 ; v. 
 18-21, p. 645; v. 19, p. 654; v. 19,20, p. 620; v. 
 
 22, vi. 9, pp. 637, 645 ; v. 24, p. 390 ; v. 25, pp. 
 169, 487 ; v. 25-27, p. 740 ; v. 28, p. 334 ; v., 32, 
 p. 636 ; vi. 6, p. 636 ; vi 8, p. 485 ; vi. 10, pp. 
 630, 615; vi. 10-17, pp. 632, 637; vi. 10-20, p. 
 647; vi. 10-24, p. 637; vi. 11, pp. 333, 654; vi. 
 
 12, pp. 636, 701 ; vi. 13-17, p. 336 ; vi. 15, p. 
 695 ; vi. 17-18, p. 636 ; vi. 18, p. 647 ; vi. 19, pp. 
 119, 338, 636 ; vi. 19, 20, p. 591 ; vi. 20, pp. 8, 
 628 ; vi. 21, pp. 580, 631, 663 ; vi. 21-24, p. 647 ; 
 vi. 22, p. 6-15 ; vi. 24, pp. 338, 347, 636. 
 
 PHILIPPIANS i. 1, pp. 242, 580, 654, 749, 750; 
 i. 1, 2, p. 597; i. 3, 4,7, 8, 10, p. 592; i. 3-11, p. 
 597; i. 4, p. 515; i. 7, p. 592; i 10, p. 516; i. 
 11, p. 479; i. 12-18, p. 608; i. 12-26, p. 597; i. 
 
 13, p. 597 ; i. 14-20, p. 589 ; i. 15, 16, p. 597 ; i. 
 15, 17, p. 253; i. 16, pp. 452, 583; i. 18, 25, 
 p. 601; i. 19, p. 267; i. 19-26, p. 598 ; i. 19, 20, 
 
 23, 27, p. 598 ; i. 20-23, p. 3-12 ; i. 21, p. 463 ; 
 i. 23, pp. 592, 59(3, 680; i. 25, p. 516; i. 27, 
 pp. 277, 538; i. 27-30, p. 599; i. 27-ii. 16, 
 p. 597; i. 28-30, p. 285; ii. 1, pp. 599, 691; ii. 
 1-4, 599; ii. 2, 5, 17, p. 592 ; ii. 3-6, 18, p. 589 ; ii. 
 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, p. 592 ; ii. 6, pp. 496, 599, 603 ; 
 ii. 6, 9, p. 595 ; ii. 7, pp. 16, 636 ; ii. 8, pp. 502, 
 695 ; ii. 9-11, 12, 13, p. 600 ; ii. 12, 13, p. 732 ; ii. 
 14-18, p. 600; ii. 15, p. 278; ii. 16, pp. 234, 434, 
 516; ii. 17, p. 601, 683; ii. 17-30, p. 597; ii. 
 18-20, p. 260; ii. 19, pp. 328, 580; ii. 19, 20, 
 p. 194; ii. 19-23, p. 658 ; ii. 19-30, p. 601; ii. 20, 
 p. 259 ; ii. 22, p. 259 ; ii. 24, pp. 516, 591 ; ii. 25, 
 pp. 432, 580 ; ii. 26, pp. 408, 591; ii. 30, p. 182 ; 
 iii. 1, pp. 594, 601 ; iii. 1, 2, p. 597 ; iii. 2, 
 pp. 79, 273, 525, 692; iii. 2, 3, pp. 441, 695; 
 iii. 2-11, p. 602 ; iii., 2, 18, p. 509 ; iii. 3, p. 602 ; 
 iii. 3, 4, 5, 9, 19, 21, p. 592 ; iii. 3-iv. 1, p. 597 ; 
 iii, 5, pp. 3, 9, 602 ; iii. 6, p. 98 ; iii. 7, p. 463 ; 
 iii. 8, pp. 123, 273, 287; iii. 8, 9, p. 602 ; iii. 9, 
 651 ; iii. 10, pp. 617, 618, 711 ; iii. 12, pp. 101, 
 126, 277, 476, 680; iii. 12 11, p. 699; iii. 12-16, 
 pp. 277, 603; iii. 13, p. 435 ; iii. 14, pp. 277, 481, 
 699 ; iii. 14, 15, p. 592 ; iii. 17-iv. 1, p. 603 ; iii. 
 
 18, p. 752; iii. 19, p. 346 ; iii. 20, p. 201, 277 ; iii. 
 21, pp. 599, 603 ; iv. 2, p. 277 ; iv. 2, 3, pp. 597, 
 603 ; iv. 3, pp. 45, 277, 333, 603, 617, 696, 741 ; 
 iv. 4, p. 601 ; iv. 4-9, pp. 597, 604 ; iv. 5, p. 48 ; 
 iv. 6, p. 652 ; iv. 8, pp. 305, 604, 618, 694 ; iv. 
 8, 1C, p. 604 ; iv. 10, pp. 181, 276, 288, 476 ; iv. 
 10-20, p. 601 ; iv. 11, p. 657 ; iv. 11, 12, p. 288 ; 
 iv. 11-13, p. 657 ; iv. 11-18, p. 303 ; iv. 12, p. 507 ; 
 iv. 15, pp. 238, 318 ; iv. 15, 16, p. 287 ; iv. 16, 
 p. 276 ; iv. 18, pp. 580, 604; iv. 20, p. 652 ; iv. 
 21-23, p. 597; iv. 23 p. 338. 
 
 COLOSSIANS i. 1, p. 580; i. 1, 2, p. 615; t 2, 
 6, 7, 9-14, 10, p. 615 ; i. 38, p. 615 ; i. 4, p. 330 ; 
 i. -1, 6, 7, p. 202 ; i. 4, 6, 9, p. 6*7 ; i. 5, p. 245 ; 
 i. 6, 23, p. 739; i. 7, pp. 366, 581 ; i. 7, 9-14, p. 
 615 ; i. 8, 9, p. 636 ; i. 9-13, p. 615 ; i. 11, p. 15 j 
 i. 13-ii. 3, p. 615; i. 14, p. 739; i. 15, p. 496; 
 i. 15-18, pp. 612, 616; i. 15-23, p. 617 ; i. 16, pp. 
 616, 701 ; i. 16, 17, pp. 495, 751 ; i. 18, p. 479 ; i. 
 
 19, pp. 603, 016, 633, 636, 638; i. 19, 20-22, p. 616 j
 
 780 
 
 PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 i. 20, p. 114; i. 20, 22, pp. 610, 639 ; i. 20, 21-23, 
 p. 617 ; i. 21, p. 617 ; i. 24, p. 711 ; i. 24-29, p. 617; 
 i. 25, p. 118 ; i. 26, p. 610 ; i. 27, pp. 617, 633 ; i. 
 29, p. 617; ii. 1, pp. 282, 607, 617; ii. 1-7, p. 618; 
 " 2, pp. 515, "" 
 
