The life and work of St. Paul

BEGINNING OF THE SECOND MISSIONARY JOURNEY. 265
from the yoke of external and useless ordinances), " for I, too, made myself as
you are.1 Jew that I was, I placed myself on the level of you Gentiles, and
now I want you to stand with me on that same level, instead of trying to
make yourselves Jews. I do not wish to speak by way of complaint about
you. Tou never did me any personal wrong. 8
Nay, you know that when I
preached the Gospel among you, on my first visit, it was in consequence of an
attack of sickness, which detained me in the midst of a journey; you could
not, therefore, feel any gratitude to me as though I had come with the express
purpose of preaching to you ; and besides, at that time weak, agonised with
pain, liable to fits of delirium, with my eyes red and ulcerated by that disease
by which it pleases God to let Satan buffet me, you might well have been
tempted to regard me as a deplorable object. My whole appearance must
have been a trial to you a temptation to you to reject me. But you did
have treated me with con-
not ; you were very kind to me. You might
temptuous indifference 3
; you might have regarded me *
with positive loathing ;
but instead of this you honoured, you loved me, you received me as though
I was an angel nay, even as though I were the Lord of angels, as though I
wore even He whom I preached unto you. How glad you were to see me !
How eagerly you congratulated yourselves and mo on the blessed accident-
nay, rather, on the blessed providence of God, which had detained me amongst
you! 5 So generous, so affectionate wore you towards me, that I bear
yon witness that to aid me as I sat in misery in the darkened rooms,
unable to bear even a ray of light without excruciating pain, yon would,
rendered "become;" and the "Jam as you are" should be "I became;" the "havenot
injured " should be " did not injure," since the tense is an aorist, not a perfect, and the
allusion is to some fact which we do not know. In verse 13 the S ought not to be left
unnoticed; "through infirmity of the flesh" is a positive mistake (since this would
require Ji' o