[55] St. Luke's informants, twenty-five years after the events, would naturally only remember the leading points, the most striking events of St. Paul's early Christian career. Few people realise how hard it is to recall the events of twenty-five years ago in anything like consecutive order. We preserve upon the whole a lively and a true impression; but till we go and consult documents, diaries, journals, etc., it is almost impossible to state the succession of events in accurate order. I was trying the other day to recall the events of my own public life twenty-five years ago anent the controversy which raged about the disestablishment of the Irish Church, into which I plunged with the vehemence of early manhood, and I failed to distinguish events which must have been separated by months and even by years. How much more easily must others have failed accurately to follow details of St. Paul's life known only to himself!

[56] Mr. Lewin, in his St. Paul, vol. i., p. 72, argues that the governor or ethnarch, as he is called by St. Paul in 2 Cor. xi. 32, was the Jewish chief magistrate of Damascus, appointed to that post by Aretas, King of Petra, who then held Damascus. The Jews were allowed by the Romans to have chief magistrates of their own wherever they lived in large colonies. At Alexandria, for instance, where they occupied a large portion of the city, the Jews were ruled by an Alabarch. Mr. Lewin shows in the same place a picture of the exact spot in the walls where St. Paul is by tradition said to have escaped.

[57] All thought about Saul and his doings may just then have been swallowed up in the national excitement about Caligula and his attempt to set up his statue in the Temple. The trouble connected with the Nazarene sect would seem to every true Jew but a small matter compared with the outrage to Jehovah threatened by the mad emperor. See more about this in the next chapter.

[58] It is expressly said in Acts ix. 26 that when Saul came to Jerusalem he tried to join himself to the disciples. They, knowing only of his record as a persecutor, were afraid of him. Then Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles.

[59] See Bishop Lightfoot's dissertation upon St. Paul's first visit to Jerusalem, and the use of the term apostle in the New Testament in his Commentary on Galatians, pp. 91-101. Cf. Volume I. of this Commentary, p. 348.

[60] We may apply this typical fact in primitive Church history in a very modern direction. It would be very well if candidates for the sacred ministry always imitated St. Paul's departure into Arabia. I have known a great many promising careers spoiled because young deacons would select a heavy, laborious town or city charge for the opening work of their ministry. They know nothing of life or the world. They know nothing of preaching or pastoral work. They have, too, all their mistakes to make, and they select the most public place for their perpetration. But this is not the worst. They form habits of busy idleness and of mental dissipation which never leave them. The first two or three years of a young clergyman's life generally determine his whole career. His life never recovers the effect of the initial movement. I think the great outcry, in the Church of England at least, against sermons largely owing to the decay of study resulting from premature activity on the part of the junior clergy. Premature development in any direction is ever followed by premature decay, and when a young priest or deacon is engaged every day and every night in the week from an early service at 8 a.m. till night-school is finished at 10 p.m. in external work, how can he prepare for teaching an educated congregation on Sundays? And surely there ought to be some little consideration for thinking men and educated women as well as for others.

[61] See Joyce's Irish Names of Places, vol. i., p. 325.

[62] I have touched upon the subject of the connexion between Syria and Egypt and Oriental monasticism on the one hand, and Gaul, England, and Ireland on the other, during the period which elapsed between A.D. 400 and 900, in Ireland and the Celtic Church, chs. ix. and xi. I have discussed it at greater length and with fuller details in two papers upon the Knowledge of Greek in Gaul and Ireland, read before the Royal Irish Academy in February 1892, now published in the Proceedings of that body; and also in two papers, one upon the Island Monasteries of Great Britain and Ireland and the other on St. Fechin of Fore, published, the former in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland for 1891, and the latter in the same Journal for April 1st, 1892.

[63] See the whole story told at length in Josephus, Antiquities, Book XVIII., ch. viii., 8, and in his Wars, Book II., ch. x. This story, which is little known to Bible students, is most interesting. It fully explains the repose from persecution which the Church enjoyed at the time of the conversion of Cornelius and helps us to fix its date. In the year 39 Petronius, the prefect of Syria, received orders from the Emperor Caligula to set up his statue as a god in the Temple. He advanced to fulfil the Emperor's command with two legions and a number of auxiliary troops, and came as far as Ptolemais, a maritime town of Galilee, which is mentioned in Acts xxi. 7 as a place where St. Paul visited a Church, of which we hear nothing else. The Jewish nation met the prefect there in tens of thousands, entreating him to desist or else to put them to immediate death. He halted his army and appointed a further conference at Tiberias, where the people met him and continued their entreaties for fifty days, though it was seed-time and a famine might result from their neglect of the spring operations. Petronius suspended his operations for the time, and wrote back to the Emperor an account of the Jewish opposition. Herod Agrippa too, who was then at Rome and in high favour with the Emperor, lent his assistance, and obtained a temporary respite for the Jews by a timely and expensive banquet which he prepared for him. Towards the close of A.D. 40 Caligula, however, determined to set out and personally compel the obedience of the Jews. But his assassination in January 41 relieved their apprehensions, and freed the world from Caligula's mad freaks. During that period of anxiety, lasting fully a year and a half, the Jews had neither time nor thought for the new sect, which was opposed as strongly as themselves to the Emperor's impious projects and whose members doubtless flung themselves as heartily into the opposition. The Jews at Alexandria suffered at the same time a terrible persecution, of which Philo and Josephus tell: see Mommsen's Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. ii., pp. 190-96 (Dickson's Translation). This is one of those incidental touches which prove the wonderful accuracy of this book of the Acts. Dr. Lightfoot has remarked (Essays on Supernatural Religion) that no book of the Bible has so many points of contact with current history and politics as the Acts, and can therefore be more easily tested. This special case is an interesting illustration of the learned bishop's view.

[64] Perhaps it is well to note that this is not the classical word Æneas, which in Greek would be represented by ???e?as, but a different name with a short e, and is written in Greek ????a?. The latter is found in Thucydides and Xenophon: see Meyer in loco.

[65] I do not intend to raise any disputed question as to Church polity and government in this book, and so I may point out, without compromising my own views in the least, that even a Presbyterian may agree in this statement, as he may hold that his own teaching elder or minister corresponds to the primitive bishop, his ruling elders to the presbyters, and his own deacons to the ancient deacons. Presbyterianism claims thus a threefold ministry as well as Episcopacy.

[66] What a fine subject for historical study the delays of the Lord would prove. The delay of the Incarnation till the world was ready is a supreme instance of them. The delay of the triumph of Christianity, of the break up of the Roman Empire, of the Reformation so often attempted but never effected till the invention of printing and the revival of learning,—these and numerous other illustrations fling light upon the darkness which still surrounds the Divine methods and dispensations amid which we live.

[67] This and several other thoughts in this chapter will be found worked out in a sermon of Bishop Jebb, a well-known preacher of the last generation who is now almost forgotten. Yet he published several volumes of sermons and other theological works, which had no small influence in laying the foundations of the Oxford movement. His sermons are full of matter, though not composed in a modern style. This cannot be wondered at when we find from his well-known correspondence with Alexander Knox that a single sermon sometimes was the work of several months, if not even years. The leisurely character of even busy lives in the opening years of this century is strikingly illustrated by the correspondence between these learned men. Bishop Jebb preached a sermon in 1804 on the well-known Vincentian rule of faith, "Quod semper, quod ubique, etc." This sermon he elaborated till 1815, and then published it. It played no small part in religious controversies between 1815 and 1840, as a reference to the Christian Observer, the Christian Examiner, and other religious periodicals of that time will show.

[68] See Ramsay's Historical Geography of Asia Minor, pp. 51, 52.

[69] The most detailed account of CÆsarea-on-the-Sea, its ruins and present state, will be found in the Memoirs of the Survey of Western Palestine, vol. ii., pp. 13-29. It is accompanied with plans and maps, which show that ancient Roman CÆsarea was ten times the size of the mediÆval city which the Crusaders occupied. Geikie's The Holy Land and the Bible, ch. iv., gives a very interesting account of the ancient and modern state of CÆsarea.

[70] See Josephus, Antiquities, XV. ix. 6; Wars of Jews, I. xxi. Mr. Lewin, in his Life of St. Paul, vol. ii., ch. iv., spends several pages in an elaborate discussion of the buildings and plan of CÆsarea, to which it must here suffice to refer.

[71] Cornelius was a centurion of the Italian band. This is another of the accidental coincidences which attest the genuineness of the Acts. The Roman army was divided into two broad divisions, the legions and the auxiliary forces. Now the legions were never permanently quartered in Palestine till the great war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem, which began in A.D. 66 and ended in A.D. 70. A legion was then for the first time stationed with a fixed camp upon the site of the Holy City: see Mommsen's Roman Provinces, ii. 218. The auxiliary forces were a kind of militia raised upon the spot. Palestine was made a province of the second rank in A.D. 6, and from that time to the year 66 was garrisoned, like all second-rank provinces, exclusively by auxiliary troops, the headquarters of which were at CÆsarea. These auxiliaries, recruited amongst the Samaritans and Syrian Greeks, numbered one ala and five cohorts, about three thousand men: see Mommsen, loc. cit., p. 186. It would not have been prudent, however, to have a garrison in Palestine exclusively composed of troops locally recruited, even though restricted to Samaritans and Syrians, just as no prudent English government would garrison Ireland with a militia drawn from Ulster Orangemen alone. The Roman Government therefore mingled with the garrison of CÆsarea an auxiliary cohort composed of Italians. There were thirty-two Italian auxiliary cohorts which were thus used as a salutary precaution against treachery on the part of the local militia. See, on this interesting point, Marquardt, L' Organisation Militaire chez les Romains, p. 189 (French Edition), where this learned German writer often quotes the Acts of the Apostles to illustrate the military arrangements in Palestine during the first sixty years of the first century. Such was the military organisation of Palestine from A.D. 6 to 66. After that period Palestine was ruled in the sternest military manner, and treated like a border province subject to martial law with legionaries scattered all over it. Now if the Acts were written in the beginning of the second century, a writer would almost certainly have missed the correct description of the troops stationed at CÆsarea as St. Luke gives it in this passage. See also the article "Exercitus" in the new edition of Smith's Dictionary of Roman and Greek Antiquities; Mommsen, on the Roman Legions, in Ephemeris Epigraphica, vol. v. and Pfitzner, Geschichte der RÖmischen Kaiserlegionen.

[72] "The Roman camps were also the best training-schools for the old-fashioned virtues of faithfulness, straightforwardness, and hardihood; and in them were to be found the best types of the old Roman character, which, as moralists complained, were to be found elsewhere no more. If the funds of a country town had fallen into disorder, or uprightness was needed for a special post, the curator chosen by the Government was often an old soldier, who had long been tried and trusted; and early Christian history throws, incidentally, a favourable light upon the moral qualities of the Roman officer. These qualities were mainly formed by thoroughness of work and discipline."—W. W. Capes, The Early Empire, p. 210.

[73] See the article on "Proselytes" in Schaft's EncyclopÆdia of Theology.

[74] I owe a great many of the devout thoughts dealing with the latter portion of this subject to a volume of sermons preached by the celebrated Golden Lecturer, the eloquent Henry Melville, styled Voices of the Christian Year. Melville is now as a preacher quite forgotten, and yet he deserves to be gratefully remembered, for he was the first of the old Evangelical school to break through the traditional repetition of commonplaces which formed the main part of the preaching of the leading popular orators of fifty years ago. From a preacher's point of view his sermons will still repay study. His sermons, for instance, on the less known characters of Scripture, will teach a young divine how to extract edification and instruction out of most unpromising materials, and to apply the essential principles of the Bible to the changed circumstances of modern life. And assuredly this is the real object of a pastor's preaching in a Christian congregation, not the mere repetition of the first elements of Christianity, but an application of its great principles, first proclaimed in the language of the East, to the actions and lives of the men of the West. Preaching of that kind need never be dull and uninteresting.

[75] The house of Simon the tanner is depicted in Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., pp. 87, 88. There is a good description of it, as also of Joppa at large, in Geikie's The Holy Land and the Bible, vol. i., p. 18, from which we take the following: "On the south side of the town, at the edge of the sea, close to the lighthouse, one is reminded of the visit of St. Peter to Joppa by the claim of a paltry mosque to occupy the house of Simon the tanner. The present building is comparatively modern, and cannot be the actual structure in which the Apostle lodged. It is, however, regarded by the Mohammedans as sacred, one of the rooms being used as a place of prayer in commemoration, we are told, of the Lord Jesus having once asked God, while here, for a meal; on which a table forthwith came down from heaven. Strange variation of the story of St. Peter's vision! The waves beat against the low wall of the courtyard, so that, like the actual house of Simon, it is close on the sea-shore. Tanning, moreover, in accordance with the unchanging character of the East, is still extensively carried on in this part of the town."

[76] This is the rendering of Psalm lv. 18 according to the version in the Book of Common Prayer.

[77] A deceased friend of mine, a well-known member of the Society of Friends, once remarked to me about this very point that his Society, to which he belonged to his dying day, while aiming at the highest spirituality, in its neglect of all rules, and suitable therefore for persons of specially exalted tone, had rendered itself unfitted for the training of children. Children cannot be trained without rules, and a society which trusts to educate them in things religious without fixed and definite training must be a hopeless failure. The original principles of "Friends" preclude them from teaching children forms of private prayer, from using fixed Bible reading and regular religious instruction, as well as from stated family worship. Efforts have been made in later times to remedy this effect, but they are merely confessions of the failure of the principles inculcated by George Fox and Robert Barclay and acknowledgments that the Church from which they dissented was right.

[78] Tertullian's treatise on Prayer will be found in Clark's translation of his works, vol. i., pp. 178-204.

