“The day is short; the work abundant; the labourers are remiss; the reward is great; the master presses.”—PIRKE ABHÔTH, ii.
SO with their hearts full of the high hopes inspired by the consciousness that they were being led by the Spirit of God, the two Apostles, with Luke and Timotheus, set sail from the port of Troas. As the south wind sped them fast upon their destined course, they may have seen a fresh sign that He was with them who causes the east wind to blow in the heavens, and by His power brings in the south wind.1 Owing to this favourable breeze, they traversed in two days the distance which occupied five days when they returned.2 On the first day they ran past Tenedos and Imbros straight for Samothrace, and anchored for the night to leeward of it. Did Paul as he gazed by starlight, or at early dawn, on the towering peak which overshadows that ancient island, think at all of its immemorial mysteries, or talk to his companions about the Cabiri, or question any of the Greek or Roman sailors about the strange names of Axiocheros, Axiochersos, and Axiochersa? We would gladly know, but we have no data to help us, and it is strongly probable that to all such secondary incidents he was habitually indifferent.
On the next day, still scudding before the wind,3 they passed the mouth of the famous Strymon; sailed northward of Thasos amid the scenes so full to us of the memory of Thucydides; gazed for the first time on the “goldveined crags” of Pangaeus; saw a rocky promontory, and on it a busy seaport, over which towered the marble Maiden Chamber of Diana; and so, anchoring in the roadstead, set foot—three of them for the first time—on European soil. The town was Neapolis, in Thrace—the modern Kavala— which served as the port of the Macedonian Philippi. Here St. Paul did not linger. As at Seleucia, and Attaleia, and Perga, and Peiraeus, and Cenchreæ, he seemed to regard the port as being merely a starting–point for the inland town.4 Accordingly, he at once left Neapolis by the western gate and took the Egnatian road, which, after skirting the shore for a short distance, turns northward over a narrow pass of Mount Pangaeus, and so winds down into a green delicious plain,—with a marsh on one side where herds of large–horned buffaloes wallowed among the reeds, and with meadows on the other side, which repaid the snows of Hæmus, gathered in the freshening waters of the Zygactes, with the bloom and odour of the hundred–petal rose. At a distance of about seven miles they would begin to pass through the tombs that bordered the roadsides in the neighbourhood of all ancient cities, and one mile further brought them to Philippi, whose Acropolis had long been visible on the summit of its precipitous and towering hill.5
The city of Philippi was a monumental record of two vast empires. It had once been an obscure place, called Krenides from its streams and springs; but Philip, the father of Alexander, had made it a frontier town, to protect Macedonia from the Thracians, and had helped to establish his power by the extremely profitable working of its neighbouring gold mines. Augustus, proud of the victory over Brutus and Cassius,—won at the foot of the hill on which it stands, and on the summit of which Cassius had committed suicide,—elevated it to the rank of a colony, which made it, as St. Luke calls it, if not the first yet certainly “a first city of that district of Macedonia.”6 And this, probably, was why St. Paul went directly to it. When Perseus, the last successor of Alexander, had been routed at Pydna (June 22, B.C. 168), Macedonia had been reduced to a Roman province in four divisions. These, in accordance with the astute and machiavellic policy of Rome, were kept distinct from each other by differences of privilege and isolation of interests which tended to foster mutual jealousies. Beginning eastwards at the river Nestus, Macedonia Prima reached to the Strymon; Macedonia Secunda, to the Axius; Macedonia Tertia, to the Peneus; and Macedonia Quarta, to Illyricum and Epirus.7 The capitals of these divisions respectively were Amphipolis, Thessalonica,—at which the Proconsul of the entire province fixed his residence,—Pella, and Pelagonia. It is a very reasonable conjecture that Paul, in answer to the appeal of the Vision, had originally intended to visit—as, perhaps, he ultimately did visit—all four capitals. But Amphipolis, in spite of its historic celebrity had sunk into comparative insignificance, and the proud colonial privileges of Philippi made it in reality the more important town.