 2, pp. 515, 617 ; ii. 4-iii. 4, p. 615 ; ii. 6, pp. 
 620, 692, 733 ; ii. 6-9, p. 616 ; ii. 7, p. 618 ; ii. 
 7-10, p. 618; ii. 8, pp. 439, 618; ii. 8, 18, p. 751; 
 ii. 8, 16-19, p. 728 ; ii. 9, pp. 496, 60(1, 616, 636 ; 
 ii. 11, pp. 602, 609, 618, 620, 633 ; ii. 11-15, p. 
 619 ; ii. 12, p. 679 ; ii. 14, pp. 237, 412 ; ii. 15, pp. 
 700, 701 ; ii. 15, 18, pp. 652 ; ii. 16, pp. 25, 439, 
 513, 608 ; ii. 16-23, p. 619 ; ii. 17, p. 151 ; ii. 18, 
 pp. 16, 387, 406, 599; ii. 19, pp. 414, 606; 
 ii. 21, p. 632; ii. 23, p. 619; ii. 23, p. 273; 
 iii. 1, pp. 115, 612; iii. 1-8, &c., p. 633; iii. 
 1-17, p. 620 ; iii. 3, p. 479 ; iii. 4, p. 479 ; iii. 5, p. 
 389; iii. 5-17, p. 615; iii., p. 387; iii. 6, 11, p. 
 620; iii. 9, p. 633; iii. 10, 479; iii. 11, pp. 
 468, 739; iii. 12, p. 599; iii. 16, p. 615; 
 iii. 18-25, p. 620; iii. 18-iv. 6, p. 615; iii. 
 22, pp. 390, 657; iii. 24, p. 493; 'iii. 24, 25, p. 
 485 ; iv. 1-6, p. 621 ; iv. 3, pp. 119, 338 ; iv. 3, 4. 
 p. 591 ; iv. 5, p. 245 ; iv. 6, p. 614 ; iv. 7, p. 663 ; 
 iv. 7, 10, 14, p. 580; iv. 7-18, p. 615; iv. 8, p. 
 621 ; iv. 9, 10, 12, 14, p. 581 ; iv. 10,'pp. 133, 255, 
 256, 372, 621, 670 ; iv. 10, 11, p. 450 ; iv. 10, 11, 
 
 14, p. 272; iv. 11, pp. 452, 579 ; iv. 12, p. 515 ; 
 iv. 12, 13, 15, p. 607 ; iv. 12-16, p. 366; iv. 14, p. 
 271 ; iv. 15, p. 621; iv. 16, p. 631 ; iv. 17, p. 695; 
 iv. 18, p. 338. 
 
 I. THESSALOKIANS i 1, pp. 242, CIO ; i. 1-3, 
 p. 329 ; i. 1-10, p. 330 ; i. 2-10, p. 329 ; i. 2, 3, 5, 
 6-8, p. 289; i. 6, pp. 289, 327, a30, 338, 695; i. 
 
 8, pp. 286, 330; i. 9, pp. 216, 289 ; i. 9, 10, p. 
 342 ; L 10, pp. 330, 338, 727 ; ii. 1, 2, p. 289 ; ii. 
 1-12, pp. 329, 332 ; ii. 2, pp. 280, 288 ; ii. 3, p. 
 713; ii. 3-5, p. 122; ii. 3-6, p. 289; ii. 4, pp. 
 
 332, 652 ; ii. 5, p. 331 ; ii. 5, 7, 9, p. 276 ; ii. 5, 
 
 9, 10, p. 331 ; ii. 6, p. 329 ; ii. 6, 9, p. 14 ; ii. 
 
 7, pp. 45, 331 ; ii. 7, 11, p. 193 ; ii. 8, pp. 16, 
 331 ; ii. 9, pp. 272, 285, 287, 290, 318, 338 ; ii. 
 11, p. 332 ; ii. 12, pp. 291, 338 ; ii. 13-16, p. 329 ; 
 ii. 14, p. 289 ; ii. 14-16, pp. 321, 332 ; ii. 15, p. 
 135 ; fi. 17, pp. 333, 338 ; ii. 17-iii. 10, p. 329 ; 
 ii. 17-iii. 13, p. 333 ; ii. 18, pp. 292, 294, 328, 711 ; 
 ii. 19, pp. 339, 699 ; iii. 1, pp. 194, 715 ; iii. 1- 
 
 8, p. 329 ; iii. 2, pp. 260, 312; iii. 2, 6, p. 328; 
 iii. 4, p. 289 ; iii. 4, 7, p. 315 ; iii. 5, p. 234, 333 ; 
 iii. 10, pp. 272, 332; iii. 13, p. 339; iv. 1, p. 
 (IDl; iv. 1-8, pp. 334; iv. 3, p. 3oS ; iv. 4, p. 
 33-1 ; iv. 6, pp. 334, 694 ; iv. 7, p. 334 ; iv. 9, pp. 
 694, 698; iv. 9, 10, p. 329 ; iv. 11, pp. 347, 694; 
 iv. 11, 12, p. 335 ; iv. 13, p. 459 ; iv. 13-18, pp. 
 329, 336 ; iv. 13-v. 11, p. 329 ; iv. 14, p. 336 ; iv. 
 
 15, pp. 118, 119. 339, 341 ; iv. 15-17, p. 342 ; iv. 
 
 16, pp. 33, 333, 701 ; iv. 16, 17, p. 48; iv. 17, p. 
 338, 345; iv. 17, 18, p. 733; v. 1, pp. 3:34, 336, 
 694, 698; v. 1, 2, 4, p. 336; v. 1-11, pp. 329, 
 336; v. 3, p. 45; v. 4, p. 727; v. 5, 15, 16, p. 
 338; v. 8, pp. 646, 652 ; v. 9, p. 346; v.!2,pp. 
 
 333, 442, 749 ; v. 12-15, pp. 322, 329, 337 ; v. 15, 
 pp. 337, 338; v. 16-22, p. 329; v. 23, pp. 337, 
 339 ; v. 23, 24, p. 329 ; v. 25-28, p. 329 ; v. 26, p. 
 509 ; v. 27, p. 434 ; v. 28, pp. 338, 610. 
 
 II. THESSAJ-OHIANS i. 1, p. 242; i. 1, 2, 
 344; i. 2, p. 328; i. 8-12, pp. 344, 315; 
 
 4, p. 344; i. 4, 5, p. 289; i. 5, p. 291 ; i. 9, 
 p. 344; L 11, p. 345; i. 12, p. 662; ii., pp. 
 342, 694; ii. 1, p. 333; ii. 1, 2, p. 733; ii. 
 1, 8, p. 339 ; ii. 1-12, pp. 3U, 346 ; ii. 2, 
 pp. 311, 317; ii. 3, 7, p. 694; ii. 4, 5, p. 695; 
 ii. 6, 7, pp. 291, 349 ; ii. 8, p. 48 ; ii. 13 17, pp. 
 344, 316; ii. 11, p. 119; iii. 1, p. 338; iii. 1-5, 
 p. 344 ; iii. 1-11, p. 347 ; iii. 4, 6, 10, 12, i>. 317; 
 
 E 
 
 iii. 5, p. 842 ; iii. 6, p. 515 ; iii. 6-16, p. 344 ; iii. 
 8, pp. 14, 272, 318, 331, &32 ; iii. 8-10, p. 289; 
 iii. 11, pp. 347, 695,698; iii. 12-16, p. 317; iii. 
 13, p. 484 ; iii. 16, p. 344 ; iii. 17, p. 326 ; iii. 17, 
 
 18, pp. 344, 347 ; iii. 18, p. 338. 
 
 I. TIMOTHY i. 1, pp. 662, 748; i. 1, 2, p. 650; 
 i. 2, 18, pp. 217, 259 ; i. 3, pp. 260, 516, 743, 
 750, 751 ; i. 3, 4, p. 651 ; i. 3-11, p. 650 ; i. 4, pp. 
 