[79] Calvin, in his commentary on Acts x. 12, has some excellent remarks on the scope and meaning of this vision. "I think that hereby is shown to Peter that the distinction which God hitherto made had now been removed. For as He had made a difference between animals; so by the choice of one nation for Himself, God showed that other nations were common and unclean. Now the distinction between animals being removed, He consequently shows that there is no longer any difference between men, and that the Jew does not differ from the Greek. Hence Peter is warned not to shrink from contact with the Gentiles as if they were unclean. There is no doubt but that God wished to encourage Peter to come boldly to Cornelius. Therefore, in order that he might be perfectly satisfied, God shows him as in a picture that the distinctions made by the law between clean and unclean had been abolished; whence he may conclude that the partition which had hitherto divided Jews from Gentiles was now overthrown. Now Paul teaches that this mystery had been hid from the ages that the Gentiles should be partakers with God's people and grafted into one body. Therefore Peter never would have dared to open the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, unless God Himself had shown him that the wall had been removed and that entrance was free to all." He then goes on to consider the objection that St. Peter must have known of the call of the Gentiles from the words of Christ's commission to go and make disciples of all nations, and therefore this vision was unnecessary. "I answer that there was so much difficulty in the novelty of the whole state of affairs that the apostles could not at once grasp the position. They knew indeed in theory the prophecies and the precept of Christ about preaching to the Gentiles, but when they came to practice, struck by the awful novelty, they hesitated. Wherefore it is not wonderful that the Lord should confirm St. Peter's mind by a new sign." Calvin clearly recognised that the inspiration enjoyed by St. Peter did not remove his natural slowness of perception. The apostles were like the bulk of ordinary men, very slow to grasp the full meaning of a novel position or principle.

[80] The aim of Christianity was to strike at the essential evil of the human heart. One darling sin of man is ostentation. It was one special vice of society in the age of the Incarnation, as students of the history of that period know right well. Now the real objection to the Divine method of action about Christ's Resurrection is that it was not ostentatious. If the human scheme had been adopted, it would simply have encouraged and sanctioned the ostentation which already dominated the world. But the Divine rule ever is this, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation," and in the very method of its development Christianity has taught men humility and self-abasement.

[81] Tradition tells very little about Cornelius. There is indeed a long article devoted to him by the Bollandists, Acta Sanctorum, Feb. t. 1, p. 280, but there is nothing in it. He is commemorated on Feb. 2nd. The Greeks make him bishop of Scepsis, the Latins of CÆsarea. St. Jerome says that in his time the house of Cornelius had been turned into a church. The story of his life as told in the Martyrologies is evidently a mere mediÆval concoction. At Scepsis the prefect Demetrius brings him into a temple of Apollo, when at his prayer the idol is smashed to pieces and the magistrate converted. Such stories are, however, the stock-in-trade of the legend-mongers of the Middle Ages.

[82] The Church tradition reports, however, that Cornelius was first bishop of CÆsarea, but without any solid authority for the statement. See, however, the note in last chapter, p. 141.

[83] See the article on Marcellinus (1) in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. iii., p. 804, where all the facts are told of this curious story.

[84] CÆsarea and Antioch were about two hundred miles distant from each other by sea. A Roman trireme travelling at express speed would easily have accomplished this distance in two or at most three days.

[85] The various Lives of St. Paul and Gibbon in his Decline and Fall give minute accounts of Antioch, its grandeur and wickedness; K. O. MÜller's Antiquities of Antioch, GÖttingen, 1839 is an exhaustive work on the subject; see also Mommsen's Provinces, Book VIII., ch. x.

[86] The same orator informs us that the streets of Antioch were lighted at night with public lamps. In this respect it stood alone among the cities of antiquity: see Libanius, I., 363, and the notes of Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus, xiv., 1, 9.

[87] Juv., Sat., iii., 62. See Farrar's St. Paul, ch. xvi., for a more minute account of the wickedness of Antioch than we can give in this place. He well remarks: "Cities liable to the influx of heterogeneous races are rarely otherwise than immoral and debased. Even Rome in the decadence of its CÆsarism could groan to think of the dregs of its degradation—the quacks and pandars, and musicians and dancing girls—poured into the Tiber by the Syrian Orontes.... 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."

[88] We shall have frequent occasions to notice the numerous varieties of rule, privileges, and local liberties which prevailed under the Roman Empire. The Romans seem to have scrupulously respected ancient rights and customs wherever possible, provided only the supreme sovereignty of Rome was recognised.

[89] See Eusebius, Eccles. Hist., v., 18.

[90] There is a good description of Daphne as St. Paul may have seen it in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. xxiii. We borrow a few extracts from it to give a more vivid idea of Antioch in St. Paul's day. "At the distance of five miles from Antioch the Macedonian kings of Syria had consecrated to Apollo one of the most elegant places of devotion in the pagan world. A magnificent temple rose in honour of the God of light; and his colossal figure almost filled the capacious sanctuary which was enriched with gold and gems and adorned by the skill of the Grecian artists. The deity was represented in a bending attitude, with a golden cup in his hand, pouring out a libation on the earth, as if he supplicated the venerable mother to give to his arms the cold and beauteous Daphne; for the spot was ennobled by fiction, and the fancy of the Syrian poets had transported the amorous tale from the banks of the Perseus to the town of the Orontes." "The temple and village were deeply bosomed in a thick grove of laurels and cypresses, which reached as far as a circumference of ten miles, and proved in the most sultry summers a cool and impenetrable shade. A thousand streams of the purest water, issuing from every hill, preserved the verdure of the earth and the temperature of the air; the senses were gratified with harmonious sounds and aromatic odours; and the peaceful grove was consecrated to health and joy, to luxury and love. The soldier and the philosopher wisely avoided the temptations of this sensual paradise, where pleasure, assuming the character of religion, imperceptibly dissolved the firmness of manly virtue." Gibbon's notes abound with ample proof of the statements he makes. To them we may refer the reader curious about the details of ancient paganism.

[91] The Antiochenes were always famous for the dangerous power of ridicule and giving nicknames. They quarrelled on this account with the emperors Hadrian, Verus, Marcus, Severus, and Julian. The last mentioned has celebrated these tendencies in his celebrated treatise entitled Misopogon, or the Beard-hater. Even in its final overthrow the city preserved this distinction. In the year 540 the Persian king Chosroes Nushirvan took it by storm. When he appeared before the city he was received with a shower of arrows mingled with obscene sarcasms, which so enraged him that he removed the inhabitants when he had taken the town to a new Antioch in the province of Susa.

[92] This famine is thoroughly historical. It is noticed by several who wrote of this time, as Dion, lx., 11; Suetonius, Claud., 20; Aurelius, Victor; and is confirmed by the testimony of the coins: see Eckhel, vi., 238, 239, 240. Cf. Lewin's Fasti Sacri, p. 274, A.D. 42.

[93] The Herodian family form a notable instance of the modern doctrine of heredity, which yet is only the ancient principle of Divine action announced long ago in the Second Commandment, "Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." The moral taints which we behold in Esau, passion, self-indulgence quenching all forethought, ostentation joined with magnificent generosity, displayed themselves in Herod the Great. In him they were joined with absolute power, and they produced their natural results. They made his heart, his life, his home a howling wilderness, and handed down to his descendants a legacy of wickedness which ceased not to bear fruit so long as his name survived. Herod's family cruelties were so celebrated that we are told by a pagan writer, named Macrobius, that when the Emperor Augustus heard of the slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem, thinking they were Herod's children, he jokingly said, "It were better to be Herod's pigs than Herod's children."

[94] See Lewin's Fasti Sacri, A.D. 41, p. 271, for the authorities on the subject of Herod's career.

[95] See p. 95 above.

[96] The tradition of the second century has only one story to tell about this martyrdom. We find it in Eusebius, H. E., ii., 9, where we read: "Concerning this James Clement hands down a story worthy of remembrance in the seventh book of his Hypotyposes (or Outlines) delivering it from the traditions of his predecessors, that the messenger who led him to the judgment-seat, beholding his witness, was moved to confess himself a Christian. Both were therefore led away, says he, and on the road (to execution) he asked forgiveness from James. And he, having considered for a little, said, Peace be to thee, and he kissed him tenderly. And thus both were beheaded together."

[97] Bishop Lightfoot, in his celebrated essay on the Christian Ministry, Philippians, pp. 200-205, 2nd edition, regards Episcopacy as the work of St. John. "By whom was the new constitution organised? To this question only one answer can be given. This great work must be ascribed to the surviving apostles. St. John especially, who built up the speculative theology of the Church, was mainly instrumental in completing its external constitution also, for Asia Minor was the centre from which the new movement spread." These words occur in his analysis of Rothe's views, with which Dr. Lightfoot substantially agrees.

[98] These elaborate precautions were doubtless taken on account of his escape on the previous occasion, when the Sanhedrin had arrested him, as narrated in the nineteenth verse of the fifth chapter.

[99] In the fifth century an order of monks was established at Constantinople who practised this ceaseless worship. They were called AcoimetÆ, or the Watchers. They are described at length in Bingham's Antiquities, Book VII., ch. ii., sect. 10, and in Smith's Dict. Christ. Antiqq., vol. i., p. 13. A similar attempt was made in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. by the well-known Nicholas Ferrar in a monastic institution which he planned in connection with the Church of England: see the article in the Dictionary of National Biography upon his name.

[100] The early Church has left us a treatise showing how thoroughly it recognised its duty in this respect. The "PÆdagogue" or the "Instructor" of Clement of Alexandria is a handbook of the social life of the early Christians, teaching them what to do and wear and say under every conceivable circumstance. Clement thinks nothing too trivial for the rule of Christian principle, prescribing the kind of clothes, shoes, and beds which should be used. He may seem at times to border on the ludicrous in his minuteness; but then we cannot realise how profoundly paganism had corrupted human life and manners. Thus in Book III., ch. xi., he treats of the management of the hair by men. Paganism had introduced many sensual practices in this direction. Clement lays down: "Let the head of men be shaven, unless it has curly hair. But let the chin have the hair. But let not twisted locks hang far down from the head gliding into womanish ringlets.... Since cropping is to be adopted, not on account of elegance, but for the necessity of the case; the hair of the head, that it may not grow so long as to come down and interfere with the eyes, and that of the moustache similarly which is dirtied in eating, is to be cut round, not by a razor, for that were unbecoming, but by a pair of cropping scissors. But the hair on the chin is not to be disturbed, as it gives no trouble, and lends to the face dignity and paternal terror." This treatise of a very early Christian writer can be easily consulted in Clark's Ante-Nicene Library.

[101] There is an ancient tradition that our Lord bade the apostles remain twelve years in Jerusalem before they dispersed to preach the gospel all the world over (Eusebius, H. E., V., xviii.). Some think that the famine and persecution which now happened may have been the occasion of their dispersion.

[102] It is noteworthy, indeed, that it was with Tyre and Sidon in the days of Herod as it was with them in the earlier days of King Solomon and of the prophets. In 1 Kings v. 10, 11 we see that Hiram, king of Tyre, depended on Solomon for food: "So Hiram gave Solomon timber of cedar and timber of fir according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year"; with which may be compared Ezekiel xxvii. 17.

[103] The story of the death of Herod Agrippa as told by Josephus, Antiqq., Book XIX., ch. viii., is in striking unison with that given in the Acts. "Now when Agrippa had reigned three years over all Judea, he came to the city CÆsarea, formerly called Strato's Tower; and there he exhibited shows in honour of CÆsar, upon his being informed that there was a certain festival celebrated on account of his safety. At which festival a great multitude was gotten together of the principal persons, and such as were of dignity through his province. On the second day of which shows he put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of a contexture truly wonderful, and came into the theatre early in the morning; at which time the silver of his garment, being illuminated by the fresh reflexion of the sun's rays upon it, shone out after a surprising manner, and was so resplendent as to spread a terror over those that looked intently upon him; and presently his flatterers cried out, one from one place, and another from another (though not for his good), that he was a god; and they added, 'Be thou merciful to us; for though we have hitherto reverenced thee only as a man, yet shall we henceforth own thee as superior to mortal nature.' Upon this the king did neither rebuke them, nor reject their impious flattery. But as he presently afterwards looked up he saw an owl sitting on a certain rope over his head, and immediately understood that this bird was the messenger of ill tidings, as it had once been the messenger of good tidings to him, and fell into the deepest sorrow. A severe pain also arose in his stomach, and began in a most violent manner. He therefore looked upon his friends, and said, 'I, whom you call a god, am commanded presently to depart this life; while Providence thus reproves the lying words you just now said to me; and I, who was by you called immortal, am immediately to be hurried away by death. But I am bound to accept of what Providence allots, as it pleases God; for we have by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner.' When he said this his pain became violent, and he was carried into the palace." The reference to the owl relates to a story about Agrippa's earlier life told by Josephus in his Antiqq., Book XVIII., ch. vi. The Emperor Tiberius had bound Agrippa, and placed him in his purple garments opposite his palace, with a number of other prisoners, among whom was a German. An owl perched on a tree near Agrippa, whereupon the German predicted that he would be freed from his bonds, and be raised to highest station; but that when he saw the owl again his death would be only five days distant.

[104] The Jews themselves received at the same time the support of their foreign proselytes. Helena, Queen of Adiabene, sent liberal gifts to Jerusalem to support the famine-stricken multitudes of that city, as Josephus tells in his Antiquities, XX., ii., 5. Cf. Lewin's Life of St. Paul, vol. i., p. 108, where the reader will find engravings of her mausoleum as it is still to be seen at Jerusalem.

[105] One great lesson which the true expositor will derive from this typical history is this, the long, doubtful, painful strife which the battle of truth and justice ever involves. The struggle for Gentile freedom waged by St. Paul is typical of the battle for freedom of conscience, for freedom of knowledge, for human rights against slavery, and of every other battle against tyranny and wrong which the world has ever seen. The combat has ever been long and wearisome, and the chiefest of God's champions have always been compelled to suffer much for their support of the truth, which must, however, triumph in the long run.

