The life and work of St. Paul

664 THE LIFE AND WORK OF BT. PAUL,
people also will learn to follow the example of these kindly services to all who
require them, that they m*y not be
"
unfruitful. All who are with me salute
thee. Salute those who love us in the faith. God's grace with you all."
These last three greetings have several points of interest. They show us
that Paul, who was soon to be so sadly and unworthily deserted, was still
carrying on his manifold missionary activities as one in a band of devoted
friends. The fact that they differ in expression from every other closing
salutation is a mart of authenticity, because a forger would have been sure
to confine himself to a servile and unsuspicious repetition of one of the forms
which occur elsewhere. But what does St. Paul mean by the remarkable expression,
"let our people also learn to be forward in good works "P It is
"
but this is
usually explained to mean " the other believers as well as thou ;
obviously unsatisfactory. On the other hand, we have no sufficient data to
interpret it of the existence of converts of Apollos forming a different body
from those of Paul. Its very obscurity is a sign that the allusion is to some
fact which was known to the correspondent, but is unknown to us.
Titus here disappears from Christian history. The rest of his biography
evaporates into the misty outlines of late ecclesiastical conjecture scarcely to
be dignified by the name of tradition.
CHAPTER LV.
THE CLOSING DAYS,
'* Christianus etfam extra carcerem saeoulo renuntiavit,
in careers autem etiam
carceri. . . . Ipsam etiam conversationen saeculi et carceris comparemus, si
non plus in carcere spiritus acquirit, quam cai-o amittit." TERT. ad Mart. 2.
" In a free state Gaius would have found his way to Bedlam, and Nero to
Tyburn." FREEMAN, Essays,
ii. 337.
SOME of those critics who have been most hostile to the genuineness of the
Pastoral Epistles have felt and expressed a certain reluctance to set down the
Second Epistle to Timothy as the work of a forger, and to rob the world of
this supremely noble and tender testament of the dying soldier of Christ.
And some who have rejected the two other Epistles have made an exception
in favour of this. For myself I can only express my astonishment that any
one who is sufficiently acquainted with the Christian literature of the first
two centuries to see how few writers there were who showed a power even
distantly capable of producing such a letter, can feel any hesitation as to its
having been written by the hand of Paul. The Tubingen critics argue that
the three Epistles must stand or fall together, and think that the First
Epistle to Timothy shows signs of spuriousness, which drags the other two
letters into the same condemnation. Accepting the close relationship which
binds the three letters together, and seeing sufficient grounds in the First
Epistle to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus to furnish at least a very strong