 11, seq., pp. 42, 745 ; i. 12-17, p. 650 ; i. 12-20, 
 p. 652 ; i. 13, p. 98; i. 15, pp. 663, 745, 746, 747; 
 i. 16, pp. 42, 680 ; i. 17, p. 695 ; i. 18, pp. 261, 
 262 ; i. 18-20, p. 650 ; i. 19, p. 748; i. 20, pp. 401, 
 516, 678 ; ii., p. 650 ; ii. 1-7, p. 652 ; ii. 2, p. 747 ; 
 ii. 3, pp. 484, 748; ii. 3-5, p. 662 ; ii. 3-6, p. 494; 
 ii. 3, 7, p. 746 ; ii. 4, p. 494 ; ii 4-6, p. 745 ; ii. 
 5, pp. 438, 496 ; ii. 7, p. 748; ii. 8, pp. 653, 743; 
 ii. 8-15, p. 653 ; ii. 12-14, p. 751 ; ii. 14, p. 476; 
 ii. 15, pp. 390, 746; iii., pp. 75, 650, 750; iii. 1, 
 pp. 663, 747 ; iii. 1-7, pp. 654, 750 ; iii. 2, p. 246 ; 
 iii. 3, pp. 417, 539 ; iii. 6, p. 273 ; iii. 8, p. 331 ; 
 iii. 8-10, p. 654 ; iii. 8-13, p. 750 ; iii. 9, p. 748; 
 iii. 11-13, p. 654 ; iii. 14, pp. 516, 750 ; iii. 14, 15, 
 p. 746 ; iii. 14-16, p. 654 ; iii. 15, p. 750 ; iii. 16, 
 pp. 114, 115, 620, 745, 747 ; iv., p. 650 ; iv. 1, 2, 
 p. 346 ; iv. 1-3, p. 728 ; iv. 1-6, 10, 21, p. 748 ; iv. 
 1-16, p. 655 ; iv. 2, pp. 273, 752 ; iv. 3, pp. 46, 
 694 ; iv. 4, p. 751 ; iv. 7, p. 747 ; iv. 7, 8, p. 484 ; 
 iv. 8, p. 273 ; iv. 9, p. 747 ; iv. 10, p. 748 ; iv. 12, 
 pp. 260, 262 ; iv. 12-20, p. 516; iv. 14, pp. 261, 
 262, 652, 749 ; v. 1, 2, p. 650; v. 1-16, p. 656 ; v. 
 3-16, p. 650 ; v. 5, p. 272 ; v. 6, p. 604; v. 11-14, 
 p. 750 ; v. 13, p. 695 ; v. 14, p. 46, 390, 653 ; v. 
 17 19, p. 750; v. 17-23, p. 657 ; v. 17-25, p. 6'0 ; 
 v. 22, p. 749 ; v. 21, p. 662 ; v. 23, pp. 273, 746 ; 
 v. 24, p. 91 ; vi., p. 650 ; vi. 1, p. 748 ; vi. 1, 2, 
 p. 747 ; vi. 1-16, p. 658 ; vi. 2, p. 390 ; vi. 3, p. 273 ; 
 vi. 3, 4, p. 747 ; vi. 4, p. 273 ; vi. 11, p. 747 ; vi. 12, 
 pp. 261, 699 ; vi. .13, pp. 347, 662 ; vi. 14-16, p. 
 108 ; vi. 15, 16, p. 620 ; vi. 17-19, p. 658 ; vi. 19, 
 pp. 654, 746 ; vi. 20, pp. 743, 717, 751 ; vi. 21, p. 
 338. 
 
 II. TIMOTHY i. 1-5, p. 677 ; i. 6, pp. 261, 262, 
 655 ; i. 6-12, p. 677 ; i. 9, p. 7-15 ; i. 10, p. 495 ; 
 i. 11, 15 seq., p. 745; i. 13, pp. 644, 747, 749 ; i. 
 13,14, p. 677 ; i. 15, pp. 669, 728 ; i. 15-18, p. 678 ; 
 i. 16, 17, p. 670 ; i. 18, p. 667 ; ii., p. 13 ; ii. 1, 
 p. 217 ; ii. 1-6, 7, p. 678 ; ii. 1-8, p. 680 ; ii. 2, p. 
 259 ; ii. 3, p. 600 ; ii. 5, p. 699 ; ii. 7-13, p. 678 ; 
 ii. 8, p. 119 ; ii. 10, p. 169 ; ii. 11, pp. 663, 747 ; 
 ii. 11-13, pp. 620-745 ; ii. 14, p. 678; ii. 14-26, p. 
 679 ; ii. 16, pp. 680, 747 ; ii. 17, pp. 273, 652, 752 ; 
 ii. 18, p. 751; ii. 19, pp. 10, 470; ii. 21, pp. 491, 
 494, 679, 747 ; ii. 22, p. 260 ; ii. 24, pp. 331, 420 ; 
 iii. 1, p. 666 ; iii. 1-7, pp. 613, 752 ; iii. 1-9, p. 
 728; iii. 1-17, p. 6SO ; iii. 2, p. 466; iii. 2-5, 10, 
 11, p. 695 ; iii. 5, 12, p. 747; fii. 6, pp. 600, 751 ; 
 iii. 8, pp. 198, 701 ; iii. 10, p. 259; iii. 11, p.). 
 217, 221, 259 ; iii. 13, pp. 198, 365, 680 ; iii. 16, 
 pp. 28, 663; iv. 1-8, p. 680; iv. 2, pp. 235, 680; 
 iv. 3, pp. 273, 747 ; iv. 6, p. 731; iv. 6 seq., p. 
 745 ; iv. 6-8, p. 592 ; iv. 7, pp. 208, 515, 652 ; iv. 
 8, pp. 493, 699 ; iv. 9, p. 750 : iv. 9, 13, p. 260 ; 
 iv. 9-21, pp. 676, 750 ; iv. 9-22, p. 681 ; iv. 10, 
 pp. 420, 621 ; iv. 10-11, p. 581 ; iv. 11, pp. 194, 
 255, 256, 271, 512 ; iv. 12, p. 422; iv. 13, pp. 21, 
 270; iv. 14, p. 652; iv. 16, pp. 92, 450, 670, 715 ; 
 iv. 16-17, p. 742 ; iv. 17, pp. 373, 672 ; iv. 19, pp. 
 317,352,450,670; iv. 20, pp. 369,423; iv. 21, 
 p. 450 ; iv. 22, pp. 338, 658. 
 
 TITUS i. 1, pp. 279, 747 ; i. 3, p. 748 ; i. 4, p. 
 660 ; i. 5, pp. 285, 750; i. 6-7, p. 750; i. 5-9 p.
 
 QUOTED OR REFERRED T. 
 
 781 
 
 CGI ; i. 6, p. 655 ; 1. 7, pp. 331, 417, 539 ; i. 9, 13, 
 p. 747 ; i. 10, p. 747 ; i. 10, 14, pp. 743, 752 ; i. 
 10-16, p. 662 ; i. 11, 15, 16, p. 752 ; i. 12, p. 696 ; 
 i. 13, p. 419 ; i. 15, p. 745 ; ii. 1, 8, p. 747 ; ii. 3, 
 p. 662 ; ii. 3-5, p. 6(52; ii. 9, p. 747 ; ii. 10, 748 ; 
 u. 11, pp. 494, 745 ; ii. 11-14, p. 662 ; ii. 12, p. 
 747 ; ii. 13, pp. 203, 638, 748 ; ii. 14, p. 484 ; iii. 
 3, pp. 305, 745 ; iii. 3-7, p. 732; iii. 5, p. 748; 
 iii 5-7, p. 663 ; iii. 8, p. 484 ; iii. 9, pp. 743, 
 747, 752 ; iii. 12, pp. 668, 750 ; iii. 13, 14, p. 
 362; iii. 15, pp. 338,658. 
 