On the insignia of Roman citizenship which here met his gaze on every side—the S.P.Q.R., the far–famed legionary eagles, the panoply of the Roman soldiers which he was hereafter so closely to describe, the two statues of Augustus, one in the paludament of an Imperator, one in the semi–nude cincture of a divinity—Paul could not have failed to gaze with curiosity, and as they passed up the Egnatian road which divided the city, they must have looked at the figures of tutelary deities rudely scratched upon the rock, which showed that the old mythology was still nominally accepted. Can we suppose that they were elevated so far above the sense of humour as not to smile with their comrade Silvanus as they passed the temple dedicated to the rustic god whose name he bore, and saw the images of the old man,
“So surfeit–swollen, so old, and so profane,”
whom the rural population of Italy, from whom these colonists had been drawn, worshipped with offerings of fruit and swine?
They had arrived in the middle of the week, and their first care, as usual, was to provide for their own lodging and independent maintenance, to which Luke would doubtless be able to contribute by the exercise of his art. They might have expected to find a Jewish community sheltering itself under the wings of the Roman eagle; but if so they were disappointed. Philippi was a military and agricultural, not a commercial town, and the Jews were so few that they did not even possess a synagogue. If during those days they made any attempt to preach, it could only have been in the privacy of their rooms, for when the Sabbath came they were not even sure that the town could boast of a proseucha, or prayer–house.8 They knew enough, however, of the habits of the Jews to feel sure that if there were one, it would be on the river–bank outside the city. So they made their way through the gate9 along the ancient causeway which led directly to the Gangites,10 and under the triumphal arch which commemorated the great victory of Philippi ninety–four years before.11 That victory had finally decided the prevalence of the imperial system, which was fraught with such vast consequences for the world. In passing to the banks of the river the missionaries were on the very ground on which the battle had been fought, and near which the camps of Brutus and Cassius had stood, separated by the river from the army of Octavianus and Antony.
But when they reached the poor open–air proseucha,12 strange to say they only found a few women assembled there. It was clearly no time for formal orations. They simply sat down, and entered into conversation with the little group.13 Their words were blessed. Among the women sat a Lydian proselytess, a native of the city of Thyatira, who had there belonged to the guild of dyers.14 The luxurious extravagance of the age created a large demand for purple in the market of Rome, and Lydia found room for her profitable trade among the citizens at Philippi. As she sat listening, the arrow of conviction pierced her heart. She accepted the faith, and was baptised with her slaves and children.15 One happy fruit her conversion at once bore, for she used hospitality without grudging. “If you have judged me,” she said, “to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house, and stay there.” To accede to the request, modestly as it was urged, was not in accordance with the principles which the great Apostle had laid down to guide his conduct. Fully acknowledging the right of every missionary of the faith be to maintained by those to whom he ministered, and even to travel about with a wife, or an attendant deaconess, he had yet not only foregone this right, but begged as a personal favour that it might not be pressed upon him, because he valued that proof of his sincerity which was furnished by the gratuitous character of his ministry. Lydia, however, would not be refused, and she was so evidently one of those generous natures who have learnt how far more blessed it is to give than to receive, that Paul did not feel it right to persist in his refusal. The trade of Lydia was a profitable one, and in her wealth, joined to the affection which he cherished for the Church of Philippi beyond all other Churches, we see the probable reason why he made other Churches jealous by accepting pecuniary aid from his Philippian converts, and from them alone.16
There is some evidence that, among the Macedonians, women occupied a more independent position, and were held in higher honour, than in other parts of the world.17 In his Epistle to the Philippians St. Paul makes prominent mention of two ladies, Euodia and Syntyche, who were well known in the Christian community, although unhappily they could not agree with each other.18 The part that women played in the dissemination of the Gospel can hardly be exaggerated, and unless it was a mere accident that only women were assembled in the proseucha on the first Sabbath at Philippi, we must suppose that not a few of the male converts mentioned shortly afterwards19 were originally won over by their influence. The only converts who are mentioned by name are Epaphroditus, for whom both Paul and the Philippian Church seem to have felt a deep regard; Clemens, and Syzygus, or “yokefellow,”20 whom Paul addresses in a playful paronomasia, and entreats him to help the evangelising toils—the joint wrestlings for the Grospel—of Euodia and Syntyche. But besides these there were other unnamed fellow–workers to whom St. Paul bears the high testimony that “their names were in the book of life.”
