In Corinth Paul made two new friends who became very dear to him and who were able to be great helpers in his work. Their names were Aquila—a Jew from Pontus who had lived sometime in Italy—and his wife Priscilla who was a very remarkable woman. They became followers of Christ and joined with Paul in the work of spreading Christianity in the great Greek city of Corinth. Aquila and Priscilla were also tent-makers and part of the time they all worked at this trade to get money to live by. Then they gave all the rest of their time to the main business for which Paul had come to Corinth. It was a very happy group of workers for they all loved and enjoyed each other and they all loved and enjoyed their work. As Corinth was a great city close to the sea, people from all countries in the world came there. There were men of many colours and men of many languages. They had not learned how to live good and beautiful lives. Very wrong things were done in Corinth. We sometimes think that the world is wicked to-day but if we could see the way the Corinthians lived and then see how men live to-day we should discover that there has been some improvement.

For a year and a half, this little group of missionaries laboured in the city, telling about Christ and His love and His death for men and His resurrection and of His Spirit working in the hearts of men. All kinds of people were changed by the power of this message. Jews and Greeks and persons from many lands listened and rejoiced and believed and followed Christ. Paul’s old enemies, the Jews, who had heard about his past life, made all the trouble they could for him, but he had been through trouble before and he knew how to bear it now. He went straight ahead with his work and was not disturbed by the difficulties. His soul was filled with joy as he saw his little church growing larger every day. New persons kept coming and there were more all the time who were trying to live the new way. All kinds of people came in to form the new church in Corinth. A few of them were learned and well off, but most of them were poor and ignorant. They were working people who had never had any real life before, and now the whole world seemed changed for them. It was as though they had been living in a dark cave before and now they had come into the beautiful world where the bright sun was shining.

After eighteen months of this hard and happy work, Paul, with his two companions, and with his two new friends, sailed away from Corinth, leaving behind a great group of Christian men and women and children gathered into a church. We can well believe that all these people, who had found the new life, were on the shore of the harbour at Cenchrea to say “farewell” and to wave their last greetings as the missionaries pushed out to sea. They sailed in and out among the famous islands of the Ægean and across its blue waters to the eastern shore and came to Ephesus. Paul had wanted to go to Ephesus at the beginning of this long missionary journey, but he had not been able to accomplish his desire then. Now after wonderful experiences, dangers and trials and after many months of work in Europe he found himself at last in the great city of Ephesus. He knew that this was to be one of the most important fields of his entire lifework, but he still felt that the time for his work in Ephesus had not come yet. So he left Aquila and Priscilla there and went on by ship to CÆsarea and then to his beloved home church group at Antioch.

There were many things to tell as the Christian Jews and Greeks of Antioch flocked in to hear Paul recount the wonderful events of the greatest journey of his life. How the field had widened and how Christianity had spread in these eventful years since he last saw Antioch! After a short stay at Antioch, Paul went once more, and this was to be the last time, to see his dear friends in Galatia. When this visit was finished, he came over the great stretch of country which formed the ancient province of Asia to its capital, Ephesus. He had made a little beginning of work here before his return to Antioch and now he came back to finish what he had begun.

Ephesus was much larger than Corinth and it was also, like Corinth, a very wicked city. There was much to do here and much to suffer before Ephesus could be changed into a city of pure and beautiful citizens. But nothing ever discouraged Paul. He went at his great task as though he fully expected to see it done. It was like fighting beasts in the arena to work among the hard and wicked people who tried every way they could to defeat Paul and spoil his work. Steadily he fought on—gaining a little all the time—explaining to everybody who came to hear and proving that he had found a new way to live.

Right in the midst of this great work of transforming and remaking Ephesus, Paul heard very bad news from Corinth, across the Ægean. He heard that the church there was in sad trouble. The people had divided into parties and were quarrelling. Some of the people had gone wrong and were doing the kind of things they used to do when they were heathen. Paul wrote a wonderful letter to them—our First Corinthians. It was full of good advice and counsel and it showed them how to get back into the new way of living. The most wonderful thing in the letter was what Paul said to them about love. He told them, in the most beautiful words that perhaps were ever written that love was the greatest thing in the world, that when everything else failed love would not fail and when everything else vanished away love would still abide.