 PHILEMON 1, 2, p. 607; 1, 24, p. 580 ; 2, p. 
 600; 5, 9, p. 628 ; 9, p. 7 ; 10, pp. 193, 581 ; 10, 
 12, p. 626 ; 11, pp. 629, 695, 698; 11, 18, p. 694; 
 11, 20, pp. 629, 695; 12, p. 733; 13, p. 627 ; 19, 
 pp. 334,415, 694; 22, pp. 578, 591,648; 23, p. 
 621 ; 24, pp. 256, 271, 288, 372, 581, 670 ; 25, p. 
 338. 
 
 HEBREWS i. 3, p. 638 ; i. 13, p. 85 ; ii. 2, p. 
 92; ii. 8. p. 468; ii. 8, 14. p. 495; iii. 1, p. 188; 
 iii. 4, p. 334; v. 8, p. 695; v. 14, pp. 337, 469; 
 vi. 4-6, p. 362 ; vii. p. 392 ; vii 9, 10, p. 477 ; 
 vii. 18, p. 2 ; viii 13, p. 154 ; is. 5, p. 151 ; ix. 
 25, p. 473 ; x 1, p. 151 ; x. 5, p. 490 ; x. 24, p. 254 ; 
 x. 25, pp. 345, 513 ; x. 33, p. 698 ; x. 37, p. 48; 
 x. 38, p. 29; x. 39, p. 346; xi. 1, p. 463; xii. 
 1, p. 619 ; xii. 2, p. 464 ; xii. 4, p. 99 ; xiii. 21, p. 
 267 ; xiii. 23, pp. 654, 685 ; xiii. 25, p. 347. 
 
 JAMES i. 1, pp. 65, 66, 243, 638 ; i. 4, p. 337 ; 
 i. 6, p. 695; i. 11, pp. 396, 497 ; i. 17, p. 395 ; i. 
 25, pp. 240, 425 ; ii. 5, p. 636 ; ii. 7, pp. 169, 240 ; 
 
 11. 10, p. 482 ; U. 12, p. 240 ; ii. 17, 24, p. 484 ; ii. 
 24, pp. 132, 474 ; iv. 4-13, p. 469 ; iv. 15, p. 352; 
 v. 1-6, p. 469 ; v. 8, p. 48 ; v. 8, 9, p. 342 ; v. 12, 
 p. 409. 
 
 I. PETER i. 1, pp. 66, 255, 269, 317 ; i. 3, 
 p. 740; i. 3, 4, p. 47 ; i.5, 7,p. 740; i. 10, 11,484; i. 
 
 12, p. 656; i. 14, p. 740; i. 20, p. 740; ii. 2, 
 p. 119 ; ii. 3, p. 169 ; ii. 4-8, p. 1 ; ii. 5, p. 479 ; 
 
 ii. 9, p. 740; ii. 11, p. 740 ; ii. 1C, p. 441 ; ii 16, 
 17, p. 252; ii. 21 seq., p. 42 ; ii. 24, p. 252 ; iii. 
 4, p. 489 ; iii. 7, pp. 334, 740 ; iii. 18 seq., p. 42 ; 
 iv. 5, p. 48; iv. 7, p. 342 ; iv. 11, pp. 433, 654; 
 iv. 13, 14, p. 476 ; iv. 16, pp. 168, 170 ; v. 2, p. 
 750 ; v. 5, p. 619 ; v. 8, p. 672 ; v. 10, p. 740; 
 v. 12, pp. 242, 256 ; v. 13, pp. 255, 256, 448; v. 
 14, pp. 337, 509. 
 
 II. PETEB i. 1, pp. 241, 662 ; i. 5, p. 267 ; i. 
 
 10, 11, p. 484 ; ii. 1, p. 225 ; ii. 1, 2, p. 728 ; ii. 
 4, p. 701; ii. 10, p. 540; ii. 22, p. 154; iii. 3, 
 p. 728 ; iii. 7, p. 204 ; iii. 9, p. 494 ; iii. 15, p. 
 252 ; iii. 16, pp. 339, 488. 
 
 I. JOHN i. 1, pp.42, 172, 479 ; ii 18, p. 342 ; 
 
 11. 19, p. 516; ii. 22, p. 382; ii. 24, p. 479 ; iv. 
 1-3, p. 382 ; iv. 2, 3, p. 643 ; iv. 3, pp. 350, 728 ; 
 iv. 10, p. 473 ; v. 4, p. 491 ; v. 12, p. 479 ; v. 19, 
 p. 646; v. 20, pp. 330, 479. 
 
 II. JOHN i. 1, p. 623. 
 IIL JOHN, 9, p. 338. 
 
 JUDE 4, pp. 266, 436, 662; 6, 14, p. 701; 
 8, p. 613 ; 9, pp. 159, 336 ; 13, p. 466 ; 14, p. 
 333. 
 
 REVELATION i. 13, p. 93; i.-iii. p. 263 ; ii. 2, 
 6, 9, 14, 15, 20, 34. p. 723 ; ii. 5, p. 375 ; ii. 6, p. 
 131, 516 ; ii. 6, 15, p. 75 ; ii. 9, p. 79 ; ii. 14, p. 
 379; ii. It, 20-22, p. 613 ; ii. 20, p. 131 ; ii. 24, 
 pp. 243, 386 ; iii. 9, pp. 79, 131, 723 ; iii. 14, p. 
 607, 612 ; iii. 15, p. 621 ; iii. 21, p. 612 ; iv. 3, p. 
 110 ; v. 9, p. 724 ; vi. 1, p. 57 ; vii. 9, p. 72 1 ; 
 vii 15, p. 79 ; ix. 17, p. 110 ; xi. 19, p. 79 ; xiii, 
 p. 728 ; xiii. 18, p. 349 ; xiv. 4, p. 45 ; xiv. 13, p. 
 94; xiv. 14, p. 93; xv. 3, p. 620; xvii 6, p. 
 535 ; xvii. 10, 11, p. 727 ; xviii. 12, 13, p. 355 ; 
 xviii. 13, p. 625; xix. 1-4, p. 645; xix. 10, p. 
 4; xix. 20, p. 198; xxi. 4, p. 494; xxi. 5, p. 651; 
 xxi 11, p. 600 ; xxi. 14, pp. 1, 679 ; xxii. 3, p. 
 494 ; xxii. 6, p. 651 ; xxii. 15, p. 601 ; xxii. 20, 
 p. 342. 
 
 TiLE EM3X
 
 PKISTED BT 
 
 & COMPAKT, LIMITED, LA Bzt.i.a SAUYAGB, 
 LOHDOB, E.G. 
 
 50.998
 
 THE 
 
 QUIVER 
 
 WHAT IT Is 
 
 AND 
 
 WHAT IT HAS 
 DONE.
 
 is "THE QUIVER"? 
 
 QUIVER is A Popular Magazine contain- 
 ing attractive and suitable reading for Sunday 
 and Every Day in the Christian Household. The 
 aim of the Editor is to provide Sermon Papers, com- 
 bining sound doctrine with enlightened and forcible 
 teaching ; Narratives of the great Philanthropic and 
 Missionary movements of the day; Stories, serial and 
 complete, intended to instruct as well as to entertain, 
 by inculcating higher views of life, and applying Chris- 
 tian principles to the daily incidents of the home ; 
 Sacred Music, for the Church and the Family ; Scrip- 
 ture Lessons, for the use of Parents and Sunday-school 
 Teachers; Parables, Addresses, and Stories for Children; 
 and numerous notes and anecdotes under the head of 
 Short Arrows, descriptive of good words said and good 
 work done in all fields, at home and abroad. It is, in 
 fact, as has been often said, A Library in Itself. 
 
