The life and work of St. Paul

512 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
Paul had left him on his first visit, 1 and the two stayed at the Roman colony
to keep the Passover. Very happy, we may be sure, was that quiet time spent
by St. Paul in the bosom of the Church which he loved best of all amid the
most blameless and the most warm-hearted of all his converts. Years must
have elapsed before he again spent a Passover in
2
and happy.
circumstances so peaceful
The eight days of the feast ended in that year on Monday, April 3, and on
the next day they set sail. Detained by calms, or contrary winds, they took
8
five days to sail to Troas, and there 4
they again stayed seven days. The delay
was singular, considering the haste with which the Apostle was pressing forward
to make sure of being at Jerusalem by Pentecost. It was now about the
10th of April, and as the Pentecost of that year fell on May 17, St. Paul,
dependent as he was on the extreme uncertainties of ancient navigation, had
not a single day to spare. We may be quite sure that it was neither the
splendour of the town, with its granite temples and massive gymnasium, that
detained him, nor all the archaic and poetic associations of its neighbourhood,
nor yet the loveliness of the groves and mountains and gleams of blue sea.
Although his former visits had been twice cut short once by the Macedonian
vision, and once by his anxiety to meet Titus it is even doubtful whether he
would have been kept there by the interest which he must have necessarily felt
in the young and flourishing Church of a town which was one of the Tory few
in which he had not been subjected to persecution. The delay was therefore
probably due to the difficulty of finding or chartering a vessel such as they
required. 6
Be that as it may, his week's sojourn was marked by a scene which is
peculiarly interesting, as one of the few glimpses of ancient Christian worship
which the New Testament affords. The wild disorders of vanity, fanaticism, and
greed, which produced so strange a spectacle in the Church of Corinth, would
give us, if we did not regard them as wholly exceptional, a most unfavourable
conception of these Sunday assemblies. Very different, happily, is the scene to
which we are presented on this April Sunday at Alexandria Troas, A.D. 58. 5
It was an evening meeting. Whether at this period the Christians had
already begun the custom of meeting twice early in the morning, before
dawn, to sing and pray, and late in the evening to partake of the Love Feast
and the Lord's Supper, as they did some fifty years after this time in the
neighbouring province of Bithynia we are not told. Great obscurity hangs
over the observance of the Lord's day in the first century. The Jewish
1 The first person plural is resumed in the narrative at xx. 5, having been abandoned
at xvi. 17. It is now continued to the end of the Acts, and Luke seems to have remained
with St. Paul to the last (2 Tim. iv. 11).
2
Lewin, Fasti Sacri, 1857.
3 It had only taken them two days to sail from Troas to Neapolis, the port of Philippi,
on a former occasion, xvi. 11.
4
Compare xx. 6, xd. 4, xxviil. 14. 2 Cor. ii. 13.
' It was early called Sunday, even by Christians. TJ} nv 'HAi'ov tayopcVg iMMf (Just
Mart. Apul. ii. 228).
Plin. Ep. x. 96. "Quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire , . . quibus