You would have thought this letter would have settled all their troubles but it did not. When people get wrong it is very hard setting them right again and it often takes a long time and much patience. Things went from bad to worse. Finally Paul had to leave his work in Ephesus and go across to Corinth, to see the people there in person and to straighten out their trouble. But even when he got among them, they remained stubborn and difficult, and he had to go back without getting the trouble settled. Then he sent Timothy over and he failed. It looked as though the church would fall to pieces and Paul would lose all his friends in Corinth. Then he wrote another letter, full of pleading, which he sent by his friend Titus, who was now his companion.

While he was waiting, full of anxiety, for Titus to come back with the answer from Corinth, some dreadful catastrophe happened in Ephesus. There was a great uprising in the city against Paul. It seemed for a time as though there was no hope that his life could be saved. He has told us that the sentence of death was pronounced against him—probably the sentence that he should be thrown into the arena to fight with lions. For a time there seemed no hope. But his friends Aquila and Priscilla, whom Paul sometimes calls “Prisca,” saved his life. He says that they “risked their necks” for him and that he was “delivered from death.”

This catastrophe may very likely be connected in some way with the strange event so powerfully described in the nineteenth chapter of Acts. It happened this way. There was a man in Ephesus named Demetrius. He was a silversmith and made little silver images of the goddess Diana which he sold in great numbers to the people. These images were little copies of the great statue of Diana which the Ephesians believed had fallen down from heaven, and so it was looked upon with awe and was very sacred. One of the most beautiful temples in the world—one of the seven “wonders”—had been built to Diana in Ephesus and in this temple stood the famous statue. Now Demetrius made a great deal of money selling his silver images to those who visited the temple. But suddenly he discovered that people were not buying as many of his silver Dianas as they used to do. He began to wonder what was happening and he hit upon the idea that all the trouble was caused by the preaching of Paul! Paul was calling people to Christ and when they believed in Christ, they no longer worshipped Diana. They stopped going to her temple and they did not care to have copies of the great statue. Demetrius was losing money. His business was in danger. Something must be done. He called together all the silversmiths and stirred them up to do something at once to drive Paul out of the city. “Just see,” he cried, “how our trade is going down! We are losing all our business! We are making no money! This stranger has come to our city and he has told people that gods are not made of silver and gold; that gods made by hands are no gods at all! He has carried people away with his new ideas. They won’t buy our images now. Not only is our business in danger, but our whole city will suffer as well. People will stop coming to see the great temple which all the world admired. We must act. We must save the city and defend the great goddess!” Then all the silversmiths and goldsmiths and coppersmiths and workers in iron and brass began to make processions through the city, shouting as they marched, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” The whole city was aroused. People rushed out of their houses to see what was happening and a great commotion and excitement followed. The throng pressed into the immense city theatre and everybody kept shouting, some one thing and some another, as generally happens in a vast mob of excited people. Paul tried to get into the theatre. He was, as usual, ready to face the danger and stand his ground. But his friends kept him back and would not let him risk his life in such a wild and seething and furious crowd. When any one tried to speak the mob drowned the voice of the speaker with their shouts. A man named Alexander—perhaps he was “Alexander, the coppersmith,” who, Paul says, did him “much evil,” a little later—tried to speak, when suddenly the vast throng of excited people began crying again, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” For two hours nobody could stop this cry which went on and on, with the continual shout, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” At last the town-clerk of the city got the people quiet and made a sensible speech to them, telling them if they had any charge against Paul the right thing to do was to take the matter to the courts and not to get up a riot and endanger the liberty and reputation of the city. Then he sent the people away to their homes.

How this uproar affected Paul we do not know. What danger threatened him now because of the hate of Demetrius and the silversmiths we cannot tell. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but in some way Paul escaped from the city, never to go back again. He got to Troas in safety and then crossed over the Ægean at the same place where he crossed the first time he entered Europe, and reached Macedonia where he was among his friends.

Here in Macedonia where Paul was waiting, worn and perplexed and weary—but not cast down—Titus came to him from Corinth and told him the good news that his letter to Corinth had done its work, had saved the day, and that now his church there was ready to be faithful to him. Nothing in his life ever touched his soul with more joy than did that report which Titus brought. If you wish to see how he felt, you must read the first nine chapters of Second Corinthians, for he wrote those chapters just after Titus came to him. It makes you love Paul to find how eagerly he loved his friends and his churches, and to see how much he suffered when they did wrong or turned against him. Soon after this he went to Corinth and spent three months there with his old and new friends of that city.