The life and work of St. Paul

THH CLOSING DATS. W
probability of their genuineness, it seems to me that the probability is raised
to certainty by the undoubted genuineness of the Second Epistle to Timothy.
If, indeed, St. Paul was never liberated from his first Roman imprisonment,
then the Pastoral Epistles must be forgeries ; for the attempts of Wieseler
and others to prove that they might have been -written during any part of the
period covered by the narrative of the Acts during the three years' stay at
Ephesus, for instance, or the stay of eighteen months at Corinth sink to the
ground not only under the weight of their own arbitrary hypotheses, but even
more from the state both of the Church and of the mind and circumstances of
the Apostle, which these letters so definitely manifest. But as the liberation
and second imprisonment of St. Paul are decidedly favoured by tradition, and
give a most easy and natural explanation to every allusion in these and in
earlier Epistles, and as no single valid objection can be urged against this belief,
I believe that there would never have been any attempt to disprove its possibility
except from the hardly-concealed desire to get rid of these letters
the truths to which they bear emphatic witness.
and
The allusions in the Second Epistle, though too fragmentary and insig-
nificant to have been imagined by an imitator, are only allusions, and it is quite
possible that they may not supply us with sufficient data to enable us to
arrive at any continuous narrative of events in the Apostle's history between
his first and second imprisonment. To dwell on these events at any length
would therefore be misleading ; but it is perfectly allowable to construct an
hypothesis which is simple in itself, and which fits in with every circumstance
to which any reference is made. The probability of the hypothesis, and the
natural manner in which it suits the little details to which St. Paul refers, is
one more of the many indications that we are dealing here with genuine letters.
If, then, we piece together the personal notices of this Epistle, they enable
us to trace the further fortunes of St. Paul after the winter which he spent
at Nicopolis, in the society of Titus. At his age, and with his growing
infirmities conscious too, as he must have been, from those inward intimations
which are rarely wanting, that his life was drawing to a close it is most
unlikely that he should have entered on new missions, and it is certain that
he would have found more than sufficient scope for all his energies in the
consolidation of the many Greek and Eastern Churches which he had
founded, and in the endeavour to protect them from the subtle leaven of
spreading heresies. The main part of his work was accomplished. At
Jerusalem and at Antioch he had vindicated for ever the freedom of the
Gentile from the yoke of the Levitic Law. In his letters to the Romans and
Galatians he had proclaimed alike to Jew and Gentile that we are not under
the Law, but under grace. He had rescued Christianity from the peril of
dying away into a Jewish sect, only distinguishable from Judaism by the
accepted fulfilment of Messianic hopes. Labouring as no other Apostle had
laboured, he had preached the Gospel in the chief cities of the world, from
Jerusalem to Rome, and perhaps even as far as Spain. During the short
space of twenty years he had proclaimed Christ crucified to the simple