The life and work of St. Paul

ST PAUL'S SOJOURN IN HOME. 583
of the miserable youth who was then the emperor of the world. He was
saddened at the rejection of his teaching by his unconverted countrymen, and
by the dislike and suspicion of Judaising Christians. He could not but feel
disheartened that some should be preaching Christ with the base and contentious
motive of adding affliction to his bonds. 1 His heart must have been
sometimes dismayed by the growth of subtle heresies in the infant Church.'
But, on the other hand, he was safe for the present from the incessant perils
and tumults of the past twenty years and he was ;
deprived of the possibility,
and therefore exempt from the hard necessity, of earning by incessant toil his
daily bread. And again, if he was neglected by Jews and Jndaisors, he was
acceptable to many of the Gentiles ;
if his Gospel was mutilated by unworthy
preachers, still Christ was preached ; if his bonds were irksome, they inspired
others with zeal and courage ; if one form of activity had by God's will been
restrained, others were still open to him, and while he was strengthening
distant Churches by his letters and emissaries, he was making God's message
known more and more widely in imperial Rome. He had preached with but
small success in Athens, which had been pre-eminently the homo of intellect ;
but he was daily reaping the fruit of his labours in the city of empire the
city which had snatched the sceptre from the decrepit hands of her elder
sister the capital of that race which represented the law, the order, and the
grandeur of the world.
That many of the great or the noble resorted to his teaching is wholly
improbable, nor is there a particle of truth in the tradition which, by the aid
of spurious letters, endeavoured to represent the philosopher Seneca as one of
his friends and correspondents. We have seen that Gallio prided himself
on ignoring his very existence; and it is certain that Seneca would have
shared, in this as in all other respects, the sentiments of his brother. In his
voluminous writings he never so much as alludes to the Christians, and if he
had done so he would have used exactly the same language as that so freely
adopted many years later and, therefore, when there was far less excuse
for it even by such enlightened spirits as Pliny, Tacitus, Epictetus, and
M. Aurelius. Nothing can less resemble the inner spirit of Christianity than
the pompous and empty vaunt of that dilettante Stoicism which Seneca
professed in every letter and treatise, and which he belied by the whole tenor
of his life. There were, indeed, some great moral principles which ho was
enabled to see, and to which ha gave eloquent expression, but they belonged
to the spirit of an age when Christianity was in the air, and when the loftiest
natures, sick with disgust or with satiety of the universal vice, took refuge in
the gathered experiences of the wise of every age. It is doubtful whether
Seneca ever heard more than the mare name of the Christians ; and of tiia
Jews he only speaks with incurable disdain. The ordinary life of the wealthy
and noble Roman of St. Paul's day was too much divided between abject
terror and unspeakable depravity to be reached by anything short of a
yniraculous awakening.
1 Phil. i. 16.
' Later Epistles,