The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLES OF THE CAPTIVITY. 593
comparative calmness, the spiritual joy which breathes through its holy resig-
nation, the absence of impassioned appeal and impetuous reasoning, mark its
affinity to the three by which it was immediately followed. Although not
much more than four years had now elapsed since Paul, a free man and an
active Apostle, elaborated at Corinth the great argument which he had
addressed to the Gentiles and proselytes, who formed the bulk of the Church
of Rome, his controversy with Judaism had to some extent faded into the
background. Every Church that he had founded was now fully aware of
his sentiments on the questions which were agitated between the advocates
of Judaic rigour and Gospel freedom. In writing to the Philippians there
was no need to dwell on these debates, for whatever dangers might yet
await them dangers sufficiently real to call forth one energetic outburst,
which reminds us of his earlier tone they had up to this time proved
themselves faithful to his teaching, and were as yet unsophisticated by any
tampering interference of emissaries from Jerusalem. The Judaisers of the
party of James may have heard enough of the devotion of the Philippians for
St. Paul to show them that it would be unadvisable to dog his footsteps
through the Christian Churches of Macedonia. They might leave their view
of the question with better policy in the hands of those unconverted Jews,
who would never hesitate to use on its behalf the engines of persecution.
Thus St. Paul had no need to enter on the debate which had so recently
occupied the maturity of his powers ; and in the Epistle to the Philippians
we have only " the spent waves of this controversy." Nevertheless, as we
have seen, his was a mind whose sensitive chords continued to quiver long
after they had been struck by the plectrum of any particular emotion. He
was reminded of past controversies by the coldness and neglect of a community
in which some " preached Christ even of contention, supposing to add
affliction to his bonds." If, then, he dwelt on doctrinal considerations at all
in a letter of affectionate greetings to the community which was dearest to
his heart, they would naturally be those on which he had last most deeply
thought. By the time that he sat down to dictate the Epistle to the Colossians
a fresh set of experiences had befallen him. His religious musings had
been turned in an entirely different direction. The visit of Epaphras of
ColossEe had made him aware of new errors, entirely different from those
which he had already combated, and the Churches of Proconsular Asia evi-
dently needed that his teaching should be directed to questions which lay far
apart from the controversies of the last eight years. On the other hand, I
regard it as psychologically certain that, had the Epistle to the Philippians
been written, as so many critics believe, after those to the " Ephesians " and
its surface some
Colossians, it could not possibly have failed to bear upon
traces of the controversy with that hybrid philosophy that Judaic form of
incipient Gnosticism in which he had been so recently engaged. These considerations
seem to me to have decided the true order of the Epistles of the
Captivity, and to give its only importance to a question on which little would
otherwise depend.
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