The life and work of St. Paul

I-RTTITS OP FAITH. 509
turn his face towards Spain, and visit them on his way, and he is confident that he
shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He, therefore,
earnestly entreats their prayers that he may be rescued from the perils which
he knows await him from the Jews in Jerusalem, and that the contribution due to
his exertions may be favourably received by the saints, that so by God's will he
may come to them in joy, and that they may mutually refresh each other. 1 " And
the God of peace be with you all. Amen."'
There in all probability ended the Epistle to the Romans. I have already
given abundant reason in support of the ingenious conjecture 3 that the
greater part of the sixteenth chapter was addressed to the Epliesian Church. 4
Even a careless reader could scarcely help observing whatVe should not at all
have conjectured from the earlier part of the Epistle that there were schisms
and scandals (17 20) in the Roman Church, and teachers who deliberately
fomented them, slaves of their own belly, and by their plausibility and
flattery deceiving the hearts of the simple. 5
Nor, again, can any one miss the
fact that the position of the Apostle towards his correspondents in verse 19 is
far more severe, paternal, and authoritative than in the other chapters. If
as is surely an extremely reasonable supposition St. Paul desired other
Churches besides the stranger Church of Rome to reap the benefit of his
ripest thoughts, and to read the maturest statement of the Gospel which he
preached, then several copies of the main part of the Epistle must have been
made by the amanuenses, of whom Tertius was one, and whose services the
Apostle was at that moment so easily able to procure. In that case nothing is
more likely than that the terminations of the various copies should have
varied with the circumstances of the Churches, and nothing more possible
than that in some one copy the various terminations should have been care-
fully preserved. We have at any rate in this hypothesis a simple explanation
of the three final benedictions (20, 24, 27) which occur in this chapter alone.
The fullest of the Apostle's letters concludes with the most elaborate of
his doxologies.'
1 xv. 32, KU avv*vairtt.v