[106] See, for instance, ch. xiv. 4: "Part held with the Jews and part with the apostles"; and again, verse 14: "But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it." It must be remembered that the term apostle was one used very freely among the Jews to signify the official delegates of the high priest, the Sanhedrin, or even the smallest synagogue. It has, however, gained a sanctity and special application in the Christian Church which causes a certain amount of mental confusion. At the same time, we must remember that the title apostle was continued in the primitive Church after the age of the Twelve. It was applied to their successors, as we learn from the Didache, xi.; Hermas, Sim. ix.; 15, 16, 25. Cf. Origen on John iv., and Euseb., H. E., i. 12.

[107] An elaborate plan of ancient Antioch, accompanied with a description of its various parts and references to the authorities for the same, will be found in Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., p. 92.

[108] HypÆpa, for instance, was a celebrated sanctuary of Diana, between Sardis and Ephesus. Jewish inscriptions have been found there proving that a Jewish synagogue and community existed even in that pagan stronghold: see Revue ArchÉologique for 1885, vol. ii., p. 111.

[109] There is a series of plates in Lewin's Life of St. Paul, vol. i., pp. 130-36, depicting the site and ruins of Antioch, and showing the roads which connected it with all the leading towns of the neighbourhood, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe. Professor Ramsay, in his Historical Geography of Asia Minor, bestows a good deal of attention on Antioch of Pisidia and its position: see pp. 47, 57, 85, 391, 453.

[111] Iconium was in St. Paul's day the centre of an independent tetrarchy ruled by native princes. See Pliny's Nat. Hist., v. 27. The site of Iconium has never been uncertain. It was made the capital of their dominions by the Sultans of the Seldjuk Turks, and continued to occupy that position till the conquest of Constantinople. It is still called Konia, a modification of its original name, and still continues to attract a large population on account of the beauty and convenience of its situation, which gives it the title of the Damascus of Asia Minor. According to tradition Sosipatros, one of the seventy disciples, was the bishop of Iconium, and was succeeded by Terentius, another member of the same sacred company; Acta Sanctorum, June 20th, p. 67; Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor, p. 332. The latest account of Iconium as it is at present will be found in Sterrett's Epigraphical Journey in Asia Minor, printed among the Papers of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Boston, 1884. vol. ii., p. 188-225.

[112] The apostles seem to have acted as in former times persons harassed by legal processes could do in this country. A writ directed to a sheriff only ran within his own county. A man could not be arrested under it if he passed one step beyond the county bounds, till countersigned by the sheriff of the county into which the delinquent had passed. Under the Roman empire the local liberties and jurisdictions were simply infinite, a fact which of course lent much assistance to persons persecuted as the apostles were. Derbe, for instance, was a native city of Lycaonia, and belonged to the Koinon or local assembly of that province. Lystra was situated indeed in Lycaonia, but being a Roman colony had therefore exceptional privileges, and scorned to belong to the local Assembly of native cities. See Ramsay, Hist. Geog., pp. 332, 375, 376.

[113] It is well perhaps to note that the ? in this name is long, representing the diphthong e?, the Greek name of the town being ?tt??e?a.

[114] See vol. i., p. 216.

[115] The words of Dion are: "Eo tempore Cyprum ac Galliam Narbonensem, quia nihil armis suis indigerent, populo reddidit; atque ita proconsules etiam in istas provincias mitti coeperunt." See the works of Dion, edited by H. Valerius, vol. i., p. 733 (Hamburg, 1750). Valerius, in his note on this passage, notes the inaccuracies into which the older critics—Grotius, Hammond, Baronius—had fallen about Acts xiii. 7.

[116] Cf. vol. i., pp. xi, 300.

[117] See the story of Philemon and Baucis as told in Smith's Dictionary of Classical Biography and Mythology.

[118] The site of Lystra and the fact that it was a Roman colony were unknown till 1884, when Sterrett discovered an inscription which ascertained both facts: see Ramsay's Historical Geography of Asia Minor, p. 332, and Sterrett's Epigraph. Journey, already quoted, from "Papers of American School at Athens," vol. iii., p. 142 (Boston, 1888). Artemas, one of the seventy disciples, is said to have been bishop of Lystra: see Acta Sanct., June 20th, p. 67.

[119] The Romans had a local police in Asia Minor, organised after the manner of our own local police. The chief of the police in each town was called the eirenarch, and was annually appointed by the proconsul. The Romans never made the mistake of placing the police in the hands of discontented subjects. See, on this curious topic, Le Bas and Waddington's Voyage ArchÉologique, t. iii., pp. 27 and 255.

[120] It has often been argued that the gift of tongues conferred by the Holy Ghost at Pentecost was not necessary, as Greek was universally spoken in Asia Minor. The use of the Lycaonian tongue at Lystra, even though a Roman colony, is an important fact on the other side. Mr. Ramsay, in his Hist. Geog. of Asia Minor, says; "Greek was not the popular language of the plateau, even in the third century after Christ; the mass of the people spoke Lycaonian and Galatian and Phrygian, though those who wrote books wrote Greek and those who governed spoke Latin." Cf. pp. 98, 99 of Mr. Ramsay's work, and p. 103 of the previous volume of this commentary. This subject of the original languages of Asia Minor and their survival to Christian times is an interesting and novel subject of study, for which materials are gradually accumulating. Thus the ancient Cappadocian language is discussed and a lexicon of it compiled in a monograph which appeared in the Museum of the Evangelical school at Smyrna (1880-84), pp. 47-265. A large number of inscriptions in the Phrygian language have also been recovered. St. Paul, addressing the natives of the central plateau of Asia Minor in Greek, would have been like an Englishman preaching to the inhabitants of Wales or of Connemara in English. I never heard of any powerful results thus following, save in the case of Giraldus Cambrensis who tells us in his Itinerary in Wales of the melting character of his own Latin sermons upon the Welsh people, though they did not understand a word of them. But then Giraldus was, to say the least, an imaginative historian.

[121] Mansi, A.D. 1692-1769, was Archbishop of Lucca. He was a very learned man. Besides valuable editions of other men's works he published his Sarcorum Conciliorum Collectio in thirty-one vols. folio, Florence and Venice, 1759-98. Mansi fixes the date of the Jerusalem Synod either to 49 or 51 A.D. He counts it the third synod, regarding as the first synod that held for the election of Matthias, and as the second that assembled for the choice of the deacons.

[122] We miss the true standpoint whence to judge St. Paul's conduct aright, when we think as people generally do that St. Paul opposed circumcision per se. He simply opposed it when connected with wrong ideas. The Judaising disciples viewed the Jewish nation as the covenant people to whom alone salvation belonged. St. Paul viewed the Church as the body to whom alone salvation belonged, admission to which was gained by baptism. If any Christian holding St. Paul's view chose to add any private ceremony such as circumcision in order to gain admission into any human society, St. Paul would not have opposed him any more than, if he were now alive, he would have opposed or denounced a Christian man because he became a Freemason, or an Orangeman, or joined the Oddfellows, observing the special ceremonies appointed for admission. The nearest approach in later times to the position taken up by the strict Jewish party will be found in the history of mediÆval monasticism. The Cistercians and subsequently the Mendicant Orders endeavoured to persuade every person that every one who wished to be saved must join their Orders and assume their peculiar dress. On this account Fitz Ralph, Archbishop of Armagh, and his friend Wickliffe denounced them most vigorously. I have given some amusing instances of the opposition to the Cistercians evoked two centuries earlier by similar claims in Ireland and the Anglo-Norman Church, p. 42.

[123] I have often noted what I consider an unfair use of this controversy and of St. Paul's position in it. Men in the heat of argument have represented the High Church, or rather the so-called Ritualists in the Church of England, as answering to the Judaisers of St. Paul's day. There seems to me, however, no parallel between them. The Judaisers contended for a certain ceremony as necessary to salvation. I never heard of any Ritualist who considered any of his dearest practices in this light. He may view them as lawful, as edifying, and very necessary for the instruction of the people; but I have never heard of their most extreme adherents contending for their necessity to salvation. It would be just as true to identify their opponents with the Judaisers, because they have insisted, and often with great vigour, upon the use of the black gown in the pulpit. I have known extreme men to take up the position that the gospel could not be preached where the black gown was not used. Any one who will take the trouble to read the Life of Bishop Blomfield of London, edited by his son, vol. ii., will see some striking illustrations of the extent to which such views were pushed half a century ago.

[124] The conduct of the Romish clergy in Ireland when the Papal rescripts were issued concerning the Parnell tribute, boycotting, and the Plan of the Campaign was an amusing commentary on their view of Papal Infallibility. Any one who will take the trouble to search the columns of the Freeman's Journal at that time will see how freely curates even criticised the Papal infallible utterances. One of them remarked to me at the time, "I think we have taught the old gentleman a lesson he will not forget," referring to the Papal rescripts. Infallibility is very good so long as it is with us, but when against us it becomes very fallible. Such is clearly the view of Irish Roman Catholics.

[125] The reader should consult what Mr. Findlay has written on this point in his Galatians, chs. vi. and vii., pp. 92-112.

[126] The fifth verse states that after Paul had rehearsed the wonders done among the Gentiles certain of the sect of the Pharisees rose up saying, "It is needful to circumcise them." Some maintain that this was in a missionary meeting before the Synod, but that this is no proof that such laymen, if they were laymen, were allowed to raise the question in the Synod. Of course the next verse states that "the apostles and elders" came together to consider this matter; but it also states that there was much questioning before St. Peter opened his mouth to speak on the subject. Surely the much questioning must have been on the part of the "certain of the sect of the Pharisees who believed"!

[127] It is a curious thing that three parties otherwise very much opposed unite in this view: the extreme High Church party in England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Wesleyan Conference, which latter body restrains all questions of doctrine and discipline to ministers alone as rigorously as either of the others. The Presbyterian Assemblies are in many respects open to the same charge, the elders who represent the laity being ordained by imposition of hands as truly as the ministers and signing the same doctrinal tests. I cannot say how far this may be true of the Established Assembly in Scotland, but as far as the Free Church and the Irish General Assemblies are concerned, I am bold to say that no unordained layman sits in them. I was much amused some time ago reading the charge of a Wesleyan President of Conference to the newly ordained ministers of the Irish Conference, when he bid them remember that Christ had entrusted to them alone the care of all questions touching doctrine and discipline. See for the High Anglican theory, which is just the same as the Wesleyan President's, Joyce's Acts of the Church, A.D. 1531-1885, p. 12.

[128] I may perhaps be allowed to refer to a little tract of my own on this topic published at the time, on "The Work of the Laity in the Church of Ireland," as embodying the principles of Hooker applied to modern times and needs.

[129] St. Jerome places the beginning of St. Peter's twenty-five years' episcopate at Rome in A.D. 42—that is, two years before Herod's attempt to put St. Peter to death. This idea has been worked up into an elaborate story, which will be found duly set forth in great detail in Fleury's Ecclesiastical History, Book I., where St. Peter is made Bishop of Rome prior to the death of Herod Agrippa, whence he despatches disciples to found Churches in various towns of Italy, and whence he writes his first Epistle to the Jews of the Dispersion in Asia Minor. A simple statement of this is sufficient refutation for any one who knows the bare text of the Acts. There seems, however, no reason whatsoever to doubt the ancient tradition which fixes the martyrdom of St. Peter at Rome. See on the whole subject the interesting article on St. Peter in Schaff's EncyclopÆdia of Theology, p. 1814. In the Acta Sanctorum, published by the Bollandists, April, vol. iii., p. 346, we are told that St. Peter despatched St. Mark to found the Church of Aquileia, which claims the next rank to the Church of Rome among the Italian sees. In fact, the Bishops of Aquileia regarded themselves as of such importance, owing to their apostolic origin, that they headed a separation from the Church of Rome, which lasted from about A.D. 570 to 700. See Robertson's History of the Church, ii., p. 306, and the authorities there quoted, on this interesting anticipation of the Reformation in England.

[130] "Origen started this theory that the dispute between Peter and Paul was simulated; in other words, being of one mind in the matter they got up this scene that St. Paul might the more effectually condemn the Judaisers through the chief of the apostles, who, acknowledging the justice of the rebuke, set them an example of submission. Thus he, in fact, substituted the much graver charge of dishonesty against both apostles in order to exculpate the one from the comparatively venial offence of moral cowardice and inconsistency. Nevertheless this view commended itself to a large number of subsequent writers, and for some time may be said to have reigned supreme." (Lightfoot's Galatians, p. 129.) St. Chrysostom and St. Jerome maintained the same view, while St. Augustine opposed it. The epistles exchanged between Jerome and Augustine on this topic are very interesting. They may be most easily perused in Augustine's Epistles, vol. i., pp. 131 and 280, as translated in T. & T. Clark's series (Edinburgh, 1872).

[131] Mark is usually regarded as nephew to Barnabas. This opinion is grounded upon Col. iv. 10, as translated in the Authorised Version. They were, however, cousins merely. The Revised Version translates Col. iv. 10 thus: "Mark, the cousin of Barnabas." Dr. Lightfoot, in his Colossians, p. 236, has a long note showing that the word used about St. Mark in that passage is ? ??e????, which always means cousin german: see Thayer's edition of Grimm's Lexicon of New Testament, s.v.

[132] The sequel of this story as made known through the Epistles is most interesting. The quarrel between St. Paul and St. Barnabas was not a permanent one. Five years or so later, when writing the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians (ix. 6), St. Paul associates himself with Barnabas as if they were companions once again: "Or I only, and Barnabas, have we not a right to forbear working?" It is interesting too to trace the change that came in subsequent years over the relations between St. Paul and St. Mark as revealed by the Epistles. About the year 50 St. Paul treated Mark sternly, and that same sternness was most beneficial to the young man. It was just what his character wanted. Fifteen years passed over both their heads, and the scene was then very different. In Col. iv. 10, 11 Mark is commended unto the Church of ColossÆ as one of the few Jewish Christians who had been a comfort in his bonds to the prisoner of Jesus Christ; while again, when on the point of his departure, in the 2nd Epistle to Timothy, iv. 11, the once weak disciple is most touchingly and lovingly remembered: "Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is useful to me for ministering." St. Mark, after being the cause of this quarrel, appears no more in the Acts. The traditions about him will be found collected in English in Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, under his Feast Day, April 25th; or better still in Cave's Lives of the Apostles, pp. 217-23 (London, 1684); and in Latin in the Acta Sanctorum, Ed. Boll., April, iii., 344-58. Cave and the Bollandists give all the traditions about his foundation of the Church of Alexandria, the patriarchs of which still claim descent from him. Some historical writers have maintained, that they used to be ordained by the imposition of St. Mark's dead hand. This seems a mistake, however. Mr. Butler, in his Coptic Churches of Egypt, vol. ii., p. 311, says that the newly ordained Patriarch of Alexandria used to hold St. Mark's head in his hands during the celebration of Mass after his consecration. (See also Coptic Church in Dict. Christ. Biog.). Renaudot, a learned French writer, published a history of the Alexandrian Patriarchate in 1713, which industriously collects all the details of St. Mark's life true and imaginary alike. St. Mark's supposed body was carried to Venice from Alexandria about A.D. 1235.