 But The Quiver is more than this : it is A Philan- 
 thropic Institution. Its vast body of Readers form a 
 magnificent Society for Philanthropic purposes. More 
 than twenty years ago this great society of Quiver 
 Readers subscribed their hundreds of pounds to the 
 Lancashire Famine Relief Fund ; some years later the 
 Indian Famine Relief Fund received more than a
 
 thousand pounds from what the Lord Mayor of 
 London termed "That inexhaustible Quiver." Four 
 Lifeboats have been given to the Royal National 
 Lifeboat Institution ; a " Quiver Cot " has been given 
 to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond 
 Street, London ; a new wing was added to the 
 Orphan Home at Ham Common; the "Quiver 
 Medal " adorns the breast of many a hero who has 
 saved another's life, at the risk of his own, from perils 
 by land and water ; an Order of Honourable Service, 
 now numbering over 3,000 members, was founded (with 
 H.R.H. Princess Christian as Patron), for the recogni- 
 tion of long and faithful domestic service. The Quiver 
 League of Christian Compassion was instituted, in con- 
 nection with which Prizes, Medals, and Certificates ol 
 Honour were awarded to the members ; whilst the latest 
 development is a Roll of Honour for Sunday-school 
 Teachers. Under this scheme a special medal has been 
 struck and is awarded to all Sunday-school workers of 
 over twenty years' standing, and to the worker with the 
 longest record in each county is presented a Silver 
 Medal and a handsome Bible. 
 
 Many other instances might be mentioned, but 
 enough has been said to establish the fact that this 
 is no mere Magazine, but an Institution. And we 
 may confidently anticipate for The Quiver a long- 
 continued and still more widely extended career of 
 usefulness. 
 
 THE EDITOR. 
 
 26*
 
 QUIVER 
 
 For SUNDAY AND GENERAL READING. 
 Monthly, 6d. 
 
 NOTICE. The Yearly Volume of THE QUIVER, con- 
 taining about 1,000 Quarto Pages, with several 
 hundred Illustrations and Coloured Picture for 
 Frontispiece, is published, Strongly Bound in Cloth, 
 price 7$. 6d. 
 
 SOME OPINIONS OP THE PRESS. 
 
 "THE QUIVER contains a rich variety of matter, 
 religious and secular. It is unquestionably ahead of its 
 contemporaries in its illustrations." The Times. 
 
 " THE QUIVER appears in a new and enlarged form." 
 Guardian. 
 
 " The subjects are well varied, the illustrations are 
 many and good. The devotional or expository papers 
 are thoroughly Scriptural." Record. 
 
 " THE QUIVER is an amazing sizpennyworth ; the 
 illustrations are so good and the style is so fresh and 
 attractive, combining solid instruction with much that is 
 entertaining and bright." The Rock. 
 
 " There is no help for it. Without withdrawing one 
 word written in praise of the other sixpenny magazines 
 of this kind, we are bound to say that THE QUIVER, 
 alike for quality and quantity, for variety of literature, 
 and for charm of illustration, stands at the top of the 
 poll." Methodist Times. 
 
 " THE QUIVER continues to march with the times, 
 and takes constant advantage of the many fresh pro- 
 cesses which lend added interest and attractiveness to 
 our magazine illustrations. There is an abundance of 
 welcome matter, both literary and pictorial, in these 
 pages." Daily Telegraph.
 
 "The Quiuer" Press Opinions (continued). 
 
 "This magazine has distanced all its sixpenny 
 competitors." Methodist Recorder, 
 
 "The new volume of THE QUIVER holds its own 
 against any of its predecessors, if, indeed, it may not be 
 said to have shot a long way ahead." Christian World. 
 
 "THE QUIVER volume is a veritable storehouse of 
 stories, records of Christian and philanthropic work, and 
 direct Gospel teaching, beside a miscellaneous collection 
 of subjects of general interest gathered under the title 
 of ' Short Arrows.' " Sword and Trowel. 
 
 "An excellent gift-book for the family circle," 
 Glasgow Herald. 
 
 "A right royal book for the home is the annual 
 volume of THE QUIVER. There is not a dull page 
 from first to last ; there is a fine blend of the instruc- 
 tive and the entertaining, whilst in it all there is a high 
 moral purpose which binds the variety into unity. 
 Every imaginable taste in reading seems here met, 
 and with an up-to-date chattiness that will arrest at- 
 tention and maintain the interest to the end." Word 
 and Work. 
 
 "THE QUIVER well maintains its high reputation." 
 Bradford Observer. 
 
 " This is a remarkably cheap production, and should 
 be in great demand among those who desire to dis- 
 seminate wholesome literature. The volume contains 
 960 pages of letterpress by eminent divines and popular 
 authors, about 600 original illustrations by the leading 
 artists of the day, five complete serials, and about 40 
 short stories, and numerous papers on Christian life and 
 work in all fields, in addition to twelve new and original 
 hymn tunes by the most popular composers of sacred 
 airs. Such a work would be an invaluable addition 
 to any library, especially those in connection with 
 schools." Western Daily Mercury.
 
 The Quiver" Press Opinions (continued}. 
 
 " Among all the ' Monthlies ' none even approach 
 in importance to ' The Quiver.' Its stories are always 
 of the highest order, the articles are ever fresh and 
 instructive, and the illustrations by leading artists." 
 Christian Union. 
 
 "THE QUIVER is a library in itself of instructive, 
 attractive, and profitable reading." Christian. 
 
 " A veritable gold-mine to those who are partial to 
 quiet, instructive, and religious reading." The Queen. 
 
 " It is a joy to have such a magazine in one's hands. " 
 Sword and Trowel. 
 
 " We know of nothing to compare with THE QUIVER 
 among the religious monthlies." Church Sunday School 
 Magazine. 
 
 "There are several complete stories in 'The 
 Quiver ' better worth a guinea and a half than many 
 for which that sum is charged; and there is a mass 
 of varied reading of the highest possible character." 
 Sunday School Times. 
 
 " THE QUIVER continues month after month to keep 
 up the high standard of excellence, both of its light and 
 serious articles. The sermons are generally sensible, 
 practical, and liberal, and the tales are really well 
 written. The illustrations are still a feature deserving 
 a word of praise." Scotsman. 
 
 " The publishers of THE QUIVER give better value 
 for the sixpences nearly every month. In no depart- 
 ment is the improvement more noticeable than that of 
 the illustrations, which come out on the fine paper on 
 which the magazine is printed in excellent style. The 
 variety of the contents is also more than maintained, 
 and altogether this old-established periodical for Sunday 
 and general reading is a long way ahead of any of its 
 rivals." Nottingham Express. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London ; and all Booksellers.
 
 A PEW OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO 
 
 The Quiver. 
 
 THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF 
 
 ARMAGH. 
 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF RIPON. 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF SODOR 
 
 AND MAN. 
 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF DERRY. 
 THE VERY REV. THE DEAN 
 
 OF CANTERBURY. 
 THE VERY REV. THE DEAN 
 
 OF GLOUCESTER. 
 THE VERY REV. THE DEAN 
 
 OF WINDSOR. 
 THE VERY REV. THE DEAN 
 
 OF NORWICH. 
 THE VERY REV. A. K. H. BOYD, 
 
 D.D. 
 THE REV. ALEXANDER 
 
 MACLAREN, D.D. 
 THE REV. JOSEPH PARKER, 
 
 D.D. 
 PROF. W. GARDEN BLAIKIE. 
 
