The life and work of St. Paul

tHE LAST JOTTBNEY TO JERUSALEM. 519
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at Tyre, and St. Paul may have seen them on previous occasions ; but in so
populous and busy a town it required a little effort to find them. 2 With them
Paul stayed his usual period of seven days, and they by the Spirit told him
not to go to Jerusalem. He knew, however, all that they could tell him of
impending danger, and he too was under the guidance of the same Spirit which
urged him along a fettered but willing captive. When the week was over 3
St. Paul left them; and so deeply in that brief period had he won their affections,
that all the members of the little community, with their wives and children,
started with him to conduct him on his way. Before they reached the vessel
they knelt down side by side, men and women and b'ttle ones, somewhere on
the surf-beat rocks 4 near which the vessel was moored, to pray together he for
them, and they for him before they returned to their homes ; and he went
once more on board for the last stage of his voyage from Tyre to Ptolemais,
the modem Acre. There they finally left their vessel, and went to greet the
disciples, with whom they stayed for a single day, and then journeyed by land
across the plain of Sharon bright at that time with a thousand flowers of
spring the forty-four miles which separate Acre from Cassarea. Here St. Paul
lingered till the very eve of the feast. Eeady to face danger when duty
called, he had no desire to extend the period of it, or increase its certainty.
At Csesarea, therefore, he stayed with his companions for several days, and
they were the last happy days of freedom which for a long time he was
destined to spend. God graciously refreshed his spirit by this brief interval
of delightful intercourse and rest. For at Csesarea they were the guests of
one who must have been bound to Paul by many ties of the deepest sympathy
Philip the Evangelist. A Hellenist like himself, and a liberal Hellenist,
Philip, as Paul would have been most glad to recognise, had been the first to show
the large sympathy and clear insight, without which Paul's own work would
have been impossible.
It was Philip who had evangelised the hated Samari-
tans ; it was Philip who had had the courage to baptise the Ethiopian eunuch.
The lots of these two noble workers had been closely intertwined. It was the
furious persecution of Saul the Pharisee which had scattered the Church of
Jerusalem, and thus rendered useless the organisation of the seven deacons.
Ifc was in flight from that persecution that the career of Philip had been
i Acts xrvi. 20 ; Gal. 1. 21.
3 "
xxi. 4, avtvpovrt* TOVS /uaflip-as, Seeking out the disciples," not as in E. V. "finding
disciples."
3 xxi. 5. IfaprtW usually means "to refit, "but hers with i^e'pasit seems to mean
"complete." Hesychius makes it equivalent to reXsiwcrai, and so Theophylact and
(Ecumeuius understood it. Meyer is probably mistaken in giving the word its first
meaning here.
4 Ver. 5, aiyiaXw. Of. xxvii. 39. There is, indeed, a long range of sandy shore
between Tyre and Sidon, but near the city there are also rocky places. Dr. Hackett,
ad- loc., quotes a strikingly parallel experience of an American missionary, Mr. Schneider,
at Anrtab, near Tarsus :
" More than a hundred converts accompanied us out of the
city ; and there, near the spot where one of our number had once been stoned, we halted,
and a prayer was offered, amid tears. Between thirty and forty escorted us two hours
farther . . . Then another prayer was offered, and with saddened countenances and
with weeping they forcibly broke away from us. (Cf. ajr