[133] It is curious to note how widespread is this notion that the apostles always possessed supernatural powers in virtue of their office, enabling them, for instance, infallibly to read men's hearts and thoughts. In a letter in the Church Times for August 19th, 1892, from an eminent dignitary of the Church of England, I noticed an example of it. He was discussing a question with which I have nothing to say, and in doing so writes: "The commission given by our Lord to the apostles cannot be used in precisely the same sense by ourselves. The apostles' powers were miraculous.... They could tell whether the condition of the soul of the recipient of their gifts was right or the reverse in a manner not possible for us.... They could perceive and gauge faith in a way that is not our prerogative.... It is clear that the apostles could have perceived whether repentance and faith were genuine." I do not deny that God sometimes made such special revelations to them. But qu apostles they had no such gift of discerning spirits, else why did Peter baptize Simon Magus, or St. Paul and Barnabas take Mark with them at all, or St. Paul tolerate Demas even for a moment, or why did he not indicate the "grievous wolves" who should ravage the Ephesian Church after his departure?

[134] Ecclesiastical history and tradition tell us more about Barnabas and Cyprus. They represent Barnabas as the Apostle of the Church of Cyprus. This idea played a prominent part in the fifth century. The ancient connection between Antioch and Cyprus was then kept up, and the patriarchs of Antioch wished to subject the Archbishop and Bishops of Cyprus to their rule. The Seventh Session of the Great Council of Ephesus, which dealt with the Nestorian controversy, was engaged with this question of Cyprus. The session was held on July 31st, 431. The Cypriote bishops claimed that they had been free from the dominion of Antioch back to apostolic times, and the Council confirmed their freedom: see Mansi's Councils, iv., 1465-1470; Hefele's Councils (T. & T. Clark's translation), vol. ii., p. 72. Forty years later the same claim was advanced by the celebrated Peter the Fuller, Patriarch of Antioch, and resisted by Anthemius, Bishop of Salamis or Constantia. The bishops of Cyprus were again successful, owing to the timely discovery of the body of Barnabas lying in a tomb with a copy of the Gospel of St. Matthew upon his heart, which, according to the opinion of the times, settled the point in dispute: see Anthemius in the Dict. Christ. Biog., vol. i., p. 118. Cave, in his Apostolici, or Lives of the Fathers, pp. 33-43, diligently collects every scrap of information about St. Barnabas. An early tradition found in the Clementine Recognitions, lib. i., cap. 7, and dating from about A.D. 200, makes him the first apostle to preach in Rome, preceding St. Peter himself, against which theory as trenching on St. Peter's prerogatives Cardinal Baronius disputes very vigorously in his Annals, A.D. 51, lii.-liv.; see also Dr. Salmon on Clementine Literature in the Dict. Christ. Biog., i., 568.

[135] The record of a very similar journey performed five years ago in July 1887 may be read in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for April 1890. Mr. D. G. Hogarth, who writes the story, travelled on that occasion from the borders of Galatia to the Cilician coast. His narrative gives a vivid picture of the scenery over the Taurus Range as St. Paul must have seen it on this second missionary tour, and of the difficulties by which he must have been surrounded. Cf. Ramsay's Historical Geography of Asia Minor, p. 362.

[136] Cave has a long account of Timothy in his Apostolici, or Lives of the Fathers, pp. 45-53, where he gives an account of Timothy's martyrdom at Ephesus from Photius, the celebrated Greek scholar and patriarch of the ninth century: see Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 254, and the Acta Sanctorum for January, vol. ii., pp. 562-69. Timothy is said in the Martyrologies to have been buried on Mount Prion, a hill upon the side of which ancient Ephesus was built (see Wood's Ephesus, chap. i.), after he was cruelly put to death by the Ephesians enraged at his protest against one of their popular feasts. He suffered under Domitian about thirty years after St. Paul, and according to Photius was succeeded at Ephesus by St. John, who had been recalled from exile. His feast-day in the Calendar is January 24th.

[137] The provinces of Asia Minor all retained their ancient languages at the time of St. Paul. Latin and Greek were the language of society, but the mass of the people all spoke the original language of the country. In the time of St. Jerome, four centuries after St. Paul, Celtic was still spoken in Galatia as well as in Gaul. St. Paul must then have heard a language identical with that of Wales and the western districts of Ireland and Scotland, as is shown by Bishop Lightfoot in his Galatians, pp. 240-44, by his analysis of the remains of the Galatian language which ancient writers have handed down to us. Texier, a modern French traveller, thought that he could even trace Celtic features in the present inhabitants of the district. Cf. Lightfoot's Galatians, p. 12. It is very probable that a careful study of the existing language of Galatia, when treated according to the methods of modern scientific philology, would disclose Celtic elements. When Celtic elements survived in England and France, it is not likely they died out in Galatia. We know at any rate that the other original languages of Asia Minor have not perished without leaving some traces behind. There is a learned Review published at Smyrna from time to time. It is called the Museum of the Evangelical School of Smyrna. In the volume published for 1880-84 there is an article of more than 200 pages treating of the ancient Cappadocian and Lycaonian dialects, and the traces of them which remain. On p. 71 there is a notice of the accuracy with which Acts xiv. 11 mentions the speech or dialect of the men of Lystra, which Mr. Hogarth, in the article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, April 1890, p. 157, to which we have already referred, identifies with the Phrygian dialect spoken till the sixth century of our era. Mr. Hogarth copied several inscriptions in this ancient Lycaonian or Phrygian speech. See also an English article by Professor W. M. Ramsay in KÜhn's Journal of Comparative Philology for 1887, where he treats of this Lycaonian speech, and avows his belief (p. 382) that GrÆco-Roman civilisation and language did not begin to affect the rural parts of Northern and Eastern Phrygia till A.D. 100, long after St. Paul's day. The mass of the people spoke nothing but the original Phrygian. The reader who wishes to investigate what I consider the bearing of this subject on the gift of tongues should consult another article in English by Professor Ramsay, styled Laodicea Combusta, in the Transactions of the German ArchÆological Institute, vol. xiii., p. 248 (Athens, 1888).

[138] See Lightfoot's Galatians, pp. 22 and 172.

[139] Those who have access to great libraries will see a good description of Galatia accompanied with splendid plates in Texier's Description de l'Asie, in 3 vols. folio, published at Paris between 1839 and 1849. Mr. Lewin has reproduced some of the pictures in his Life of St. Paul.

[140] We owe one of the earliest glimpses of the Christian Church after apostolic days to this same province of Bithynia. Pliny went there as proconsul about 110 A.D. He found the whole country covered with Christians, and the Church organised, with deaconesses even, as in Greece and Ephesus. See the first volume of this commentary, p. 274. The picture of the saintly slave deaconesses tortured for their faith within ten years of St. John's death is an interesting confirmation of the faith. It would be instructive to trace back the connexion of the second-century martyrs who have been well authenticated, with the Churches founded by the apostles. Justin Martyr suffered, for instance, at Rome about A.D. 165. With him there died Hierax, who had been born of Christian parents at Iconium. His grandfather might have been converted by St. Paul. In his examination he dwells upon the fact that he had been born of believing parents. See Ruinart's Acta Sincera, p. 44, a translation of which passage will be found in the works of Justin Martyr, in Clark's Series of Ante-Nicene Writers.

[141] See this sermon in Taylor's works, vol. viii., Ed. C. P. Eden (London, 1850). On p. 380 we find the following eloquent and profound passage bearing on this point: "Lastly there is a sort of God's dear servants who walk in perfectness, who perfect holiness in the fear of God, and they have a degree of charity and divine knowledge more than we can discourse of, and more certain than the demonstrations of geometry, brighter than the sun and indeficient as the light of heaven. This is called by the Apostle the ?pa??asa t?? ???. Christ is this 'brightness of God' manifested in the hearts of His dearest servants. But I shall say no more of this at this time, for this is to be felt and not to be talked of; and they that have never touched it with their finger, may secretly perhaps laugh at it in their heart, and be never the wiser. All that I have now to say of it is, that a good man is united unto God, ???t??? ???t?? s????a?, as a flame touches a flame and combines into splendour and glory; so is the spirit of a man united unto Christ by the Spirit of God. These are the friends of God, and they best know God's mind, and they only that are so know how much such men do know. They have a special unction from above."

[142] Both Lewin and Conybeare and Howson in their Lives of St. Paul enter into great details about the scenery and other circumstances of St. Paul's voyage from Troas to Neapolis, which would be out of place in this commentary, even if space did allow their insertion. Mr. Lewin's account is specially interesting, as he gives the impressions made upon himself when going over the ground. These writers all point out that St. Paul must have travelled with a fair wind; Conybeare and Howson even try to determine its exact direction, which they maintain was from the southward. Otherwise he could not have made the passage in two days, or followed the course actually taken. On a subsequent occasion (Acts xx. 6) St. Paul took five days in sailing from Philippi to Troas.

[143] Posts for the conveyance of intelligence were established by Augustus (see Suetonius, Aug., 49). Gibbon, in the second chapter of his History, has much information on this point. The reader curious in such matters will find a learned account of the Roman postal service in Godefroy's Commentary on the Theodosian Code, vol. ii., p. 526, where he traces the system down from Augustus to the year 400 A.D. It was somewhat similar to that which now prevails in Russia. An interesting story is told concerning Constantine the Great, which illustrates the system. During the Diocletian persecution Constantine, whose leanings towards Christianity were suspected, was residing in Asia Minor with the Emperor Galerius, the determined enemy of Christianity. Constantine knew that there was a plot against him, so, having obtained the authority necessary to use the post, he fled secretly one night, and as he rode along took fresh horses, and at the same time brought the tired animals with him. When his enemies followed him next day, they found the post stables empty, and their prey escaped without any possibility of pursuit. See Dict. Christ. Biog., vol. i., p. 526, Art. Constantinus I., and De Broglie, L'Église et L'Empire, vol. i., p. 192.

[144] The remains of this rampart still exist. They are described in the Mission ArchÉologique de MacÉdoine, p. 103, carried out under the direction of M. Leon Heuzey, by order of Napoleon III., and published at Paris between 1864 and 1876.

[145] The proper official title of the highest magistrates of a colony was Duumviri. The colonies where a Greek spirit prevailed did not like this title, and called themselves PrÆtors, or St?at????, as in the case of Philippi. In exact accordance with St. Luke's usage Cicero, a century earlier, tells us in one of his Epistles, speaking of the vanity of Capua, which was thoroughly Greek in spirit, and therefore very vain: "While in other colonies the magistrates are called Duumviri, these wish themselves to be styled PrÆtors," a weakness laughed at in Horace's Satires, lib. i., v. 34-6. Dion Chrysostom, a Greek rhetorician of St. Paul's day, mocks the Greeks for the same flashy spirit.

[146] The common pronunciation of Attaleia, or as it is spelt in the Authorised Version, Attalia, is with the ? short. The "i" represents, however, the Greek diphthong e?, and is long.

[147] See Dr. John Lightfoot's HorÆ HebraicÆ on Matt. iv. 23; Works (London, 1684), vol. ii., pp. 132-34, for the Rabbinical legislation on Synagogues and their erection.

[148] A local illustration of this typical Church history occurs to me. Oliver Cromwell planted Ireland, especially the golden vale of Tipperary, with his Puritan soldiers. They were strong Nonconformists, and refused therefore after the Restoration to worship according to the forms of the Established Church. Their children after a generation or two almost universally fell into the arms of the Church of Rome, and now many of the leading members of the National League are Roman Catholic descendants of Cromwell's Puritans, and display still the same vigorous qualities which adorned their Protestant ancestors in the copious abuse they pour upon the memory of the men from whom they are descended.

[149] I am here reminded of a place with exactly the same name which became as famous in the history of the Celtic Church as Philippi did in that of the Macedonian Church. Fore, in the county of Westmeath, means Place or Valley of Streams. It was celebrated in the seventh century as a great missionary establishment, at the head of which stood St. Fechin, a primitive Celtic missionary. His oratory, cell, and ancient church are still to be seen. I have described them in a paper contributed to the Journal of the Society of Irish Antiquaries for this year (1892). A comparison of St. Paul's missionary methods with those of St. Fechin would be interesting. They are fully described in Colgan's Acts of the Irish Saints.

[150] The guild of dyers at Thyatira is celebrated in the inscriptions belonging to that city found in Boeckh's Corpus Inscriptionum GrÆcarum.

[151] See Leon Heuzey's Mission ArchÉologique de MacÉdoine, p. 71 (Paris, 1864-76). One tablet found furnishes a list of benefactions. One man gives a bronze statue of the deity, another helps to roof the building. Another tablet gives a list of the officials of the temple worship. Curiously enough among these officials occur names well known to us from St. Paul's Epistles, as Crescens, Secundus, Trophimus, Aristarchus, Pudens, Urbanus, and Clemens: cf. the Philippian inscriptions in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. iii., par. i., pp. 120-28. Among these rude Italian veterans, unspoilt by the glitter and vices of Greek idolatry and civilisation, the Cross may have found out many true soldiers of Jesus Christ: see Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., p. 210. It is interesting to notice that a similar set of tablets commemorating the benefactors of the temple of Diana at Ephesus was discovered in the excavations made twenty years ago at that place. The inscriptions are translated in the Appendix to Wood's Ephesus.