 D.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E. 
 THE REV. THOMAS SPUR- 
 
 GEON. 
 
 THE REV. H. S. LUNN, M.D. 
 ARCHDEACON SINCLAIR, D.D. 
 THE REV. HUGH MACMILLAN, 
 
 D.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E. 
 CANON McCORMICK, D.D. 
 THE REV. C. A. BERRY, D.D. 
 THE REV. G. F. PENTECOST, 
 
 D.D. 
 
 THE REV. R. F. HORTON, 
 
 D.D. 
 
 THE REV. R. GLOVER, D.D. 
 THE REV. W. J. DAWSON. 
 THE REV. G. S. BARRETT, D.D. 
 THE REV. A. R. BUCKLAND. 
 THE REV. W. W. TULLOCH, 
 
 D.D. 
 
 THE REV. SILVESTER HORNE. 
 THE REV. GUINNESS ROGERS, 
 
 D.D. 
 
 THE DUKE OF FIFE. 
 SIR LEWIS MORRIS. 
 LORD COMPTON. 
 SIR GEORGE WILLIAMS. 
 LORD KINNAIRD. 
 
 MISS EVELYN EVERETT 
 GREEN. 
 
 L. T. MEADE. 
 
 MRS. E. S. CURRY, Author of 
 
 " Miss Gayle of Lescough." 
 HIS HONOUR JUDGE COLLIER. 
 F. MORELL HOLMES. 
 
 THE AUTHOR of " How to be 
 Happy Though Married." 
 
 MABEL E. WOOTTON, 
 
 SYDNEY C. GRIER, Author of 
 " Richard Jenkins, Master." 
 
 ALAN ST. AUBYN, Author of " A 
 Fellow of Trinity," etc. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Lttdgate Hill, London.
 
 A List of 
 
 ~-j Works Suitable for 
 i| f ;;| ;;. . Students of the f ^ 
 Bible, Teachers, and others 
 L " Interested in Bible 
 Reading.
 
 COMPLETION OF 
 
 Sacred Art. 
 
 The Bible Story pictured by eminent modern painters. Edited 
 by A. G. TEMPLE, F.S.A., the Director of the Art Gallery 
 of the Corporation of London. With nearly 200 full-page 
 Illustrations, beautifully printed on plate paper, and de- 
 scriptive text. Large 4to, 95. 
 
 This work has been designed for the purpose of interpreting the Scriptures, 
 from Genesis to Revelation, by the medium of such Works of Art as have 
 occupied the prominent painters of our time. It has been the endeavour of 
 the publishers to present in its pages the most complete collection of modern 
 pictures illustrating the sacred narrative ever brought together. The artists 
 whose pictures have been reproduced include the greatest painters of the 
 British school as well as those of eminence in Europe and America. 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York &> Melbourne. 
 
 WORKS EDITED BY BISHOP ELLICOTT. 
 
 Commentary, The Old Testament. Edited by Bishop 
 
 ELLICOTT. In Small Vols., suitable for School and 
 General Use. 
 
 VOL. I. Genesis. 33, 6d. I VOL. III. Leviticus. 33. 
 
 VOL. II. Exodus. 33. | VOL. IV. Numbers. 2s. 6d. 
 
 VOL. V. Deuteronomy. 23. 6d. 
 
 Commentary, The New Testament. Edited by Bishop 
 
 ELLICOTT. In Small Vols., suitable for School and 
 General Use. 
 
 VOL. I. St. Matthew. 33. 6d. 
 VOL. II. St. Mark. 33. 
 
 Vni I St Luhe is Vo1 " IX> ~~ Colossians, Thessa- 
 
 VOL. III. 6t. Luhe. 33. 6d. lonians, and Timothy. 33. 
 
 VOL. IV. St. John. 33. 6d. 
 
 VOL. V.The Acts of the 
 Apostles. 33. 6d. 
 
 VOL. VI. Romans. 2s. 6d. 
 VOL. VII. Corinthians I. and 
 //. 3s. 
 
 VOL. VLlI.Galatians, Ephesians, 
 and Philippians. 35. 
 
 VOL. X. Titus, Philemon, He- 
 brews, and James. 33. 
 
 VOL. XI. Peter, Jude, and John. 
 33. 
 
 VOL. XII. The Revelation. 33. 
 
 VOL. XIII. An Introduction to 
 the New Testament. 2s. 6d. 
 
 Plain Introductions to the Boohs of the Old 
 Testament. 33. 6d. 
 
 Plain Introductions to the Boohs of the New 
 
 Testament, 35. 6d. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York 6* Melbourne.
 
 WORKS BY THE 
 
 Very Rev. DEAN FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S. 
 
 The Life of Christ 
 
 CHEAP EDITION, with 16 Full-page Plates, cloth gilt, 
 
 35. 6d. 
 POPULAR EDITION with 16 Full-page Plates, cloth gilt, 
 
 gilt edges, 75. 6d. 
 ILLUSTRATED EDITION, large 4to, cloth, 75. 6d. ; cloth, 
 
 full gilt, gilt edges, IDS 6d. 
 LIBRARY EDITION (33^ Edition), Two Vols., demy 
 
 8vo, cloth, 243. ; morocco, 423. 
 
 The Life and Work of St. Paul. 
 
 CHEAP EDITION, with 16 Full-page Plates, cloth gilt, 
 
 35. 6d. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 410 EDITION, cloth, 73. 6d. 
 POPULAR EDITION, cloth, gilt edges, 73. 6d. ; tree-calf, 
 
 i5 s - 
 ILLUSTRATED EDITION (original Edition). i is. ; 
 
 morocco, 2 23. 
 LIBRARY EDITION (zoth Thousand}. In Two Vols., cloth, 
 
 243. ; morocco, 423. 
 
 The Early Days of Christianity, 
 
 CHEAP EDITION, cloth gilt, 33. 6d. 
 
 POPULAR EDITION. Cloth, gilt edges, 73. 6d. ; tree-calf, 
 
 155. 
 LIBRARY EDITION. Ninth Thousand. Two Vols., 243. ; 
 
 morocco, 2 23. 
 
 %* The Popular Editions of the above works can be obtained in uniform 
 binding, cloth, gilt top, in cloth box, 2 is. the set. 
 
 The Three Homes. 
 
 With Eight Full-page Illustrations. New Edition. Cloth, 
 gilt edges, 6s. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, Nt*v York &> Melbourne.
 
 Popular Edition 
 
 OF 
 
 Bishop Ellicott's 
 Commentary 
 
 FOR 
 
 ENGLISH READERS. 
 
 New Testament. Popular Edition. Unabridged. Three 
 Vols., 43. each. 
 
 Old Testament. Popular Edition. Unabridged. Five 
 Vols., 45. each. 
 
 * # * Tne complete set of Eight Vols. in this Edition is 
 supplied at 303. 
 
 This work has been written by some 
 of the most eminent Biblical Scholars, 
 under the supervision of the Bishop of 
 Gloucester and Bristol. 
 
 " A greater boon to students than this Commentary 
 has never," says The Spectator, "been published in 
 England." 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York &> Meltountt.
 
 Bound in Cloth, red edges, Is. each. 
 
 " HEART CHORDS." 
 
 Consisting of Little Books by Eminent Divines, having for 
 their object the stimulating, guiding, and strengthening of 
 the Christian Life. 
 
