The life and work of St. Paul

354 THE LIFE AND WOEK OF ST. PAUL.
course. God bad counted him worthy of being entrusted with a sacred cause.
He had a work to do ; he had a Gospel to preach. If in obeying this call of
God he met with human sympathy and kindness, well ;
if not, it was no great
matter. Life might be bitter, but life was short, and the light affliction which
was but for a moment was nothing to the exceeding and eternal weight of
glory. Once more he set forth for a new, and, as it turned out, for the most
brilliantly energetic, for the most eternally fruitful, for the most overwhelmingly
afflictive period of his life of toil.
From Jerusalem he went to Antioch, where we can well imagine that a
warmer and kindlier greeting awaited him. In that more cordial environment
he rested for some little time ; and thence, amid many a day of weariness and
struggle, but cheered in all probability by the companionship of Timothy and
Titus, and perhaps also of Gains, Aristarchns, and Erastus, he passed once more
through the famous Cilician gates of Taurus, 1 and travelled overland through
the eastern region of Asia Minor, 2
confirming on his way the Churches of
Galatia and Phrygia. In Galatia he ordered collections to be made for the
poor at Jerusalem by a weekly offertory every Sunday. 3 He also found it
necessary to give them some very serious warnings ; and although, as yet,
there had been no direct apostasy from the doctrines which he had taught, he
could trace a perceptible diminution of the affectionate fervour with which he
had been at first received by that bright but fickle population.* Having thus
endeavoured to secure the foundations which he had laid in the past, he
descended from the Phrygian uplands, and caught a fresh glimpse of the
Marseilles of the ^Egean, the hostelry and emporium of east and 5
west, the
great capital of Proconsular Asia. Very memorable were the results of his
visit. Ephesus was the third capital and starting-point of Christianity. At
Antioch had been
Jerusalem, Christianity was born in the cradle of Judaism ;
the starting-point of the Church of the Gentiles ; Ephesus was to witness its
full development, and the final amalgamation of its unconsolidated elements
in the work of John, the Apostle of Love. It lay one mile from the Icarian
Sea, in the fair Asian meadow where myriads of swans and other waterfowl
disported themselves amid the windings of Cayster. 8
Its buildings were
clustered under the protecting shadows of Coressus and Prion, and in the
delightful neighbourhood of the Ortygian Groves. Its haven, which had once
been among the most sheltered and commodious in the Mediterranean, had
been partly silted up by a mistake in
engineering, but was still thronged with
vessels from every part of the civilised world. It lay at the meeting-point of
great roads, which led northwards to Sardis and Troas, southwards to Magnesia
and Antioch, and thus commanded easy access to the great river- valleys of the
Hermus and Maeander, and the whole interior continent. Its seas and rivers
1 From Antioch to the Cilician gates, through Tarsus, is 412 miles,
9
ai-tartpuca ig practically equivalent to ivaro^iKa.
* 1 Cor. xvi. 1, 2. But the collection does not seem to have been sent with that of
the Grecian churches (Rom. xv. 25, 26). Perhaps the Judaic emissaries got hold of it.
Gal. iv. 16 ; v. 21. * Kenan, p. 337.
* Now the Kutschuk Menclerr, or Little Maeander.