Very encouraging and very happy must these weeks at Philippi have been, resulting, as they did, in the founding of a Church, to whose members he finds it needful to give but few warnings, and against whom he does not utter a word of blame. The almost total absence of Jews meant an almost total absence of persecution. The Philippians were heart–whole in their Christian faith. St. Paul’s entire Epistle to them breathes of joy, affection, and gratitude. He seems to remember that he is writing to a colony, and a military colony—a colony of Roman “athletes.” He reminds them of a citizenship loftier and more ennobling than that of Rome;21 he calls Epaphroditus not only his fellow–worker, but also his fellow–soldier, one who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in the new Macedonian phalanx, which was to join as of old in an advance to the conquest of the world. He derives his metaphorical expressions from the wrestling–ground and the race.22 Alike St. Paul and St. Luke seem to rejoice in the strong, manly Roman nature of these converts, of whom many were slaves and freedmen, but of whom a large number had been soldiers, drawn from various parts of Italy in the civil wars—men of the hardy Marsian and Pelignian stock—trained in the stern, strong discipline of the Roman legions, and unsophisticated by the debilitating Hellenism of a mongrel population. St. Paul loved them more and honoured them more than he did the dreamy, superstitious Ephesians, the fickle, impulsive Gauls, or the conceited, factious Achaians. In writing to Thessalonica and Philippi he had to deal with men of a larger mould and manlier mind—more true and more tender than the men of Corinth, with their boastful ignorance which took itself for knowlege, or the men of Asia, with their voluptuous mysticisms and ceremonial pettiness. He was now thrown for the first time among a race which has been called the soundest part of the ancient world,23 a race which shone forth like torches in narrow and winding streets, like stars that beamed their light and life in the dark firmament—blameless children of God amid the dwarfed and tortuous meanness of a degenerate race.24
Their stay in this fruitful field of labour was cut short by an unforeseen circumstance, which thwarted the greed of a few interested persons, and enlisted against Paul and Silas the passions of the mob. For there is this characteristic difference between the persecutions of Jews and Gentiles— that the former were always stirred up by religious fanaticism, the latter by personal and political interests which were accidentally involved in religious questions. Hitherto the Apostles had laboured without interruption, chiefly because the Jews in the place, if there were any at all, were few and uninfluential; but one day, as they were on their way to the proseucha, they were met by a slave–girl, who, having that excitable, perhaps epileptic diathesis which was the qualification of the Pythonesses of Delphi, was announced to be possessed by a Python spirit.25 Nothing was less understood in antiquity than these obscure phases of mental excitation, and the strange flashes of sense, and even sometimes of genius, out of the gloom of a perturbed intellect, were regarded as inspired and prophetic utterances. As a fortune–teller and diviner, this poor girl was held in high esteem by the credulous vulgar of the town.26 A slave could possess no property, except such peculium as his master allowed him, and the fee for consulting this unofficial Pythoness was a lucrative source of income to the people who owned her. To a poor afflicted girl like this, whose infirmities had encircled her with superstitious reverence, more freedom would be allowed than would have been granted, even in Philippi, to ordinary females in the little town; and she would be likely—especially if she were of Jewish birth—to hear fragments of information about Paul and his teaching. They impressed themselves on her imagination, and on meeting the men of whom she had heard such solemn things, she turned round27 and followed them towards the river, repeatedly calling out—perhaps in the very phrases which she had heard used of them—“These people are slaves of the Most High God, and they are announcing to us the way of salvation.”28 This might be tolerated once or twice, but at last it became too serious a hindrance of their sacred duties to be any longer endured in silence.
