The life and work of St. Paul

666 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
Pagans of Lycaonia, the fickle fanatics of Galatia, the dreamy mystics of
Phrygia, the vigorous colonists of Macedonia, the superficial dilettanti of
Athens, the sensual and self-satisfied traders of Corinth, the semi-barbarous
natives of Dalmatia, the ill-reputed islanders of Crete, the slaves and
soldiers and seething multitudes of Borne. He had created the terminology,
he had formulated the truths of Christianity. It had been his rare blessedness
to serve the Gospel at once as an active missionary and as a profound thinker.
The main part of his work was done. There was no further danger to be
apprehended from " them of the circumcision," or from " certain who came
from James." New dangers were arising, but their worst developments lay
far in the future. 1 As Karl the Great burst into tears when, after a life spent
in subjugating Lombards and Saxons, he saw in the offing the barques of the
pirate Norsemen, and knew that they would never give much trouble in his
own days, but wept to think of the troubles which they would cause hereafter,
so Paul felt the presentiment of future perils from the Essenic elements
which were destined to ripen into Gnosticism, but he did not live to witness
their full development. His desire would be, not to attempt the foundation
of new Churches, but to forewarn and to strengthen the beloved Churches
which he had already founded.
And therefore, after he left Nicopolis, he would naturally travel back to
Bercea, Thessalonica, Philippi, and so by Neapolis to Troas, where he stayed
in the house of a disciple named Carpus. Here it was that the final crisis of
his fate seems to have overtaken him. It is at least a fair conjecture that he
would not have left at the house of Carpus his precious books, and the cloak
which was so necessary to him, unless his departure had been hasty and
perhaps involuntary. His work and his success in that town had been suffi-
ciently marked to attract general attention, and it was exactly the kind of
town in which he might have been liable to sudden arrest. Since Nero's
pei-secution of the Christians, they must have been more or less the objects
of hatred and suspicion throughout the Empire, and especially in the
provincial towns of Asia Minor, which were ever prone to flatter the Emperor,
because their prosperity, and sometimes almost their existence, depended on
his personal favour. Any officer eager to push himself into notice, any angry
Jew, any designing Oriental, might have been the cause of the Apostle's
arrest; and if it took place at Troas, especially if it were on some pretext
suggested by Alexander the coppersmith, or connected with St. Paul's long
and active work at Ephesus, he would, in the ordinary course of things, have
been sent under guard to Ephesus to be judged by the Proconsul. While
and the
awaiting his trial there he would, of course, have been put in prison ;
fact that his place of imprisonment is still pointed out among the ruins of
Ephesus, although no imprisonment at Ephesus is directly mentioned in
Scripture, adds perhaps a slight additional probability to these conjectures.
It was here that he experienced at the hands of Onesiphorus the kindness
1 9 Tim. lii. 1, ireri