 My Comfort in SorrOW. By HUGH MACMILLAN, D.D. 
 
 My Bible. By the Right Rev. W. BOYD CARPENTER, 
 D.D,, Lord Bishop of Ripon. 
 
 My Father. By the Right Rev. ASHTON OXENDEN, late 
 Bishop of Montreal. 
 
 My Work for God. By the Right Rev. Bishop 
 
 COTTERILL. 
 
 My Aspirations. By the Rev. G. MATHESON, D.D. 
 
 My Emotional Life. By the Rev. Prebendary CHAD- 
 WICK, D.D. 
 
 My Body. By the Rev. Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D. 
 
 My Growth in Dwine Life. By the Rev. Prebendary 
 REYNOLDS, M.A. 
 
 My SOU/. By the Rev. P. B. POWER, M.A. 
 
 My Hereafter. By the Very Rev. Dean BICKERSTETH. 
 
 % Walk With God. By the Very Rev. Dean MONT 
 
 GOMERY. 
 
 My Aids to the Diuine Life. By the very Rev. 
 
 Dean BOYLE. 
 
 My Sources of Strength. By the Rev. E. E. JEN- 
 
 KINS, M.A., Secretary of Wesleyan Missionary Society. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED. London: Paris. New York & Melbourne.
 
 BIBLES. 
 
 Bible. Popular Edition, with 200 Full-page Illus- 
 trations by GUSTAVE DORE. Cloth gilt, gilt edges, 153. ; 
 also in leather binding, price on application. 
 
 Cassell's Illustrated Family Bible, with 900 illus- 
 trations. Toned Paper Edition. Leather, gilt edges, 
 2 i os. ; best full morocco flexible, elegant, $ 153. 
 
 OaSSell's Guinea Bible. With 900 Illustrations and 
 Coloured Maps. Royal 4to, 2 is. net. Persian antique, 
 with corners and clasps, 255. net. 
 
 7776 Child's Bible. With 200 Illustrations. Demy 4 to, 
 830 pages. 150^ Thousand. Cheap Edition, 73. 6d. 
 Superior Edition, with 6 Coloured Plates, los. 6d 
 
 The Child's Life Of Christ. With about 200 Original 
 Illustrations. Cheap Edition, cloth, 73. 6d. ; or with 6 
 Coloured Plates in addition, cloth, gilt edges, zos. 6d. 
 
 New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land. 
 
 By B. T. A. EVETTS, M.A. Illustrated. Cloth, 73. 6d. 
 
 Conquests Of the CrOSS. A Record of Missionary 
 Work throughout the World. Edited by EDWIN HODDER. 
 Illustrated. Complete in Three Vols. 95. each. 
 
 The Holy Land and the Bible. By the Rev. CUN- 
 NINGHAM GEIKIE, D.D., LL.D. (Edin.). Cheap Edition, 
 with 24 Collotype Plates, 125. 6d. 
 
 The Dictionary of Religion. Edited by the Rev. 
 
 v WILLIAM BENHAM, B.D., F.S.A. Cheap Edition, IDS. 6d. 
 
 rhe Bible Student in the British Museum. By the 
 
 Rev. J. G. KITCHIN, M.A. Entirely New and Revised 
 Edition. Cloth, is. 4d. 
 
 Searchings in the Silence. By the Rev. GEORGE 
 
 MATHESON, D.D. 33. 6d. 
 
 My Life in Christ. Being Extracts from the Diary of the 
 Most Reverend JOHN ILIYTCH SERGIEFF (Father John). 
 Translated by E. E. GOULAEFF, St. Petersburg. 93. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paru, New York &> Melbourne.
 
 BIBLE BIOGRAPHIES 
 
 "Dramatic scenes, historical description^ c/wice quotations^ 
 are artistically combined with moral and spiritual lessons. 
 Numerous illustrations embellish the text." ROCK. 
 
 The Story of Joseph. 
 
 Its Lessons for To-Day. By the Rev. GEORGE BAINTON. 
 Illustrated Extra foolscap 8vo, 256 pages, is. 6d 
 
 The Story of Moses and Joshua, 
 
 By the Rev. J. TELFORD. Illustrated. Extra foolscap 
 8vo, 256 pages, is. 6d. 
 
 The Story of the Judges. 
 
 By the Rev. J. WYCLIFFE GEDGE, M.A. Illustrated. 
 Extra foolscap 8vo, 356 pages, is. 6d 
 
 The Story of Samuel and Saul. 
 
 By the Rev. D. C. TOVEY, M.A. Illustrated. Extra 
 foolscap 8vo, 256 pages, is. 6d. 
 
 The Story of Dauid. 
 
 By the Rev. JOHN WILD. Illustrated. Extra foolscap 
 8vo, 256 pages, is. 6d. 
 
 The Story of Jesus. 
 
 In Verse. Leading Incidents in the Great Biography. 
 By J. R. MACDUFF, D.D., Author of "Morning and 
 Night Watches," "Memories of Bethany," &c. Extra 
 foolscap 8vo, 128 pages. With 8 full-page Illustrations, 
 is. 6d. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York & Melbovmt.
 
 Cassell's Concise Bible Dictionary. 
 
 By the Rev. ROBERT HUNTER, LL.D., F.G.S. (Membei 
 of the Biblical Archaeological Society, &c.). Illustrated 
 with Woodcuts, 'i 2 Coloured Page Maps, and large Map 
 of Palestine in Pocket, 75. 6d. 
 
 " There is a library of information in the book which bears 
 evidence of the ransacking of almost every scholarly work that 
 throws light on any part of the Bible." jRock. 
 
 The Bible Educator. 
 
 Edited by E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D. With Illustrations, 
 Maps, &c. Four Vols., cloth, 6s. each ; or Two Double 
 Vols., ^i is. Library Edition, Two Double Vols., 243. 
 
 Price Is. each. 
 
 HELPS TO BELIEF. 
 
 A Series of Helpful Manuals on the Religious Difficulties of 
 
 the Day. 
 
 Edited by the Rev. T. TEIGNMOUTH SHORE, M.A., 
 Canon of Worcester. 
 
 The Atonement. 
 
 By WILLIAM CONNOR MAGEE, D.D., late Archbishop 
 of York. 
 
 Creation. 
 
 By the late LORD BISHOP OF CARLISLE. 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 By the Rev. CANON SHORE, M.A. 
 
 Miracles. 
 
 By the Rev. BROWNLOW MAITLAND, M.A. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York & Melltmntt.
 
 COMPLETE IN FOUR VOLUMES, GILT TOP AND HEAD-BANDED, 
 
 68, EACH. 
 
 THE 
 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 A HISTORY FOR THE PEOPLE. 
 
 BY TUB 
 
 VERY REV. H. D. M. SPENCE, D.D., 
 Dean of Gloucester. 
 
 VOL. I. THE BRITISH AND ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 VOL. II. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH. 
 
 VOL. III. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. 
 
 VOL. IV. THE ANGLICAN CHURCH. 
 
 "It will supply what is undoubtedly a real want a graphic and 
 picturesque, and yet sound and impartial, record of the English Church 
 likely to attract readers never reached by the numerous Church histories 
 already in existence. An excellent feature of the book is its illustrations, 
 which, besides representations of places and antiquities connected with the 
 story, contain many admirable imaginative pictures of notable events and 
 contemporary manners by well-known 'black-and-white* artists." The 
 Times. 
 
 "*The Church of England* is profusely and judiciously illustrated." 
 The Guardian. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London ; Paris, New York & Mtlbmrm.
 
