The life and work of St. Paul

THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS,
their own hands, 1 and not to meddle with others, and not to rely on the
assistance of others, but to present to the outer world a spectacle of honour-
able and active independence (vs. 11, 12).
And now, by these moral exhortations, by thus recalling them from overeschatological
excitement to the quiet fulfilment of the personal' duties which
lay nearest at haud, he has prepared the way for the removal of a serious
doubt which had troubled some of them. Since he loft them there had been
deaths in the littlo community, and these deaths had been regarded by some
of the survivors with a peculiar despondency. They had been taught again
and again to hope for, to look unto, the coming of Christ. That blessed
Presence was to be for them the
of all wrongs, the consolation for
solution of all
all sufferings.
perplexities, the righting
What the hopes of the
birth of the Messiah had been to the Jew, that the hope of His return with
all His saints was to the early Christian. And it was natural that such a
topic should be prominent in the addresses to a church which, from its very
2
foundation, had been, and for years continued to be, peculiarly afflicted.
*"*WTiat, then, was to be said about those who had died, and therefore had not
t,een the promise of Christ's coming ? What could be said of those whose
life had ended like the common life of men no wrongs righted, no miseries
consoled? Had not they been beguiled of their promise, disappointed in
their hope, deceived, even, as to the event on which they had fixed their
faith ? And if they, why not others ? If the dead were thus frustrated in
their expectation, why might not the living be ? St. Paul has already given
them the advice which would prevent them from brooding too much on that
one uncertain moment of Christ's coming. He has bidden them be pure, and
loving, and diligent, and live their daily lives in simple honour and faithfulness.
He would have eminently approved the quiet good sense of that
president of the Puritan assembly, who, when a dense darkness came on,
and some one proposed that they should adjourn because it might be the
beginning of the Day of Judgment, proposed rather that caudles should be
lighted, because if it was to be the Day of Judgment, they could not be found
better employed than in the quiet transaction of duty. But Paul does not
leave his converts in their perplexity about their departed friends. He tells
them, in words which have comforted millions of mourners since, not to sorrow
as those that have no hope, 3 for that " if we believe that Jesus died and
I This shows that the Thessalonian converts were mainly artisan*.
II 2 Cor. vii. 5.
3 That the Gentiles were at this time, as a rule, despondent in their views of death,
"
in spite of dim hopes and splendid guesses, is certain. Mortuus nee ad DCOB, nee ad
homines acceptus est" (Corp. Inscr. i. 118; Boissier, La Rd. Rom, L 304, teq.). See,
for the more ancient Greek view, Jisch. Eumen. 648, &o. The shade of Achilles says to
Ulysses in Hades :
" '
Talk not of reigning In this dolorous gloom,
JJor think vain words/ he cried, '
can ease my doom ;
Better by fax laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air
Slave to the meanest hiud that begs his bread.
Than reign the sceytred monarch of the deafl..