In an outburst of pity and indignation29—pity for the sufferer, indignation at this daily annoyance—Paul suddenly turned round, and addressing the Pytho by whom the girl was believed to be possessed, said, “I enjoin thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out of her.” The effect was instantaneous. The calm authoritative exorcism restored the broken harmony of her being. No more paroxysms could be expected of her; nor the wild unnatural screaming utterances, so shrill and unearthly that they might very naturally be taken for Sibylline frenzies. Her masters ceased to expect anything from her oracles. Their hope of further gain “went out” with the spirit.30 A piece of property so rare that it could only be possessed by a sort of joint ownership was rendered entirely valueless.
Thus the slave–masters were touched in their pockets, and it filled them with fury. They could hardly, indeed, go before the magistrates and tell them that Paul by a single word had exorcised a powerful demon; but they were determined to have vengeance somehow or other, and, in a Roman colony composed originally of discharged Antonian soldiers, and now occupied partly by their descendants, partly by enfranchised freedmen from Italy,31 it was easy to raise a clamour against one or two isolated Jews. It was the more easy because the Philippians might have heard the news of disturbances and riots at Rome, which provoked the decree of Claudius banishing all Jews from the city.32 They determined to seize this opportunity, and avail themselves of a similar plea.33 They suddenly arrested Paul and Silas, and dragged them before the sitting magistrates.34 These seem to have relegated the matter to the duumviri,35 who were the chief authorities of the colony, and who, aping the manners and the titles of Imperial Rome, had the impertinence to call themselves “Prætors.”36 Leading their prisoners into the presence of these “Prætors,” they exclaimed, “These fellows are utterly troubling our city, being mere Jews; and they are preaching customs which it is not lawful for us, who are Romans, to accept or to practise.”37 The mob knew the real state of the case, and sympathised with the owners of the slave girl, feeling much as the Gadarenes felt towards One whose healing of a demoniac had interfered with theirgains. In the minds of the Greeks and Romans there was always, as we have seen, a latent spark of abhorrence against the Jews. These sweepings of the Agora vehemently sided with the accusers, and the provincial duumvirs, all the more dangerous from being pranked out in the usurped peacock–plumes of “prætorian” dignity, assumed that the mob must be right, or at any rate that people who were Jews must be so far wrong as to deserve whatever they might get. They were not sorry at so cheap a cost to gratify the Roman conceit of a city which could boast that its citizens belonged to the Voltinian tribe.38 It was another proof that—
“Man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep, who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
Paul and Silas had not here to do with the haughty impartiality and supercilious knowledge which guided the decisions of a Gallio, but with the “justice’s justice” of the Vibiuses and Floruses who at this time fretted their little hour on the narrow stage of Philippi. Conscious of their Roman citizenship, they could not have expected so astounding a result of their act of mercy, as that their political franchise should be ignored, and they themselves, after condemnation without trial, ignominiously hurried off into the punishments reserved for the very meanest malefactors.39 Such, however, was the issue of the hearing. Their Prætorships would imitate the divine Claudius, and wreak on these wandering Israelites a share of the punishment which the misdeeds of their countrymen had brought upon them at Rome. As the proceedings were doubtless in Latin, with which Paul and Silas had little or no acquaintance, and in legal formulæ and procedures of which they were ignorant, they either had no time to plead their citizenship until they were actually in the hands of the lictors,40 or, if they had, their voices were drowned in the cries of the colonists. Before they could utter one word in their own defence, the sentence—“summovete, lictores, despoliate, verberate”—was uttered; the Apostles were seized; their garments were rudely torn off their backs;41 they were hurried off and tied by their hands to the palus, or whipping–post in the forum; and whether they vainly called out in Greek to their infuriated enemies, “We are Roman citizens,” or, which is far more likely, bore their frightful punishment in that grand silence which, in moments of high spiritual rapture, makes pain itself seem painless42—in that forum of which ruins still remain, in the sight of the lowest dregs of a provincial