[152] See, for instance, Justin Martyr's First Apology, ch. xxix., Second Apology, ch. xii., and Athenagoras' Apology, chs. xxxi.-xxxv. These passages will be found in Justin Martyr and Athenagoras as translated in T. & T. Clark's Ante-Nicene Series, pp. 32, 81, 415-19.

[153] This political prejudice against Christianity lasted into the second century: see the First Apology of Justin Martyr, ch. xi.: "When you hear that we look for a kingdom, you suppose, without making any inquiry, that we speak of a human kingdom; whereas we speak of that which is with God, as appears also from the confession of their faith made by those who are charged with being Christians, though they know that death is the punishment awarded to him who so confesses"; words which imply that in Justin's day many had been martyred on mere political accusations.

[154] Augustine's Confessions, i. 1.

[155] See more on this point in vol. i., pp. 134-37, where I have given conclusive proofs of the misuse of this text from the writers of the seventeenth century.

[156] Mr. Sadler, in his Commentary on the Acts, treating of this passage has a long explanation identical in meaning with that which we have above urged. He says, for instance, p. 314: "This statement of the way of salvation is one of the most important in the New Testament. It contains the seed of the whole body of apostolic doctrine respecting salvation by Christ. When I say apostolic, I mean the doctrine of SS. Peter and John, as well as of St. Paul; for all being full of the Holy Ghost preached the same. Few places have been more perverted in order to uphold a heresy which, if St. Paul had been alive now, he would have abhorred, and denounced as fatal to the whole revelation of the Son of God, and that is antinomianism.... The Philippian jailor to whom the words were first addressed had never in all probability heard the name of Jesus Christ before.... 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ' then meant to him, 'Believe on Him whom we are now about to set forth to thee.' And they there and then began to set Him forth, for they spake unto him 'the word of the Lord.'... This Word must have shown him how—on what principle—he could exercise faith in Him so as to be saved. But did they call on him in his then state to believe anything respecting the Church and the sacraments of Christ? Unquestionably; for St. Paul would certainly not baptize a man who was totally ignorant of the grace of union with Christ which he would receive, and the obligations to serve Christ which he would come under, by being baptized."

[157] Bishop Lightfoot (Philippians, p. 57) says: "St. Paul's first visit to Philippi closed abruptly amid the storm of persecution. It was not to be expected that where the life of the teacher had been so seriously endangered, the scholars would escape all penalties. The Apostle left behind him a legacy of suffering to this newly born Church. This is not a mere conjecture; the affliction of the Macedonian Christians, and of the Philippians especially, are more than once mentioned in St. Paul's Epistles (cf. 1 Thess. ii. 2). If it was their privilege to believe in Christ, it was equally their privilege to suffer for Him."

[158] Bishop Lightfoot, in his Commentary on Philippians, l.c., dwells on this point: "The unwavering loyalty of his Philippian converts is the constant solace of the Apostle in his manifold trails, the one bright ray of happiness piercing the dark clouds which gather ever thicker about the evening of his life. They are his 'joy and crown, his brethren beloved and eagerly desired.' From them alone he consents to receive alms for the relief of his personal wants. To them alone he writes in language unclouded by any shadow of displeasure or disappointment."

[159] Thessalonica is to this day the abode of a large Jewish population. Tozer, in his Highlands of Turkey, vol. i., p. 146, says: "Of the sixty thousand inhabitants of Salonica two-thirds are Jews, the rest being Turks and Greeks.... From early times the Hebrew race seem to have been attracted by the commercial advantages of Salonica. Thus when St. Paul preached there he found a considerable Jewish community.... A large number of the Salonica Jews are rich merchants, and a great part of the wealth of the place is in their hands." Mr. Lewin, in his St. Paul, vol. i., p. 222, gives a table of the distances all along St. Paul's route.

[161] This case of Thessalonica is an interesting illustration of Bishop Lightfoot's statement:—"The government of the Roman provinces at this time was peculiarly dangerous ground for the romance-writer to venture upon" (Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 291). If the Roman provinces were a dangerous ground for a romance-writer, such as some critics would make the author of the Acts, the government of the large GrÆco-Roman towns and cities was still more dangerous, as scarcely any two successive ones were alike. Thessalonica is a good instance of this. St. Luke calls the magistrates politarchs, and the triumphal arch at Thessalonica calls them politarchs; a title which seems to have been a very rare one, as only one other instance of its occurrence has been discovered. Monastir, in the north-west of Macedonia, is an important town, and there an inscription belonging to the ancient Deuriopus, twelve miles distant, was found more than twenty years ago containing the same title, politarchs. Surely the stones out of the walls of Thessalonica and of Monastir cry out in defence of St. Luke's accuracy! See Mr. Tozer's Highlands of Turkey, vol. i., p. 145, and vol. ii., p. 358, Append. B; Boeckh's Corp. Ins. GrÆc., No. 1967; articles by the AbbÉ Belley in the Acad. des Inscript., xxxviii., p. 125, and by Mr. Vaux in the Trans. of Roy. Soc. of Literature, vol. viii., new series.

[162] It is well, perhaps, to bear in mind the distances which separate the various stages of St. Paul's progress through Macedonia. Thessalonica was about a hundred miles from Philippi, Beroea fifty from Thessalonica, and the sea-coast of the Thermaic Gulf, or the Gulf of Salonica, as it is now called, some twenty miles from Beroea.

[163] The best description which I know of this neighbourhood is that given by Mr. Tozer in his Highlands of Turkey, vol. ii., p. 8. St. Paul embarked at the head of the long, narrow gulf, called anciently the Thermaic Gulf, leading up to the city of Thessalonica. The Apostle must have sailed in a mere fishing smack or good-sized boat, as the iron-bound western coast of this gulf is devoid of harbours sufficient for large ships. Mr. Tozer himself sailed from Thessalonica in such a vessel, see l.c., vol. ii., p. 4: "We chartered a vessel to convey us down the bay, a six-oared Smyrna caÏque, quite elegant in her appointments as compared with the ordinary lumbering market boats and coasters of these seas, and a tight little craft withal, for though not more than six feet in width, and without a deck, she had made a voyage to the Crimea during the war." Cicero, even when going as proconsul into Asia travelled in the "undecked vessel of the Rhodians," of whose weakness and slowness he complains: see his letters to Atticus, v. 12 and 13.

[164] This important work may be most easily consulted in Shilleto's translation, published in Bohn's Classical Library, Bell & Sons, London, 1886.

[165] The Emperor Hadrian, for instance, adorned Athens with expensive buildings and libraries, and enriched it with endowments. See Duhr's work, p. 44, on the Journeys of the Emperor Hadrian, published in the Proceedings of the ArchÆological Society of Vienna; and cf. Pausanias, i. 18.

[166] Any one wishing to consult the writings of this contemporary of St. Paul can find Philo's works translated into English in 4 vols. in Bohn's Library of Ecclesiastical Antiquity. A comparison of St. Paul's writings with those of Philo will show us the wondrous superiority of those of the Christian Apostle, owing to his inspiration by the Holy Ghost. St. Paul's writings are a perpetual feast of fat things nourishing the soul unto everlasting life. The writings of Philo are curious and interesting, but no one would dream of taking them as a spiritual guide of life.

[167] The Athenians had for a long time previous to St. Paul's visit some commercial relations with the Jewish nation. Josephus, Antiqq., XIV. 8, tells us how they erected a brass statue of the high priest Hyrcanus, as an expression of their good will to the Jewish nation. This was a hundred years before St. Paul's visit. Bayet discovered early Jewish inscriptions among the Athenian cemeteries. See his De Titulis AtticÆ Christianis, pp. 122-24, of which we treat in a note infra.

[168] Pausanias, i. 15, gives a description of the Porch or Painted Chamber, the Stoa Poecile, whence the Stoics derived their name, showing that it was close to the Agora, or market-place, where Paul disputed.

[169] That period of retirement at Tarsus may have been utilised by St. Paul in studying classical literature and Greek philosophy by way of preparation for that life's work among the Gentiles, to which he was appointed at his conversion.

[170] There are frequent notices of the altars to the unknown gods in ancient Greek writers: as in Pausanias, Description of Greece, vol. i., p. 2 (Shilleto's translation); Life of Apollonius, by Philostratus, vi., 3; Lucian's Philopatris, 29. See, however, for exhaustive discussions of this point, and the whole subject of the topography of ancient Athens, Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., p. 242; Farrar's St. Paul, ch. xxvii., and Conybeare and Howson's St. Paul, vol. i., ch. x. Spon and Wheeler were travellers of the seventeenth century, whose works on this subject are important as showing Athens as it existed before modern changes. Some of the reports of travels in Greece, made by eminent scholars in the same century, and now very little known, may be found in the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

[171] St. Paul shows that he could sympathise with the true element in pantheistic stoicism by his famous words which have a certain pantheistic ring, but still a very different one from that of the Stoics: "In Him we live and move and have our being."

[172] These words are directly and literally taken out of the PhÆnomena of Aratus, a Greek poet of Cilicia and a fellow-countryman of the orator. He was absolutely correct, however, in saying "certain of your own poets," as the same sentiment is found in a hymn to Jupiter, composed by the Stoic philosopher and poet Cleanthes, a poem which will be found with a Latin version in Cudworth's Intellectual System. Cleanthes was the immediate successor of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. His words therefore would have the more weight with his disciples three centuries later. He died, like a Stoic, of hunger, aged eighty, and a statue was erected to him by the Roman Senate in his native place Assos, a town of Æolis in Greece. See for more about Cleanthes and Aratus, Fabricius, Bibliotheca GrÆca, or Smith's Dict. Greek and Rom. Biog.

[173] As it was with the ancient image worshippers, so is it with the modern. The excuses made for the pagans in ancient times are exactly the same as those made for the image worshippers of the eighth and later centuries: see the article on Iconoclasm in the Dict. Christ. Biog.

[174] Few biblical characters have been so surrounded with a haze of fable as Dionysius the Areopagite. All that we certainly know about him is from this passage in the Acts, and from two notices by Eusebius, H. E., iii. 4, and iv. 23. In the Acta Sanctorum the Bollandists bestow an immense quantity of space on Dionysius and the literature of the subject under the date Oct. 9th, in their Fourth Volume for October, pp. 696-987. The name of Dionysius became specially celebrated when about the year 500 it was attached to an impudent forgery called the Heavenly Hierarchy, from which has been largely derived the modern Roman doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and which has also exercised a great influence on the development of modern pantheism: see the article on Dionysius in vol. i. of Smith's Dict. Christ. Biog. Johannes Scotus Erigena, an Irish scholar of the ninth century, was the only man in France found capable of translating these Greek works when brought to Western Europe from the East: see Vett. Epistt. Hibernic. Sylloge, xxii., xxiii., xxiv., in Ussher's Works (Ed. Elrington), iv. 474-87. Dionysius is commemorated on Oct. 3rd in the ancient Latin Martyrologies, on Oct. 9th in the modern Roman Martyrology. The ancient Martyrologies—the ancient Roman, Ado's, Usaurd's—have a curious notice stating that Aristides the Athenian, in a work which he wrote about the Christian religion, described the martyrdom of Dionysius in the reign of Hadrian. There is no notice of this in the Apology of Aristides which has lately come to light. A curious story is told in one of his alleged letters, addressed to Polycarp. Apollophanes, a pagan sophist, was attacking Polycarp about Christianity. Dionysius tells Polycarp to remind his opponent of the miraculous darkness on the day of Crucifixion which Dionysius and Apollophanes had seen at Hierapolis, where they were then both students, when Dionysius said, "Either the God of nature suffers, or the world is in process of dissolution."

[175] The visits of the Emperor Hadrian to Athens, and his delight in that city, have been confirmed by the latest antiquarian investigations in the region of coins and inscriptions. The student who wishes to make acquaintance with the evidence on this point, which has an important bearing upon the historic proof of our holy religion, should consult the learned treatise of Julius DÜrr, styled, Die Reisen der Kaisers Hadrian, (Vienna, 1881). It minutely investigates the records of Hadrian's life, and shows us that Hadrian visited and lived at Athens in A.D. 125. This work was published ten years before the Apology of the Athenian Christian Aristides was discovered, serving to illustrate its history from an independent point of view. I have endeavoured to set forth the bearing of this point at greater length than I can now bestow upon it in a series of papers on the Apology of Aristides in the Sunday at Home for 1891-2. Mrs. Rendal Harris, the wife of the discoverer of it, has published an interesting work on this Apology, to which I would refer the reader (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1892). The Apology itself was published in 1891, in the series called Cambridge Texts and Studies.

[176] The testimony of Eusebius, H. E., iv. 5, is express on this point: "Down to the siege of the Jews under Hadrian there were fifteen bishops in the Church of Jerusalem, all of whom, as they say, were Hebrews from the first, and received the genuine knowledge of Christ, so that in the estimation of those able to judge they were counted worthy of the episcopal office."

[177] The whole subject of the origin and history of the primitive Church of Athens has been minutely investigated by a modern French scholar, C. Bayet, a member of the French school of antiquaries at Athens. The title of his book, to which I have already referred, is De Titulis AtticÆ Christianis Antiquissimis Commentatio (Thorin: Paris, 1878). He gives a large number of primitive Christian and Jewish inscriptions found at Athens. The above quotation from Aristides will be found in Rendal Harris's edition, p. 48, in the Cambridge Texts and Studies.

[178] This expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Claudius, which in the providence of God brought Aquila and Priscilla into contact with St. Paul, is mentioned by the Roman historian Suetonius, Claudius, 25, in the following suggestive words: "He expelled the Jews who were continually creating tumults, Chestus impelling them." The tumults roused by the teaching of Christian doctrine, like those in the Thessalonian and Beroean synagogues, were evidently the origin of the edict. Aquila and Priscilla were constant travellers, and seem to have been influential Christians. We find them afterwards at Ephesus, where they tarried some time: see Acts xviii. 18, 19, 26; 1 Cor. xvi. 19; and subsequently 2 Tim. iv. 19. They also lived at Rome for a period between their two residences at Ephesus, as we learn from the fact that St. Paul sends a salutation to them in Romans xvi. 3, 4.

