The life and work of St. Paul

THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAWS. 325
to it any immortality he possesses; that he -would for all time be mainly
judged of by the glimpse we get of him on that particular morning ; that
he had flung away the greatest opportunity of his life when he closed the
lips of the haggard Jewish prisoner whom his decision rescued from the
clutches of his countrymen ;
that a correspondence between that Jew Shaul,
or Paulus, and his great brother Seneca, would be forged and would go down
to posterity; 1 that it would be believed for centuries that that wretched
prisoner had converted the splendid philosopher to his own " execrable superstition,"
and that Seneca had borrowed from him the finest sentiments of
his writings ; that for all future ages that bent, ophthalmic, nervous, unknown
Jew, against whom all other Jews seemed for some inconceivably foolish
reason to be so infuriated, would be regarded as transcendently more important
than his deified Emperors and immortal Stoics; that the "parcel of
questions " about a mere opinion, and names, and a matter of Jewish law,
which he had so disdainfully refused to hear, should hereafter become the
most prominent of all questions to the whole civilised world.
And Paul may have suspected many of these facts as little as " the sweet
Gallic" did. Sick at heart with this fresh outrage, and perhaps musing
sadly on the utterance of his Master that He came not to send peace on earth
but a sword, he made his way back from the bema of the great Proconsul to
the little congregation in the room of Justus, or to his lodging in the squalid
and Priscilla.
shop of Aquila
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CHAPTER XXIX.
THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIAWS.
"Ergo latet ultimus dies ut observentur omnes dies." ADO.
AT some period during his stay in Corinth, and probably before his arrest by
the Jews early in the year 53, or at the close of A.D. 52,an event had taken
place of immense significance in the life of the Apostle and in the history of
the Christian faith. He had written to the Thessalonians a letter which may
possibly have been the first he wrote to any Christian church,8 and which
i No one in these days doubts that the letters of St. Paul and Seneca (Fleury, St.
Paul and Slneque, ii. 300 ; Aubertin, Seneque et St. Paul, 409 ; Lightfoot, Phil. 327 ;
Boissier, La Religion Bomaine, ii. 52104) are spurious. On the real explanation of the
resemblances between the two, see Seekers after God, p. 270, tq., and passim. It will
there be seen how small ground there is for Tertullian's expression Seneca tacpe
noster"
J I only put this as & possibility. It will be seen hereafter (see 1 Cor. v. 9 ; 2 Cor.
x. 9) that I regard it as certain that St. Paul wrote other letters, of which some perhaps
many_have perished ; and it is difficult to believe that (for instance) he wrote no word
of thanks to the Philippians for the contributions which they had twice sent to him at
Thessalonica, or that he wrote nothing to the Thessalonians themselves when he sent
Timothy to them from Athens. Does not the whole style of these Epistles show that
they could not have been the first specimens of their kind ? We cannot be surprised that,