outpost, and of their own pitying friends, they endured, at the hands of these low lictors, those outrages, blows, strokes, weals, the pangs and butchery, the extreme disgrace and infamy, the unjust infliction of which even a hard–headed and hard–hearted Gentile could not describe without something of pathos and indignation.43 It was the first of three such scourgings with the rods of Roman lictors which Paul endured, and it is needless to dwell even for one moment on its dangerous and lacerating anguish. We, in these modern days, cannot read without a shudder even of the flogging of some brutal garotter, and our blood would run cold with unspeakable horror if one such incident, or anything which remotely resembled it, had occurred in the life of a Henry Martyn or a Coleridge Patteson. But such horrors occurred eight times at least in the story of one whose frame was more frail with years of suffering than that of our English missionaries, and in whose life these pangs were but such a drop in the ocean of his endurance, that, of the eight occasions on which he underwent these horrible scourgings, this alone has been deemed worthy of even passing commemoration.44
Nor was this all. After seeing that a scourging of extreme severity had been inflicted, the Duumvirs, with the same monstrous violation of all law, flung Paul and Silas into prison, and gave the jailer special orders to keep them safely. Impressed by this injunction with the belief that his prisoners must have been guilty of something very heinous, and determined to make assurance doubly sure, the jailer not only thrust them into the dank, dark, loathsome recesses of the inner prison, but also secured their feet into “the wood”. “The wood” was an instrument of torture used in many countries, and resembling our “stocks,” or rather the happily obsolete “pillory,” in having five holes—four for the wrists and ankles, and one for the neck.45 The jailer in this instance only secured their feet; but we cannot be surprised that the memory of this suffering lingered long years afterwards in the mind of St. Paul, when we try to imagine what a poor sufferer, with the rankling sense of gross injustice in his soul, would feel who—having but recently recovered from a trying sickness—after receiving a long and frightful flagellation as the sequel of a violent and agitated scene, was thrust away out of the jeers of the mob into a stifling and lightless prison, and sat there through the long hours of the night with his feet in such durance as to render it impossible except in some constrained position to find sleep on the foul bare floor.46
Yet over all this complication of miseries the souls of Paul and Silas rose in triumph. With heroic cheerfulness they solaced the long black hours of midnight with prayer and hymns.47 To every Jew as to every Christian, the Psalms of David furnished an inexhaustible storehouse of sacred song. That night the prison was wakeful. It may be that, as is usually the case, there was some awful hush and heat in the air—a premonition of the coming catastrophe; but, be that as it may, the criminals of the Philippian prison were listening to the sacred songs of the two among them, who deserving nothing had suffered most. “The prison,” it has been said, “became an Odeum;” and the guilty listened with envy and admiration to the “songs in the night,” with which God inspired the innocent. Never, probably, had such a scene occurred before in the world’s history, and this perfect triumph of the spirit of peace and joy over shame and agony was an omen of what Christianity would afterwards effect. And while they sang, and while the prisoners listened, perhaps to verses which “out of the deeps” called on Jehovah, or “fled to Him before the morning watch,” or sang—
“The plowers plowed upon my back and made long furrows,
But the righteous Lord hath hewn the snares of the ungodly in pieces”—
or triumphantly told how God had “burst the gates of brass, and smitten the bars of iron in sunder”—suddenly there was felt a great shock of earthquake, which rocked the very foundations of the prison. The prison doors were burst open; the prisoners’ chains were loosed from the staples in the wall.48 Startled from sleep, and catching sight of the prison doors standing open, the jailer instantly drew his sword, and was on the point of killing himself, thinking that his prisoners had escaped, and knowing that he would have to answer for their production with his life.49 Suicide was the common refuge of the day against disaster, and might have been regarded at Philippi as an act not only natural but heroic.50 Paul, however, observed his purpose, and, always perfectly self–possessed even in the midst of danger, called out to him in a loud voice, “Do thyself no harm, for we are all here.” The entire combination of circumstances—the earthquake, the