[179] See 1 Cor. i. 14-17: "I thank God that I baptized none of you, save Crispus and Gaius; lest any man should say that ye were baptized into my name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other. For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." I have often heard a very wrong conclusion drawn from this passage. People think that St. Paul was here casting a certain slight upon baptism as contrasted with preaching. His meaning, however, is evident to any one who will realise the circumstances. The Corinthians were breaking up into sects, calling themselves by the names of various Christian leaders. St. Paul thanks God that very few can call themselves by his name, as they had not even the poor excuse for doing so, which his officiating at their baptism might give. To him, in God's providence, had been assigned the rough, dangerous pioneer work of preaching to the adversaries, Jews and pagans, outside the Church; to others the work of introducing the converts made by him into the Mystical Body of Christ.

[180] In vol. i., p. 270, I have pointed out that in Corinth the Christians probably adopted, not only the name, but the organisation of the synagogues.

[181] Cicero, in his oration Pro Flacco, ch. xxviii., shows how troublesome and dangerous, even to the very highest persons, the Jews at Rome could be one hundred years earlier than Gallio's day.

[182] Jeremy Taylor, in his Holy Living, in his chapter on Prayer, has some wise remarks on vows. He includes them under the head of Prayer: "A vow to God is an act of prayer and a great degree and instance of opportunity, and an increase of duty by some new uncommanded instance, or some more eminent degree of duty or frequency of action, or earnestness of spirit in the same. And because it hath pleased God in all ages of the world to admit of intercourse with His servants in the matter of vows, it is not ill advice that we make vows to God in those cases in which we have great need or great danger." He then proceeds to lay down rules and cautions for making vows.

[183] See Procter on the Common Prayer, p. 212; Canon Evan Daniel on the Prayer Book, pp. 87 and 300.

[184] See on this subject of the confusion of Christianity with Judaism by the Romans, Wieseler's Die Christenverfolgungen der CÄsaren, pp. 1-10.

[185] Meyer, in his Commentary on ch. xix. 5, enunciates the following extraordinary theory about Apollos, which plainly shows that, valuable as may be his textual criticism, his conception of Christian doctrine and of Apostolic Church life is very defective: "We may not infer from this passage that the disciples of John, who passed over to Christianity, were uniformly re-baptized; for in the case of the apostles who passed over from John to Jesus this certainly did not take place; and even as regards Apollos the common opinion that he was baptized by Aquila is purely arbitrary, as in xviii. 26 his instruction in Christianity, and not his baptism, is narrated." Again: "Apollos could dispense with re-baptism, seeing that he, with his fervid spirit, following the references of John to Christ, and the instruction of his teachers, penetrated without any new baptismal consecration into the pneumatic elements of life." Meyer evidently fails to grasp what the sacrament of baptism was, as conceived by St. Paul, and uses the most dangerous line of argument, that from silence, concluding that, because there is no mention of the Christian baptism of Apollos, therefore such a baptism never took place. But this is not all. Meyer's theory cannot possibly explain why baptism was necessary for Cornelius, though he enjoyed the gift of the Holy Ghost, while it was not necessary for Apollos, "who penetrated without any new baptismal consecration into the pneumatic element of life." Meyer says, indeed, that in the whole New Testament there is no example except in xix. 1-5 of the re-baptism of a disciple of John. But then in the Acts and Epistles, where alone we read of the administration of Christian baptism, there are only two examples of the admission of John's disciples. In one case twelve such were admitted, and they were all baptized by Paul's own order. In the case of Apollos there is silence. Surely the sounder conclusion is that Christian baptism was administered there too, though nothing is said about it! As for the apostles not being baptized with Christian baptism, the explanation is not far to seek. Baptism is the reception of a disciple into covenant with Christ through the medium of water. In the case of the apostles this reception took place in person, and not through any medium. In the apostles' case, too, there is another consideration. Meyer's conclusion is simply one e silentio even in their case. We know not, however, everything that Christ did as regards His apostles.

[186] The movement instituted by St. John the Baptist was perpetuated into the second century, and in some measure developed into, or connected itself with, the sect subsequently called the Hemerobaptists. The history of this movement from apostolic days is elaborately traced by Bishop Lightfoot in his Essay on the Essenes, contained in his Colossians and Philemon; see especially pp. 400-407, to which we must refer the reader desirous of more information. The Hemerobaptists are mentioned in the Clementine Recognitions, i. 54, the Clementine Homilies, ii. 23, which date from about 200 A.D., and in the Apostolic Constitutions, vi. 6, which may be put down as a century later. This shows the continuity of the sect. There are still some fragments of it existing in Babylonia, under the name of Mandeans: see further the article "Sabians" in Smith's Dict. Christ. Biog., iv. 569-73.

[187] See my remarks on this topic on pp. 141, 142 of my first volume on Acts.

[188] See the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, concerning the methods used in preparation for baptism.

[189] See pp. 32, 33 above for some remarks on this title, the Way, used in the Acts for the Gospel Dispensation or the Christian Church. Cf. also ch. ix. 2, xix. 23, xxii. 4, xxiv. 14, and the expression the Way of Life in the Didache.

[190] Bishop Lightfoot, Colossians, Introd., p. 30, has some good remarks bearing on this topic: "How or when the conversion of the Colossians took place we have no direct information. Yet it can hardly be wrong to connect the event with St. Paul's long sojourn at Ephesus. Here he remained preaching for three whole years. It is possible, indeed, that during this period he paid short visits to other neighbouring cities of Asia; but if so, the notices in the Acts oblige us to suppose these interruptions to his residence in Ephesus to have been slight and infrequent. Yet, though the Apostle himself was stationary in the capital, the Apostolic influence and teaching spread far beyond the limits of the city and its immediate neighbourhood. It was hardly an exaggeration when Demetrius declared that 'almost throughout all Asia this Paul had persuaded and turned away much people.' The sacred historian himself uses equally strong language in describing the effects of the Apostle's preaching: 'All they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.' In accordance with these notices the Apostle himself, in an Epistle written during this sojourn, sends salutations to Corinth, not from the Church of Ephesus specially, as might have been anticipated, but from the 'Churches of Asia' generally (1 Cor. xvi. 19). St. Luke, it should be observed, ascribes this dissemination of the gospel not to journeys undertaken by the Apostle, but to his preaching at Ephesus itself. Thither, as to the metropolis of Western Asia, would flock crowds from all the towns and villages far and near. Thence they would carry away, each to his own neighbourhood, the spiritual treasure which they had so unexpectedly found."

[191] I allude, of course, to the decree of Claudius against the Jews in A.D. 52, to which Suetonius (Claudius, 25) and Dio Cassius, lx. 6, refer; cf. Tacitus, Annals, xii. 52, and Lewin's Fasti Sacri, A.D. 52.

[192] The story is an interesting one. It will be found in Stephens' Life of St. Chrysostom, p. 61. The Emperor Valens had discovered that some of his enemies had been endeavouring, through magical contrivances something like table-rapping, to spell out the name of his successor, and had succeeded so far that they had found out the first part of the name as Theod, but the oracle could tell nothing more. The jealous Emperor ordered every prominent man with the names Theodore or Theodosius to be slain, vainly thinking to kill his own successor. He also ordered every one found with magical books in their possession to be at once slain. Chrysostom and a friend were walking in A.D. 374 on the banks of the Orontes when they saw a book floating down the stream. They stretched forth and rescued it, when, seeing that it was a magical book, they at once flung it back into the river, and not a moment too soon, as just then a police officer on detective duty appeared on the scene, from whom a moment earlier they could not have escaped. St. Chrysostom always regarded this as one of the great escapes of his life: see Art. "Chrysostom" in Dict. Christ. Biog., vol. i., p. 520, and his own reference to the escape in his 38th Homily on the Acts, translated in the Oxford Library of the Fathers. Mr. Stephens, l.c., gives an account of the magical rites and their ceremonial, which was doubtless much the same in A.D. 374 as in A.D. 54, whence we take a brief extract: "The twenty-four letters of the alphabet were arranged at intervals round the rim of a kind of charger, which was placed on a tripod consecrated by magic songs and frequent ceremonies. The diviner, habited as a heathen priest, in linen robes, sandals, and with a fillet wreathed about his head, chanted a hymn to Apollo, the god of prophecy, while a ring in the centre of the charger was slipped rapidly round a slender thread. The letters in front of which the ring successively stopped indicated the character of the oracle."

[193] The magical books thus consigned to the flames by the Christian believers who practised magic were filled with figures or characters technically called "Ephesian letters," G??ata ?f?s?a. These were mystic characters and strange words which were engraven on the crown, zone, and feet of the goddess. Clement of Alexandria discusses their use, and says the Greeks were greatly addicted to them, in his Stromata, v. 8, as translated in Clement's works, vol. ii., p. 247, in Clark's Ante-Nicene Library. The same use of curious mystic words passed over to the ManichÆans and other secret sects of mediÆval times. See also Guhl's Ephesiaca, p. 94 (Berlin, 1843), where all the authorities on this curious subject are collected together. Conybeare and Howson, ch. xiv., give them from Guhl in a handy shape. Great quantities of these "Ephesian letters" have been found among the FayÛm Manuscripts discovered in Egypt, which almost universally make a large use of the name Iao or Jehovah, showing their contact with Judaism.

[194] This subject properly belongs to commentators on 1 Corinthians. Paley, in HorÆ PaulinÆ, ch. iii., and Dr. Marcus Dods, in his Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 104, 105, set forth the evidence in a convenient shape. I may remark that here, as elsewhere, I adopt in the main Mr. Lewin's chronology, as contained in his Fasti Sacri. Without pledging myself to agree in all his details, his scheme forms a good working hypothesis, on which a writer can work when composing an expositor's commentary, not one for professed critics or profound scholars.

[195] The student may consult on the identification of Artemis and the Oriental or Persian deity AnaÏtis, the Revue ArchÉologique for 1885, vol. ii., pp. 105-115, and Derenbourg and Saglio's Dict. des Antiq., s.v. Diana.

[196] This argument may be pressed further. The silence which we observe in much of second-century literature about the New Testament Canon and Episcopacy is of the same character. The best known and most notorious facts are those about which authors are most apt to be silent when writing for contemporaries, simply because every person acknowledges them and takes them for granted.

[197] This is manifest at once if the reader will consult Mr. Wood's Ephesus or Guhl's Ephesiaca, a work which, though published (in 1843) before modern discoveries had taught all we now know, is a most elaborate account of ancient Ephesus gleaned out of ancient writers.

[198] See on the exact time of the Macedonian and Ephesian month of Artemisius, Ussher's treatise on the Macedonian and Asiatic solar year, in the seventh volume of his works Ed. Elrington, p. 425, with which may be compared Bishop Lightfoot's Ignatius, i. 660-700. Mr. Lewin, in his Fasti Sacri, p. 309, makes it the month of May. The Macedonian month Artemisius extended from March 25th to April 24th. This point is further discussed in Lewin's St. Paul, vol. i., p. 405. If St. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians at or shortly before April 7th, the date of the Passover, the riot which hastened his departure must have happened within the succeeding fortnight. Boeckh, in the Corpus of Greek Inscriptions, No. 2954, inserts a long Greek inscription, found one hundred and seventy years ago at Ephesus, laying down the ceremonial to be observed in honour of the deity throughout the whole month, which Mr. Lewin translates, vol. i., p. 405. See, however, more upon this below.

[199] The Persian language was still used in the worship of Diana at HierocÆsarea and HypÆpa, two well-known towns of the province of Asia in the second century of our era. See Pausanias, v. 27; cf. Tacitus, Annals, iii. 62, and Ramsay's Hist. Geog., p. 128.

[200] Voluntary associations were formed all over Asia Minor to cultivate the worship of Artemis. Modern research, for instance, has found inscriptions raised by the Xenoi Tekmoreioi indicating their peculiar devotion to Diana and her worship. They specially flourished at a place called Saghir, near Antioch in Pisidia. It is a curious fact that the cult of the B.V.M. has been substituted for that of Artemis by the Greeks of the neighbourhood, and a feast in her honour is celebrated at the same time as the ancient feast. See Revue ArchÉologique, 1887, vol. i., p. 96; Ramsay, in his Geography of Asia Minor, p. 409, and in Jour. Hell. Studies for 1883.

[201] The original sacred image, which was preserved inside a screen or curtain in the inmost temple, was a shapeless mass of wood something like the prehistoric blocks of wood or stone which were esteemed at Athens and elsewhere the most venerable images of their favourite deities: see Pausanias, Description of Greece, i. 26. The legend at Ephesus was just the same as at Athens and elsewhere, that these prehistoric images had fallen down from heaven. Some of them may have been aerolites.

[202] The temple of Ephesus is depicted in Conybeare and Howson's and Lewin's St. Paul, as well as it could have been restored from a study of books. At the time of their publication neither Mr. Wood's discoveries had been made nor his work on Ephesus published. The plans and engravings in Mr. Wood's work of course supersede all others. The plans, etc., in the other works are sufficiently accurate to enable the reader to realise the language of the Acts.

[203] The original of this decree will be found in Boeckh's Corp. Inscriptt. GrÆc., No. 2954, and the translation in Lewin's St. Paul, 405.