 THE WORLD'S WORKERS. 
 
 A Series of JVew and Original Volumes by Popular Authors, 
 With Portraits printed on a Tint as Frontispiece, cloth t 
 is. each. 
 
 Richard Cobden. By R. COWING. 
 
 John Gassell. By G. HOLDEN PIKE. 
 
 Charles Haddon Spurgeon. By G. HOLDEN PIKE. 
 
 General Gordon. By the Rev. S. A. SWAINE. 
 
 Sir Henry Hauelock and Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde. By 
 E. C. PHILLIPS. 
 
 Dauid Liuingstone. By ROBERT SMILES. 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury. By HENRY FRITH. 
 
 Dr. Guthrie, Father Mathew, Elihu Burritt, Joseph Liueaey. 
 By JOHN W. KIRTON, LL.D. 
 
 George Muller and Andrew Reed. By E. R. PITMAN. 
 
 Thomas A. Edison and Samuel F. B. Morse. By Dr, 
 DENSLOW and J. MARSH PARKER. 
 
 Sir Titus Salt and George Moore. By J. BURNLEY. 
 George and Robert Stephenson. By C. L. MATEAUX. 
 Charles Dickens. By His ELDEST DAUGHTER, 
 Handel. By ELIZA CLARKE. 
 Turner the Artist By the Rev. S. A. SWAINE. 
 Abraham Lincoln. By ERNEST FOSTER. 
 Benjamin Franhlin. By E. M. TOMKINSON. 
 Dr. Arnold of Rugby. By ROSE E. SELFE. 
 
 Sarah Robinson, Agnes Weston, and Mrs. Meredith. By 
 E. M. TOMKINSON. 
 
 Florence Nightingale. Catherine Marsh, Frances Ridley 
 Hauergal, Mrs. Ranyard ("L.N.R.") By LIZZIE 
 ALLDRIDGE. 
 
 Mrs. Someruille and Mary Carpenter. By PHYLLIS BROWNE. 
 
 ** The above works can also be had Three in One Vol., cloth, 
 
 gilt edges, 35. 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, London; Paris, New York & Melbourne.
 
 The 
 
 Magazine of ART. 
 
 Monthly, 1s. 4-d* 
 
 YEARLY VOLUME. With Exquisite 
 Photogravures, about 800 Illustrations from 
 Original Drawings by the First Artists of 
 the day and from Famous Paintings, and a 
 Series of Full - page Plates. Cloth gilt, gilt 
 edges, 21s. 
 
 "The best written and best illustrated of the Art periodicals. 
 A wonderful shillingsworth." Graphic. 
 
 "THE MAGAZINE OF ART contains a very storehouse of 
 Art The illustrations are numerous; the letterpress is par- 
 ticularly good and varied, being designed to suit all tastes, 
 from the most to the least artistic. . . . Every year THE 
 MAGAZINE OF ART more surely justifies its name, both by the 
 quality of its illustrations and its letterpress." The Times. 
 
 " The exquisite beauty of the engravings in THE MAGAZINE 
 OF ART, and the excellence of the letterpress, should carry 
 the magazine into every home where Art is appreciated." 
 Standard. 
 
 " Every sort of fine or decorative art is represented in THE 
 MAGAZINE OF ART. Its literary excellence is certainly not less 
 than its artistic grace." Spectator. 
 
 "Interesting, popular, full of information. Criticism full 
 of value." Saturday Review. 
 
 " THE MAGAZINE OF ART contains better literature, it 
 seems to us, than any of the other Art periodicals." Pall 
 Mall Gazette. 
 
 %* THE MAGAZINE OF ART may be obtained by order from 
 all Booksellers ; or will be sent post free by the Publishers 
 to any part of the World for 19s. per annum. 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Ludgate Hill, London.
 
 's aazne. 
 
 Monthly, 
 
 YEARLY VOLUME. With about 1,250 Original 
 Illustrations. Cloth, 8s. Half= Yearly Volume, 
 cloth, 5s. 
 
 "CASSELL'S MAGAZINE keeps up its popularity and 
 attractiveness. The illustrations call for special approval. 
 This magazine ought to be in every household." Queen. 
 
 "The stories in CASSELL'S MAGAZINE are good, 
 the pictures are clever, the selection of subjects is strikingly 
 varied; it contains a variety of useful information, and 
 altogether a glance through the pages shows that their con- 
 tents are unusually attractive." Times. 
 
 "CASSELL'S MAGAZINE has long established its well- 
 deserved reputation as the favourite magazine." Morning 
 Post. 
 
 "CASSELL'S MAGAZINE is most assuredly the magazine 
 for the household." Civil Service Gazette. 
 
 "CASSELL'S MAGAZINE gains rather than loses in interest 
 with each succeeding year. It is a treasure for anyone to 
 possess, containing the variety of information, amusement, and 
 interest that it does." Saturday Review. 
 
 " CASSELL'S MAGAZINE consists of numerous short articles 
 on subjects of general interest, sometimes not exceeding one 
 page in length, and rarely extending over three pages. This 
 rule of brevity produces excellent results. We are glad to 
 observe also that the literary style is well maintained, and that 
 in the task of satisfying the public taste vulgarity is uniformly 
 avoided. While the varied interests of the domestic circle 
 are fairly represented, there is a marked absence both of 
 sensational and of sermonising writing which we cannot suf- 
 ficiently commend. The continuity of the monthly numbers 
 is preserved by novels of more than average merit." Academy. 
 
 *** CASSELL'S MAGAZINE can be obtained by order from all 
 Bookseller s> or will be sent post free by the Publishers to 
 any part of the World for 9s. per annum. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Ludgate Hill, London.
 
 "Little Folks" 
 
 m Magazine. 
 
 Monthly, 6d. 
 HALF-YEARLY VOLUMES, with Six 
 
 Full -page Coloured Plates, and numerous other 
 Pictures printed in Colours. Picture boards, 33. 6d.; 
 cloth gilt, gilt edges, 53. each. 
 
 " The extraordinary popularity of LITTLE FOLKS has placed 
 it beyond both rivalry and criticism. LITTLE FOLKS is at the 
 head of English illustrated magazines for children." Queen. 
 
 "The most popular of all the English magazines for the 
 young." Scotsman. 
 
 " LITTLE FOLKS is brimful of delight for little ones." Pall 
 Mall Gazette. 
 
 " A charming magazine for the little ones, adorned with 
 quaintly-novel coloured pictures, and full of pleasing tales and 
 poems." Christian. 
 
 " Everyone ought to know by this time that LITTLE FOLKS 
 is THE BEST MAGAZINE FOR CHILDREN." Graphic. 
 
 " LITTLE FOLKS is always a welcome arrival both in the 
 nursery and the school-room. It is among the very best of 
 all the numerous children's magazines that are now published. 
 Many of the woodcuts are really quite charming works of 
 art. " Academy. 
 
 "As usual, up to the highest point of excellence. We 
 know of nothing in the English language which can be placed 
 before LITTLE FOLKS. It keeps always in the front rank." 
 Sword and Trowel. 
 
 V LITTLE FOLKS may be obtained by order from all Book- 
 sellers, or will be sent post free by the Publishers to any 
 part of the World for 8s. per annum, 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Ludgate Hill, London.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 14 DAYS a*Art^le:*' Jv 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 'JAN 
 
 
 
 lars of 
 ynopsis 
 
 )rks are 
 
 o have 
 P olumes 
 :eipt of 
 
 !\NUALS 
 
 tioo of
 
 UCLA-College Library 
 
 BS 2505 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 992 802 9