shock of sudden terror, the revulsion of joy which diverted his intention of suicide, the serene endurance and calm forgiveness of his prisoners—all melted the man’s heart. Demanding lights, he sprang into the inner prison, and flung himself, in a tremor of agitation, at the feet of Paul and Silas. Then, releasing their feet from the stocks, and leading them out of their dark recess, he exclaimed, “Lords (Κύριοι), what must I do to be saved?” His mode of address showed deep reverence. His question echoed the expression of the demoniac.51 And the Apostles answered him partly in the terms which he had used, “Believe,” they said, “on the Lord (Κύριον) Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Deeply impressed, the man at once assembled his household in a little congregation, and, worn and weary and suffering as they were, Paul and Silas spoke to them of Him by whom they were to find salvation.52 Then the jailer, pitying their condition, washed their bruised backs, and immediately afterwards was, with his whole house, baptised in the faith.53 All this seems to have taken place in the prison precincts. Not till then did they think of food or rest. Leading them upstairs into his house, he set a table before them, and in that high hour of visitation from the Living God, though he had but heard words and been told of a hope to come, he and his whole house felt that flow of elevated joy which sprang naturally from a new and inspiring faith.54
Day dawned, and the duumvirs were troubled. Whether they had felt the earthquake,55 and been alarmed lest these “slaves of the Most High God” should be something more than the poor Jewish wanderers that they seemed to be, or whether the startling events of the night had reached their ears—they had at any rate become heartily ashamed of their tumultuary injustice. They felt it incumbent on them to hush up the whole matter, and get rid as quickly as possible of these awkward prisoners. Accordingly, they sent their lictors, no longer to use their rods in outrageous violation of justice, but to “set those people free.” The jailer hurried to Paul with the message of peaceful liberation, which no doubt he thought would be heartily welcomed. But Paul felt that at least some reparation must be offered for an intolerable wrong, and that, for the sake of others if not for his own, these provincial justices must be taught a lesson not to be so ready to prostitute their authority at the howling of a mob. Sending for the lictors themselves, he sternly said, in a sentence of which every word was telling, “After beating us publicly uncondemned, Romans though we are by right, they flung us into prison; and now they are for casting us out secretly. No such thing. Let them come in person, and conduct us out.”56 The lictors took back the message to the “Praetors,” and it filled them with no small alarm. They had been hurried by ignorance, prejudice, and pride of office into glaring offences against the Roman law.57 They had condemned two Roman citizens without giving them their chartered right to a fair trial;58 and, on condemning them, had further outraged the birthright and privilege of citizenship by having them bound and scourged; and they had thus violated the Porcian law59 in the presence of the entire mob of the forum, and in sight of some at least who would be perfectly able to take the matter up and report their conduct in high quarters. Their worships had simply flagellated in public the law and majesty of Rome.60 They did not at all like the notion of beig themselves summoned before the Proconsul’s court to answer for their flagrant illegality; so, trusting to the placability of the Jewish character as regards mere personal wrongs, they came in person, accompanied, says one manuscript, by many friends.61 Entreating the pardon of their prisoners, they urged them, with reiterated requests, to leave the city, excusing themselves on the plea that they had mistaken their true character, and pleading that, if they stayed, there might be another ebullition of public anger.62 Paul and Silas, however, were courageous men, and had no intention to give any colour of justice to the treatment they had received by sneaking out of the city. From the prison they went straight to the house of Lydia; nor was it till they had seen the assembled brethren, and given them their last exhortation, that they turned their backs on the beautiful scenes where a hopeful work had been rudely ended by their first experience of Gentile persecution. But, in accordance with a frequent custom of St. Paul,63 they left Luke behind them.64 Perhaps at Philippi he had found favourable opportunities for the exercise of his art, and he could at the same time guide and strengthen the little band of Philippian converts, before whom days and years of bitter persecution were still in store.65