[204] There is a long account of Achilles Tatius in the Bibliotheca GrÆca of Fabricius. He was a pagan first, and then became a Christian. His age is uncertain, but he certainly seems to have lived when pagan feasts were still observed in their ancient splendour. The book in which he describes them is called De Amoribus Clitophontis et Leucippes, where in Book VI., ch. iii. there is an account of the drunkenness and idleness at the feast of Diana. The words of Achilles Tatius bring the scene vividly before us as St. Paul must have seen it: "It was the festival of Artemis, and every place was full of drunken men, and all the market-place was full of a multitude of men through the whole night." In Mason's Diocletian Persecution, p. 361, there will be found an account of a festival celebrated in honour of Artemis in the same spring season at Ancyra in Galatia. This latter account is useful as giving us an authentic account of a Celtic festival of Diana about the year 306 A.D. It would seem as if an annual public washing of the image of Diana constituted an important part of the ceremonial. Both at Ancyra as told in the Acts of St. Theodotus and at Ephesus the image of Diana was annually carried about in a waggon drawn by mules: see Guhl's Ephesiaca, p. 114. At Ancyra, during the Diocletian persecution, seven Christian virgins were dressed as priestesses of Diana and condemned to publicly wash the idol. Upon their refusal they were all drowned in the lake where the image was washed. The Seven Virgins of Ancyra are celebrated in the annals of Christian martyrdom for their heroic resistance on this occasion. See Mason, l.c., and the Dict. Christ. Biog., s.v. Seven Virgins of Ancyra and Theodotus.

[205] See vol. i., pp. 8, 9.

[206] See the articles on Polycarp in the Dict. Christ. Biog., iv. 426, and on Martyrs of Lyons, iii. 764. As regards Polycarp, see also Lightfoot's Ignatius, vol. i., p. 436; and as regards the Martyrs of Lyons, see RÉnan's Marc-AurÈle, pp. 329, 331. It is interesting to notice, in the writings of St. Paulinus of Nola written about the year 400 A.D., his complaints about the abuses, drunkenness and idleness, connected with the feasts and holy days observed in honour of his great patron and hero St. Felix the Martyr. A similar feeling of the moral dangers connected with religious holy days led to the abbreviation of the week's holiday following Easter and Whitsunday to Monday and Tuesday as at present.

[207] The pagan temples were almost universally destroyed about the year 400. The edicts dealing with this matter and an ample commentary upon them will be found in the Theodosian Code, edited by that eminent scholar Godefroy.

[208] An interesting confirmation of this fact came to light in modern times. In the year 1830 there was found in Southern France a piece of such Ephesian silver work wrought in honour of Artemis, and carried into Gaul by one of her worshippers. It is now deposited in the BibliothÈque Nationale, and has been fully described in an interesting article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. iii., pp. 104-106, written by that eminent antiquary C. Waldstein.

[209] See the Revue ArchÉologique for 1886, vol. ii., p. 257, about the worship of the Ephesian Artemis in Marseilles and Southern Gaul, and an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1889, vol. x., p. 216, by Professor Ramsay, on the vast extent of Artemis worship in Asia. In the same journal, for 1890, vol. xi., p. 235, we have an account of the discovery of one of the original seats of Artemis worship in Eastern Cilicia by Mr. J. T. Bent; while again, in vol. iv., p. 40-43, Ramsay gives us a subscription list raised in Pisidia for the purpose of building a temple of Artemis in a country district.

[210] Aristarchus is described in the Martyrologies as the first bishop of Thessalonica, and is said to have suffered martyrdom under Nero. He is commemorated on August 4th.

[211] These local parliaments under the Roman Empire have been the subject of much modern investigation at the hands of French and German scholars. See for references to the authorities on the point an article which I wrote in Macmillan's Magazine for 1882.

[212] See the index to Lightfoot's Ignatius and Polycarp for extended references to the Asiarchate, and also Mommsen's Roman Provinces (Dickson's translation), vol. i., pp. 345-7.

[213] The Ephesian mob four hundred years later displayed at the third General Council held at Ephesus in 431 an extraordinary power of keeping up the same cry for hours. See the story of the Council as told by Hefele in the third volume of his General Councils (Clark's translation). Nothing will give such a vigorous idea of the confusion which then prevailed at Ephesus as a glance at Mansi's Acts of that Council. The cry "Anathema to Nestorius," the heretic against whom the Council declared, was maintained so long and so continuously that one would imagine that orthodoxy depended on strength of lungs.

[214] St. Paul's zeal never outran his discretion. He never blasphemed or spoke lightly of ideas and names held sacred by his hearers. I remember in our local ecclesiastical history an example of the opposite course which has often found imitators. When Charles Wesley first visited Dublin about the year 1747, he left behind a zealous but very unwise preacher to continue his work. His language was so violent that the mob were roused to burn his meeting-house, which stood in Marlborough Street near the spot where the Roman Catholic Cathedral now stands. He then took his stand on Oxmantown Green in the northern suburbs, where he preached in the open air. On Christmas Day he took the Incarnation as his subject, and began, as St. Paul never would have done, by crying aloud, "I curse and blaspheme all gods and goddesses in heaven and earth, save the Babe that was born in Bethlehem and was wrapped in swaddling clothes," whereupon the Dublin mob with their ready wit in the matter of nick-names called the Methodists swaddlers, a title which has ever since stuck to them in Ireland, and is to this day commonly used by the Roman Catholics. This seems an interesting illustration of the typical character of the Acts.

[215] See Preface by Bishop Stubbs to Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Regis Hen. II., t. ii., pp. lxv.-lxxi. (Rolls Series); Madox, Hist. of Exchequer, pp. 84-96, for an account of the rise of the English Assize System; see Le Blant, Les Actes des Martyrs, pp. 50-121, and Marquardt's RÖm. Staatsverwalt, p. 365 about Roman assizes. There were eleven circuits in Asia.

[216] See Lewin's St. Paul, i. 337, 338.

[217] A similar jealousy of voluntary organisations is still perpetuated in France under the code Napoleon, which largely embodies Roman methods and ideas.

[218] I do not wish to decry the industry and learning of German critics, to whom I owe much, as my various references show; but I am always suspicious of their historical conclusions, simply because they are pure students, and are therefore ignorant of life and men. The more industrious and secluded a life a man may lead, so much the more ignorant of the practical world a man becomes, and so much the more unfitted to be a real historian, who must know men as well as books. History is a picture of real life in the past, and to paint it a man must know real life in the present. As well might we set an academic scientist who regarded all lines as straight and all bars as rigid to build the Forth Bridge, as set a man who knows nothing of human nature and how it acts under the stress of practical affairs to write the story of human life two thousand years ago. We may take and use German investigations, but we should apply English common sense and experience to test German conclusions. This rule is, I fear, too much forgotten in a great deal of the literature that is now being pawned off upon the English world in the name of criticism. Surely the fate of Baur's theories ought to be a warning to all young men against swallowing as the latest results of scholarship everything that comes clothed in the German language! The English nation has a reputation for solid common sense. What fools the Germans would be did they take everything English as full of common sense because printed in our language!

[220] There is to this day a trace of this custom in the Book of Common Prayer in the rubric which prescribes that the collect for Sunday shall be said on Saturday evening. In colleges, too, according to Archbishop Laud's rules, surplices are worn on Saturday evenings as well as on Sundays.

[221] See above, pp. 342 and 361, where I have pointed out the dangerous character of the argument from mere silence. I may perhaps recur to the example of Meyer, the eminent textual critic, to illustrate my view of German critics stated in my first note to this chapter, p. 386 above. Meyer is an exhaustive textual critic, but as soon as he ventures on the region of history he falls into this trap, and concludes from the argument of silence that Apollos was never baptized with Christian baptism because he was so clever and spiritually enlightened that he did not need it. But, then, how does he account for the case of St. Paul? Was Apollos superior to St. Paul? And yet he was baptized. But the illustrations of the fallacies of this method of argumentation would be endless. If the argument of silence is sufficient to prove a negative, what are we to do with female communicants? There is not a single instance of them in the New Testament. It is here, however, that the study of the second-century writers is so valuable as illustrating the silence of the first. See my note on p. 342 above.

[222] The Christian library was a series of fifty volumes which Wesley published for the use of his followers. They were begun in 1749 and completed in 1755. "The opening volume contains, 1. The Epistles of the apostolical fathers Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, whom he believed to be endued with the extraordinary assistance of the Holy Spirit, and whose writings, though not of equal authority with the Holy Scriptures, are worthy of a much greater respect than any composures that have been made since. 2. The martyrdoms of Ignatius and Polycarp. 3. An extract from the Homilies of Macarius, born about the year 301." See Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ii. 25, 65-67.

[223] Here we have an illustration of 1 Cor. xiv. 16: "Else if thou bless with the Spirit, how shall he that filleth the place of the unlearned say the Amen at the giving of thanks, seeing he understandeth not what thou sayest?" See also ch. lxv. of Justin's same Apology for another reference to the Amen, and cf. Apost. Constitutions, viii. 10; Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat., ch. v.; Euseb., H. E., vi. 43 and vii. 9; Ambros. De Sacrament., iv. 4; Jerom., Epist., 62; Chrysost., Hom., xxxv. on 1st Cor.; Bingham's Antiqq., XV. iii. 26; and the article on Amen in the first volume of Smith's Dict. Christ. Antiqq. The preceding chapters of Justin's Apology, lxv. and lxvi., are full of information. They expressly state that in the Primitive Church no unbaptized person was allowed to communicate, an elementary point of Christian practice about which some persons and some Christian societies seem at present very uncertain. Hooker's words, Eccles. Pol., Book V. ch. lxvii., are very clear on this topic.

[224] The continuous character, the strong conservatism of the early Christian Church receives an interesting illustration from the history of the Sabbath as distinguished from the Lord's Day. The Jewish Church gave the outward form to Christianity; and though Christianity parted company with Judaism by the end of the first century, yet the sacred character of the Sabbath was still perpetuated among the Gentiles notwithstanding St. Paul's strong language in Galatians and Colossians. In the fourth century the Sabbath was observed in many places in the same manner as the Lord's Day. St. Athanasius says: "We meet on the Sabbath, not indeed being infected with Judaism, but to worship Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath." Timothy, one of his successors at Alexandria, says that the Holy Communion was administered on the Sabbath as on the Lord's Day, and that these two were the only days on which it was celebrated in that city. In the time of St. Chrysostom the two great weekly festivals were the Sabbath and the Lord's Day. It was the same in the fifth century in the Egyptian monasteries, where the services for Saturday and Sunday were exactly the same. See a full account of this matter in Bingham's Antiquities, Book XIII. ch. ix. sec. iii.

[225] St. Augustine, in Epist., cxviii., Ad Januar., cc. vi. vii., was one of the first to suggest this idea. The passage is quoted by Bingham, Antiqq., XV. vii. 8.

[226] See the exhaustive article on AgapÆ in Smith's Dict. Christ. Antiqq., vol. i., p. 39.

[227] The early Christians celebrated the Holy Communion in memory of Christ's resurrection as much as in memory of His death. The resurrection of Christ was, in fact, the central point of their belief and thought. This alone would have conduced to the practice of early morning communion, even before day, inasmuch as it was at that time the resurrection took place. Cf. Dict. Christ. Antiqq., vol. i., p. 419, on the hours of celebration of the Holy Communion. On p. 41 of the same volume the writer of the article on the AgapÆ makes an extraordinary statement that it was only at the third Council of Carthage, A.D. 391, that the time of Eucharistic celebration was changed to the morning, and that then the Agape was first separated from the Holy Communion. The change and the separation had taken place in Pliny's time, as I have already shown.

[228] This whole subject of fasting communion is discussed at length with all the authorities duly given in Bingham's Antiquities, Book XV. ch. vii. sec. 8, whence I have taken my references, and where he quotes Bishop Fell's Notes on Cyprian, Epist. lxiii. p. 156, who says that "the custom of communicating after supper lasted for a long time in the Church": cf. Socrates, H. E., v. 22, and the Dict. Christ. Antiqq., vol. i., p. 417, on Fasting Reception of H. C.

[229] The Lives of St. Paul by Lewin and by Conybeare and Howson enter into minute computations as to the days of the month upon which the Apostle touched at the various towns mentioned in the Acts. I can now merely refer the reader to these works for such details about St. Paul's life, as they scarcely come within the scope of an expositor's duty.

[230] I do not think there is any greater want in the Church of England than the revival of preaching. It is simply lamentable to see the numbers who under usual circumstances will walk out of church before the sermon, and still more lamentable to see the number of men who do not go to church at all. This I attribute to the low estate to which the ordinary sermon has fallen. In the days of evangelical supremacy the pulpit may have been unduly exalted; now it is unduly neglected, and with terrible results.

[231] I think I hear in St. Paul's words in this passage an echo of the Epistle to the Romans which he had written a month or two previously. The idea, "Repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ," as the essence of Christianity is the central idea of that Epistle.

[232] See on this point Dr. Salmon's Introduction to New Testament, 4th ed., p. 445.

[233] This rule or law is the principle of Butler's great argument for a future life in the first chapter of his Analogy. He expressly states in the following words, "There is in every case a probability that things will continue as we experience they are, in all respects, except those in which we have some reason to think they will be altered. This is that kind of presumption of probability from analogy expressed in the word continuance which seems our only natural reason for believing the course of the world will continue to-morrow as it has done so far back as our experience or knowledge of history can carry us back."

