The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL AND ONESIMU8. 623
won for him so many deeply-attached friends, must have often communicated
with them by brief letters, but the Epistle to Philemon is the only private
letter of this correspondence which has been preserved for us the only private
letter in the canon of the New Testament, with the exception of the brief
letter of St. John to the well-beloved Gaius. 1 "We cannot but regret the loss.
Hundreds of letters of Cicero, of Seiieca, and of Pliny, have come down to us,
and, though some of them are models of grace and eloquence, how gladly
would we resign them all for even one or two of those written by the Apostle t
In style, indeed, his letter is quite careless and unpolished ; but whereas the
letters of the great Romans, with all their literary skill and finish, often leave
on us an involuntary impression of the vanity, the insincerity, even in some
instances the entire moral instability of their writers, on the other hand, this
brief letter of St. Paul reveals to us yet another glimpse of a character worthy
of the very noblest utterances which we find in his other Epistles. These few
lines, at onee so warmhearted and so dignified, which theological bigotry was
once inclined to despise as insignificant, express principles of eternal applicability
which even down to the latest times have had no small influence in
the development of the world's history. With all the slightness of its texture,
and the comparative triviality of the occasion which called it forth, the letter
is yet a model of tact, of sympathy, and of high moral nobleness. This little
" idyl of the progress of Christianity " 2 shows that under the worn and
ragged gabardine of the wandering missionary there beat the heart of a true
gentleman, whose high-bred manners would have done honour to any court. 3
We have seen that during his imprisonment St. Paul was, by " that unseen
Providence which men nickname Chance," brought into contact with a
runaway slave from Colossse, whose name was Onesimus, or " Profitable." Ho
had fled to Koine to Rome, the common sentina of the world 4
to hide
himself from the consequences of crimes for which a heat-lien master might
without compunction have consigned him to the erga^tulum or the cross ; and
in the basement of one of the huge Roman insulae, or in the hovel of some
fellow-child of vice and misery in that seething mass of human wretchedness
which weltered like gathered scum on the fringe of the glittering tide of
civilisation, he was more secure than anywhere else of remaining undetected.
What it was that rescued him from the degradations which were the sole
possible outcome of such an ill-begun career wo cannot tell. He would soon
exhaust what he had stolen from his master ; and as Rome was full to over-
flowing of slaves and idlers as the openings for an honest maintenance even
5n tho barest poverty were few it is hard to see what resource was left to
1 The " "
elect lady of 2 John 1. 1 is believed to be, not an Individual, bat a Church.
s Davies.
* Even Baur seems to blush for the necessity which made him declare this Epistle
spurious. He only does so because it is more or less involved with the other three, and
stands or falls with them. "What has criticism to do with this short, attractive,
friendly, and graceful letter, inspired as it is by the noblest Christian feeling, and which
has never yet been touched by the breath of suspicion ?" (Paul. ii. 80.)
* SalL Cat. xxxviL 5.