There were many things to do in Corinth, on this last visit of Paul’s life to the city where he had worked so long and suffered so much. He had many things to tell them. There were many changes to make in the management of the church. There were many families to visit and all the time there were new people being added to the church. Then Paul was raising a great fund of money which he hoped to carry up to Jerusalem on his return, for the support of the church in that city. Finally he had letters to write to his other churches, advice to give them, difficulties to settle and problems to solve. Perhaps the most important thing he did during this stay in Corinth—certainly the most important for us—was to write a letter, which we now call an Epistle, to the Christians in the city of Rome. It is the longest of all Paul’s Epistles and the one in which he sets forth most carefully and fully his entire message about Christ. He had not been to Rome yet and he had not met the Christians there, but he was planning to go to Rome, after he had been to Jerusalem, on his way to Spain and he wanted to prepare the Christians in the great capital of the empire for the teaching which he expected to give them when he arrived. He little thought as he was writing this wonderful letter that when he did come to Rome he would come chained to two soldiers and that this would be the end of his journey! He told the people at Rome, in this letter, how hard he had tried as a young man to make himself perfect, how he had resolved to keep the law and be absolutely righteous, and how miserably he had failed. “When I meant to do right,” he wrote, “I did wrong. The things I wanted to do I did not do. The things I did, were just those things which I ought not to have done. And when I was defeated and beaten and hopeless then suddenly I discovered the love of God which Christ revealed to me. I found a power to live by, which delivered me from the old power of sin in my nature. Now through that love and that power I am more than conqueror. I know now that nothing can ever separate me from the love of God. Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything that has ever been made in the universe, can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

He told these unseen friends of his in the far-away city how to live the new way day by day in the difficult world. He told them not to overcome evil by doing evil in return but to overcome it by being good and by doing good. He told them not to worry, or fret, or be disturbed, when things were hard and difficult, but to keep calm and steady and full of faith in the love of God, and when they had done the best they could, to leave it all with God. They were, as far as possible, to live in peace and love with all kinds of people and no matter what others did to them, they were to go right on loving them and doing good to them.

When he had sent off his great epistle, and had done all that he could to strengthen the church in Corinth and had received a large collection for Jerusalem and had gathered his friends around him, Paul said farewell to Corinth and started on his return journey, accompanied by a number of companions. He went back through Macedonia—Beroea, Thessalonica, Philippi—and then across the Ægean to Troas where he had first heard the call to go to Europe. There must have been a church there on “the plains of windy Troy,” for Paul remained seven days and held meetings far into the night, but we do not know very much about this church by the Simois River—only that one of the young men there went to sleep while the meeting was going on and fell out of a window in the third story to the ground! Here at Troas Paul found again his old friend, the writer of the Diary—“the We Narrative”—who joined the party for the journey to Jerusalem. They went part of the way by land and part of the way by sea, stopping at Assos and Mitylene, touching at the famous island of Samos, and disembarking at Miletus. Here at Miletus, the leaders of the church at Ephesus came down to see the man whom they had learned to love, to hear his message and to say farewell to him. It was probably not safe for Paul to go to Ephesus with its beasts. There were too many dangers there for him. After all his years of work and his perils in that city it was a joy to see the men and women with whom he had lived and laboured and to have one more chance to speak to them about the highest things in life. It was a very solemn time as they gathered on the seashore and Paul told them of the troubles and dangers that lay before them and before him. He then told them that they would never see each other again. They loved him as though he had been a father to each one and they all wept as he left them to go into the ship to sail for Syria. As they went on their way Paul realised, from what he heard at every port where the ship stopped, that it would be very dangerous for him in Jerusalem. He had not been in the Holy City since the great conference there with Peter and James and John. Since that time tremendous things had happened across the world. Paul had succeeded, but the more he succeeded the more the Jews hated him. They had made trouble for him in every city. They had come to regard him as a traitor and as the enemy of their race and they were eager to get rid of him forever. He knew how they felt. He saw the danger ahead. He understood that if he went to Jerusalem it would be like going into the lion’s mouth. But he was determined to go, danger or no danger, for Paul was a hero. He had a great gift to carry up to the poor and needy Christians in Jerusalem and he must have thought that he could win them over and make them see his truth at last. He believed that this was the greatest opportunity of his life. Perhaps now, after all the wonderful work around the Ægean Sea he might be able to make his own people see the truth that had meant so much to the Greeks and to the Galatians. Perhaps now he could join both branches together—those who were Jewish Christians and those who were Gentile-Christians—and have one great world church with no division in it. It was worth trying anyhow. It was worth any kind of risk. The great gift would soften their hearts and he would plead with them, and then it would be done! When prophets on the way told Paul how dangerous the risk was, he said to them: “Do not talk to me of danger. Do not try to change my course. I am ready, not only to be bound in Jerusalem, but if necessary to die there for this cause”—and on he went, like the hero he was.

He very soon found that he was in the midst of enemies. James told him that there were many thousands of Christian-Jews who had heard serious charges against him, how he no longer kept the law of Moses and how he taught his converts that they did not need to become Jews, or to do the things which all good Jews considered necessary and he showed Paul how stern they were sure to be toward him.

He had hardly begun to live in Jerusalem when some Jews discovered him in the city. They gave a cry and raised a mob and rushed at him and seized him. They were so furious that they nearly killed him on the spot, but a Roman captain with a troop of soldiers came up just in time to rescue him and to carry him away to the military castle where the mob could not get at him. But he could hear them cry and shout: “Away with him! away with him!”