[234] IrenÆus, however, writing in the second century, states that the bishops and presbyters of Ephesus and the neighbouring cities were assembled at Miletus, so that he distinguishes between bishops and presbyters even on this occasion: see his work Against Heresies, iii. 14. Dr. Hatch had an extraordinary theory, which he elaborates in his article "Priest" in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, vol. ii., p. 1700. He thus states it: "Whether the institution of Presbyters existed in the first instance outside the limits of the JudÆo-Christian communities is doubtful. There is no evidence that it did so; the presumption is that it did not, for when St. Paul, writing to the churches which were presumably non-Jewish in their character, recognises the existence of church officers, he designates them by other names: p???st?e??? (1 Thess. v. 12), ?p?s????? (Philip. i. 1)." To put it briefly, his idea is that bishop as a title was confined to predominantly Greek communities, and presbyter as a title was confined to predominantly Gentile communities. Will this theory and the instances he gives stand the test of facts? Philippi was, he thinks, a predominantly Gentile Church, so thoroughly Gentile that its members would necessarily prefer titles drawn from impure pagan sources rather than from Judaism. But was Philippi so thoroughly Gentile? If so, why did St. Paul stay there and celebrate the days of unleavened bread and the passover, as we have above noted? A large element in the church must have been Jewish when this happened. Again, take Thessalonica. We have already noted that the majority of that church must have been Gentile in origin; but there must have been a large and influential minority Jewish by race in a town where the Jews were so large an element in the population. Again, we find the title presbyter applied to the church officials of Ephesus. Dr. Hatch on the same page enumerates Ephesus among the JudÆo-Christian communities, one, therefore, which would presumably prefer Jewish titles for its clergy. But was it predominantly Jewish? St. Paul laboured three months in the synagogue at Ephesus, and was then expelled. He laboured there for two years among the Gentiles with such success, that Demetrius describes him as having turned away all Asia from Diana's worship. Surely if ever there was a Gentile Christian Church it was Ephesus! (Cf. Ephes. ii. and iii., where the Gentile character of the Ephesian Church is expressly asserted.) Yet here we have the title presbyter in use. Dr. Hatch's is not scientific historical reasoning, but the exercise of what Bishop Butler well designates, that delusive faculty called man's imagination and fancy. Upon this whole question of the origin of Christian presbyters, I may notice an exhaustive Biblical inquiry, called "The Ruling Elder," by the Rev. Robert King of Ballymena, the learned author of a well-known Irish Church History. It appeared after this chapter was written.

[235] In the second century bishops were often called presbyters, though presbyters were not called bishops, or, to quote Bishop Lightfoot, "Essay on the Ministry," Philippians, p. 226: "In the language of IrenÆus, a presbyter is never designated a bishop, while on the other hand he very frequently speaks of a bishop as a presbyter." This usage long continued in the Church. Cyprian often expresses himself thus: cf. article on word "Senior" in Dict. Christ. Antiqq. Many instances of it occur in the literature of the early Celtic Church in Ireland, which was an offshoot of the Gallican Church and, through Gaul, of the Church of Western Asia Minor. In fact, this custom of calling bishops seniors or presbyters was used in Ireland till the twelfth century: see Ussher's Works, Ed. Elrington, vi. 517, 528. St. Bernard, for instance, in his Life of St. Malachy, calls the Bishop of Lismore "Senior Lesmorensis." I do not, as I have said, propose to enter any further into the debateable subject of Church government; but as I have come across this passage, and as I have already announced that I am writing this commentary as a decided Churchman, I may be permitted to state my own views, as history seems to me to set them forth, without entering into any discussion on the point. During the apostolic age the terms bishop and presbyter were interchangeable. As the apostles passed away, they seem to me to have established Episcopacy as the normal rule of the Church, though, doubtless, it was only by degrees that the title of bishop was appropriated to the office so created. By the time of Ignatius, that is, about 110 A.D., this appropriation was complete. As regards my authority for saying the apostles established Episcopacy, I simply appeal to IrenÆus, who, in his great work against Heresies, Book III., ch. iii., states in section i. that "the apostles instituted bishops in the churches," and then in sec. 3 proceeds to trace the line of these bishops in the Roman Church, beginning with Linus, "into whose hands the blessed apostles committed the office of the Episcopate." Now it is upon IrenÆus we largely depend for the proof of the canon of the New Testament and the Johannine origin of the Fourth Gospel. Surely if IrenÆus is a witness sufficient to establish the apostolic origin of the Gospels, he should be quite sufficient to establish the apostolic origin of Episcopacy! If IrenÆus is a competent witness to the true authorship of an anonymous document like the Fourth Gospel, he is surely competent to tell us of the true origin of a worldwide institution like Episcopacy. It is assuredly much easier to learn the origin of institutions than of documents.

[236] Thus in ch. xxiv. 10-16 he enlarges upon the subject of "the Way which they call a sect," a topic and a name fully discussed above on pp. 32, 33.

[237] See Lightfoot's Ignatius, vol. i., p. 452, upon the presence of Jews in the towns and cities of Proconsular Asia. Antiochus the Great transported two thousand Jewish families to these parts from Babylonia and Mesopotamia.

[238] Inscriptions, according to Josephus, were graven in Greek and Latin on stones fixed in a wall or balustrade which ran round the Temple, warning the Gentiles not to enter on pain of death: see Josephus, Wars, V. v. 2; Antiqq., XV. xi. 5. One of these stones was discovered some twenty years ago by M. Clermont Ganneau, with the inscription intact. It had been buried in the ground on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, where this learned Frenchman discovered it. A transcript of it can now be seen in Lewin's St. Paul, ii. 133. The inscription literally translated runs thus: "No alien to pass within the balustrade round the Temple and the inclosure. Whosoever shall be caught (so doing) must blame himself for the death that will ensue." This stone must often have been read by our Lord and His apostles, as they frequented the temple.

[239] It is very curious how perpetually St. Paul escaped the plots of the Jews at Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere. At Corinth the plot formed was revealed as it would seem just as he was about to go on board his vessel (ch. xx. 3). Doubtless there were concealed Christians to whose ears the plots came and by whom they were revealed.

[240] See Lewin's Fasti Sacri, pp. 314-16, for an elaborate account of each day's proceedings, and a discussion of the various problems, chronological and otherwise, which they raise.

[241] The Romans were always afraid of Jewish seditions. Seven years before St. Paul's imprisonment there had been a terrible outburst, in which Ananias the high priest had been himself involved, and which led to the despatch of Felix himself as procurator. He had effectually put down all disturbances, which led to the prolongation of his rule in Palestine for the very unusual period of eight years, from 52 to 60 A.D. This accounts for the words of Tertullus (ch. xxiv. 2): "Seeing that by thee we enjoy much peace, and that by thy providence evils are corrected for this nation." See Lewin's Fasti, pp. 296-98, 315, 320; Conybeare and Howson, ch. xxii.; and for the latest authority, SchÜrer's Geschichte des JÜdischen Volkes, i. 477-83, ii. 170 (Leipzig, 1886).

[242] Drusilla perished with her child by this union with Felix in the famous eruption of Vesuvius A.D. 79.

[243] See my remarks in the next chapter on the case of the church at Puteoli, which St. Paul found flourishing there on his voyage to Rome.

[244] This prophecy was not literally fulfilled. The Jews did not bind St. Paul, nor deliver him into Gentile hands. The Romans took him out of Jewish hands, and bound him for their own purposes. The Jews, however, brought this binding about, and were the cause of his captivity in Roman hands. On the question of prophets and prophesying in the primitive Church, see Dr. Salmon's article on Hermas, in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. ii., pp. 916-19.

[245] St. Paul, writing twelve months earlier than his arrest, expressly lays down this principle in 1 Corinthians vii. 18-20: "Was any man called being circumcised? let him not become uncircumcised. Hath any been called in uncircumcision? let him not be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but the keeping of the commandments of God. Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called."

[246] We see enough of this in politics. We see it in the Church as well. Writing as one with nearly a quarter of a century's experience of a disestablished, and therefore of a popularly governed Church, I have seen a great deal of this tendency in ecclesiastical matters. Prominent and ambitious men are ever apt to fall into the snare here noted. The tendency of popular assemblies is ever to develop a class of men who will have but little backbone, and will be always ready to rectify their convictions to suit their constituencies. "Show thou me the way I should walk in," but in a very different sense from the Psalmist's, is the unuttered prayer of their lives, addressed to the popular audiences of whose opinions they are the mere expressions, not the guides. For such men this typical history has many a reproof in St. Paul's brave conduct upon this and every other occasion. He was never afraid of a little temporary misrepresentation, and therefore he proved a real guide to the Church of his own and of every age.

[247] See Eusebius, H. E., iii. 5, and the notes of Valesius on that passage.

[248] There is no necessity to adopt forced and unnatural explanations when an easy one lies ready to our hand, and we all have daily experience how hard it is for even a keen-sighted man to distinguish among a crowd the person who utters a brief exclamation; a fact which the debates in the House of Commons often illustrate. I can myself quite appreciate St. Paul's difficulty. I am extremely short-sighted, and am never able to discern—say in a meeting of one of our synods—who it is that interrupts or contradicts me.

[249] Any reader who wishes to see how this question was discussed about the year 200 A. D. should turn to Tertullian's treatise De Fuga in Persecutione, c. 6., in his works translated in Clark's Ante-Nicene Library, vol. i., p. 364, where Tertullian admits that the apostles fled in time of persecution, but argues that the permission to do so was merely temporary and personal to the apostles. The study of Church history is specially useful in showing us how exactly the same tendencies emerge in ancient and modern schisms and sects. Tertullian would have been a Quietist had he lived in the seventeenth century; see note 2, p. 446.

[250] St. Ignatius of Antioch was very desirous of martyrdom. St. Polycarp fifty years avoided it till he was arrested. St. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, iv. 16, 17, condemns the suicidal passion for martyrdom. St. Cyprian, enthusiastic as he was, retired like Polycarp till escape was impossible. These holy men all acted like St. Paul. They waited till God had intimated His will by shutting up all way of escape. The story of Polycarp has an interesting warning against presumptuous rushing upon trials. Quintus, one of St. Polycarp's flock, gave himself up to death. His courage failed him at the last, and he became an apostate: see on this subject Lightfoot's Ignatius and Polycarp, vol. i., pp. 38, 393, 603.

[251] Quietism, Jansenism, and Quakerism were all manifestations of the same spirit, and arose about the same time. Molinos was the founder of Quietism in Spain. A concise account of the movement will be found in Schaffs Theological EncyclopÆdia in connexion with the names of Molinos and Guyon.

[252] This involves, however, the supposition that St. Luke's narrative had then obtained its more modern name of "the Gospel," which is in my opinion an anachronism. In the earliest writings which refer to apostolic narratives they are simply called the writings or memoirs or commentaries of the apostles, as in Aristides, c. xvi., and Justin Martyr, Apol., i. 67. In Aristides there is one passage in ch. ii. where the word gospel is used, but not in the sense of a special title for a book: "This is taught from that Gospel which a little while ago was spoken among them as being preached; wherein if ye also will read, ye will comprehend the power that is upon it." IrenÆus, III. xi. 7, 8, is the earliest I can now recall who uses the word gospel in this technical sense. He speaks there of the Gospel of St. Matthew, etc. But this was in the last quarter of the second century. In the year 57, when Second Corinthians was written, the word gospel was applied to the whole body of revealed truth held by the Church, and not to a book.

[253] Iren., iii. 1: "Luke, also the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by him." With respect to the relation between St. Paul and St. Luke, see also Iren., iii., xiv., xv.

[254] The subject of Christianity and the household of CÆsarea would form an interesting subject of inquiry did only space permit. I have, however, the less hesitation in passing it over because it has been exhaustively discussed by Bishop Lightfoot in the following places, to which I must refer my readers: Philippians, Introduction pp. 1-28, and in dissertations on, pp. 97-102 and 169-76. This is also the subject of an elaborate monograph by Professor Harnack in the Princeton Review for July 1878, entitled "Christians and Rome," with which should be compared SchÜrer's Geschichte des JÜdischen Volkes, ii. 506-512, and a treatise published by him Die Gemeindeverfassung der Juden in Rom., Leipzig 1879.

[255] The governors brought with them regular bodies of assessors, who assisted them like a privy council. There is a reference to this council in Acts xxv. 12 and xxvi. 30. These councils served as training schools in law and statesmanship for the young Roman nobility. See Marquardt, l.c., p. 391.

[256] Roman citizens had the right of appeal no matter where they were born or of what race they came or how humble their lot in life. Mere provincials devoid of citizenship, no matter how distinguished their position, had not that right.

[257] Julius is one of those unknown characters of Scripture about whom we would desire more information. He is described as a centurion of the Augustan band, which was the imperial guard, and was always stationed at Rome. Julius may possibly have been an officer of this guard sent out with Festus and now returning back to his duties.

[258] See Josephus, Wars, VII. ii. 1. It was exactly the same with Titus, Vespasian's son, after the war ended. He travelled from Alexandria to Italy in a trading vessel. Suet., Tit., c. 5.

[259] The accuracy of the Acts in representing Puteoli as the seat of an early church has been amply illustrated by modern investigations. Judaism was flourishing there from the earliest times. In the year 4 B.C. a colony of wealthy Jews was established at Puteoli (Josephus, Wars, II. vii. 1). An inscription has been found there commemorating a Jewish merchant of Ascalon named Herod (SchÜrer's JÜdisch. Volk., I. 234).

[260] This point is elaborated by Mr. Cazenove in an article on the Theban Legion contained in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, iii. 642.

[261] This interesting inscription will be found in Mommsen, Corpus of Latin Inscriptions, vol. iv., No. 679. I described it in the Contemporary Review for January 1881, p. 97, in an article on Latin Christian Inscriptions. This inscription fully bears out Lord Lytton in the picture he gives of the introduction of Christianity into the neighbourhood of Vesuvius and Naples in his Last Days of Pompeii.

[262] Romans xvi. is a sufficient witness of the intimate knowledge of the Roman Church and its membership possessed by St. Paul. We may be sure that many mentioned in that catalogue written three or four years before found a place in the two deputations who went to meet St. Paul.

[263] See for proof of this Harnack's article in the Princeton Review, quoted above.

[264] The various biographies of the Apostle, and specially that of Conybeare & Howson, follow the Apostle's history in great detail during these two years; but the story of that period more properly falls under the consideration of the writers upon the Epistles of the Captivity than of one dealing with the Acts of the Apostles. If I were to discuss St. Paul's life at Rome I should have simply to borrow all my details from these Epistles. The abruptness of St. Luke's termination of his narrative is very noteworthy, and the best proof of the early date of the Acts. I do not think I need add anything to Dr. Salmon's argument on this point contained in the following words, which I take from chap. xviii. of his Introduction: "To my mind the simplest explanation why St. Luke has told us no more is, that he knew no more; and that he knew no more, because at the time nothing more had happened—in other words, that the book of the Acts was written a little more than two years after Paul's arrival in Rome."