The life and work of St. Paul

326 THE LIFE AND WOKK OF ST. PAUL.
certainly is the earliest of those that have come down to us. He had begun,
therefore, that new form of activity which has produced effects so memorable
to all generations of the Christian world.
We have already seen that Paul had left Timotheus in Macedonia, had
been joined by him in Athens, and had once more parted from him, though
with deep reluctance and at great self-sacrifice, because his heart yearned for
his Thessalonian converts, and he had been twice prevented from carrying out
his earnest desire to visit them once more. After doing all that he could to
comfort and support them in their many trials, Timotheus had returned, in
company with Silas, to Corinth, and doubtless there the Apostle had talked
with them long and earnestly about the friends and brethren who had been
won to Christ in the Macedonian city. There was deep cause for thankfulness
in their general condition, but there was some need for advice and consolation.
Paul could not send Timothy again. There was other work to be done. Other
Churches required his own personal services. Nor could he spare the com-
panions of his toils in the midst of a city which demanded his whole energy
and strength. But since he could neither come to the Thessalonians himself,
nor send them back his truest and dearest fellow-workers, he would at least
write to them, and let his letter supply, as far as possible, the void created by
his absence. It was a very happy Providence which inspired him with this
thought. It would come quite naturally to him, because it had been a custom
in all ages for Jewish communities to correspond with each other by means of
travelling deputations, and because the prodigious development of intercourse
between the chief cities of Italy, Greece, and Asia rendered it easy to send one
or other of the brethren as the bearer of
correspondence
his missives. And epistolary
was the very form which was of all others the best
adapted to the Apostle's individuality. It suited the impetuosity
emotion which could not have been fettered down to the composition
of
of
formal treatises. It could be taken up or dropped according to the
necessities of the occasion or the feelings of the writer. It permitted
of a freedom of expression which was far more intense and far more
natural to the Apostle than the regular syllogisms and rounded periods of a
book. It admitted something of the tenderness and something of the
familiarity of personal intercourse. Into no other literary form could he have
infused that intensity which made a Christian scholar truly say of him that he
alone of writers seems to have written, not with fingers and pen and ink, but
with his very heart, his very feelings, the unbared
* which made Jerome say that in his
palpitations of his
writings the words
inmost being ;
were all so many thunders 2
; which made Luther say that his expressions
were like living creatures with hands and feet. The theological importance of
this consideration is immense, and has, to the deep injury of the Church, been
amid the disorders of the times, letters written on fugitive materials should have perished,
especially as many of them may have been wholly undoctrinal. In 2 Thess. iii. 17 could
St. Paul say 3