The life and work of St. Paul

676 THE LIFE ANB WORK OF ST. PAUL.
of his miserable doggrel, and the sham victories in which the supple and
shameless Greeks fooled him to the very top of his bent, he returned to find
that the revolt of Galba was making head, until he was forced to fly at night in
disguise from his palace, to quench his thirst with ditch-water, to display a
cowardice which made him contemptible to his meanest minions, and finally
to let his trembling hand be helped by a slave to force a dagger into his
throat.
But it is no wonder that when, over the ruins of streets which the fire had
laid in ashes, St. Paul returned to his lonely prison, there was one earthly
desire for the fulfilment of which he still yearned. It was once more to see
the dear friend of earlier years of those years in which, hard as were their
sufferings, the hope of Christ's second coming in glory to judge the world
seemed still so near, and in which the curtains of a neglected death and an
apparently total failure had not yet been drawn so closely around his head.
He yearned to see Timothy once more ; to be refreshed by the young man's
affectionate devotion to be cheered and comforted ;
by the familiar attendance
of a true son in Christ, whose heart was wholly at one with his who ; shared
so fully in all his sympathies and hopes who had learnt ;
by long and familiar
attendances how best to brighten his spirits and to supply his wants. It was
this which made him write that second letter to Timothy, which is, as it were,
his " cycnea oratio," and in which, amid many subjects of advice and exhorta-
tion, he urges his friend with reiterated earnestness to come, to come at once,
to come before winter, 1 to come ere it is too late, and see him, and heh) him,
and receive his blessing before he died.
CHAPTER LVI.
PAUL'S LAST LETTER.
HauAof K o rpwr/Aoxaptos TTJK KtjiaXriv tt iirtrjtijflj? 6 dyeJcSujyijTOf Mpovos. pg.
Orai. Enam.
" Testamentum Pauli et cycnea cantio eat haec Epistola." BENGBL.
11 Hoc praestat career Christiano, quod eremus Prophetis." TERT. ad Mart. 3.
" Mortem habebat Paulus ante oculos. . . . Quaecunque igitur hie legimus
de Ghristi regno, de spe vitae aetemae, de Christiana militia, de fiducia confessionis,
de certitudine doctrinao, non tanquam atramento scripta, sed ipsius Pauli sanguine
accipere convenit. . . . Proinde haec Epistola quasi solennis quaedam est sub-
scriptio Paulinas doctrinae, eaque ex repraesenti." CALVIN.
HE began much in his usual form
"
Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, J according to the promise
of the life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy my beloved son, grace, mercy, and
2 Tim. iv. 9, 21.
8
ia fleX^aros. The attempt to deduce some very special and recondite inference from
the fact that he uses this phrase for the KO.T' 7riTayV of the First Epistle, seems to me as
arbitrary as Mack's argument that the use of iyajnjr