“Christianus etiam extra carcerem saeculo renuntiavit, in carcere autem etiam carceri. … Ipsam etiam conversationen saeculi et carceris comparemus, si non plus in carcere spiritus acquirit, quam caro 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 Tübingen 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 in 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 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 and the truths to which they bear emphatic witness.
The allusions in the Second Epistle, though too fragmentary and insignificant 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 here dealing 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 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 Rome. 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 Berœa, 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 sufficiently 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 persecution 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 awaiting his trial there he would, of course, have been put in prison; and the 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 which was continued to him at Rome,2 and to which he alludes with a gratitude all the more heartfelt, because very shortly afterwards Onesiphorus seems to have died.
From the trial at Ephesus, where his cause might have suffered from local prejudices, he may once more have found it necessary to appeal to Cæsar. Barea Soranus, the then Proconsul, may have been glad, as Pliny afterwards was in Bithynia, to refer the case to the highest tribunal. Timothy would naturally desire to accompany him, but at that time the Apostle—still sanguine, still accompanied by other friends, still inclined to believe that his life, which had long been valueless to himself, might be saved from human violence, however near might be its natural close—thought it necessary to leave his friend at Ephesus to brave the dangers, and fulfil the duties of that chief pastorate, respecting which he had recently received such earnest instructions. It was natural that they should part with deep emotion at a time so perilous and under circumstances so depressing. St. Paul, sitting in his dreary and desolate confinement at Rome, recalls with gratitude the streaming tears of that farewell, which proved how deeply his affection was requited by the son of his heart. In all his wanderings, in all his sickness, in all his persecutions, in all his imprisonments, in all his many and bitter disappointments, the one spot invariably bright, the one permanent consolation, the one touch of earthly happiness, had been the gentle companionship, the faithful attendance, the clinging affection of this Lycaonian youth. For St. Paul’s sake, for the Gospel’s sake, he had left his mother, and his home, and his father’s friends, and had cheerfully accepted the trying life of a despised and hunted missionary. By birth a Greek, he had thrown in his lot by circumcision with the Jew, by faith with the Christian; and his high reward on earth had been, not the shadow of an immortal honour, but the substance of lofty service in the cause of the truth which was to subdue the world. The affection between him and the Apostle began in the spiritual sonship of conversion, and was cemented by community of hopes and perils until it had become one of the strongest ties in life. For troubled years they had cheered each other’s sorrows in the midst of painful toils. The very difference in their age, the very dissimilarity of their characters, had but made their love for each other more sacred and more deep. The ardent, impetuous, dominant character and intense purpose of the one, found its complement and its repose in the timid, yielding, retiring, character of the other. What Melancthon was to Luther, whom Luther felt that he could not spare, and for whose life when all hope seemed over he stormed heaven with passionate and victorious supplication,3—that and more than that was the comparatively youthful Timothy to the more tried and lonely Paul.
We may hope that the Apostle, now once more a prisoner, was not alone when he left Ephesus to cross the Mediterranean for the last time. Titus and Tychicus4 had probably accompanied him from Nicopolis; Demas may have joined him at Thessalonica, Luke at Philippi; and Trophimus, undeterred by his past dangers at Jerusalem, volunteered to accompany him from the Ionian capital. But the kindly intentions of the latter were frustrated, for he fell ill at Miletus, and there the sad little band of Christians had to leave him when the vessel started.5 Erastus, if he was with him at Ephesus, stayed behind when they reached his native Corinth.
Of the particulars of the voyage we know nothing. It may very possibly have been from Ephesus to Cenchreae, over the Diolkos to Lechaeum, and then along the Gulf of Corinth and across the Adriatic to Brundisium, whence the prisoner, his guards and his companions, would make their dreary way along the great Appian road to Rome. This time no disciples met them at the Appii Forum or the Three Taverns, nor could anything have well occurred to make Paul thank God and take courage. The horrible Neronian persecution had depressed, scattered, and perhaps decimated the little Christian community; and the Jews, who had received Paul at the time of his first imprisonment with an ostentatiously indifferent neutrality, had been transformed since then— partly, no doubt, by the rumours disseminated by emissaries from Jerusalem, and partly by the mutual recriminations after the fire of Rome—into the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemies. On the former occasion, after a short detention in the Prætorian camp, St. Paul had been allowed to live in his own lodging; and even if this had been in the humblest purlieus of the Trastevere, among the Jewish vendors of sulphur matches and cracked pottery,6 it had still been his own, and had allowed him to continue, in a sphere however restricted, his efforts at evangelisation. But Christianity was now suspected of political designs, and was practically reduced to a religioillicita. This time he had no kindly–disposed Lysias to say a good word for him, no friendly testimonies of a Festus or an Agrippa to produce in his favour. The government of Nero, bad almost from the first, had deteriorated year by year with alarming rapidity, and at this moment it presented a spectacle of awful cruelty and abysmal degradation such as has been rarely witnessed by the civilised world. While an honest soldier like Burrus held the high post of Prætorian Præfect, a political prisoner was at least sure that he would not be treated with wanton severity; but with a Tigellinus in that office—a Tigellinus whose foul hands were still dripping with Christian blood, and whose foul life was stained through and through with every form of detestable wickedness—what could be expected? We catch but one glimpse of this last imprisonment before the curtain falls, but that glimpse suffices to show how hard it was. Through the still blackened ruins of the city, and amid the squalid misery of its inhabitants—perhaps with many a fierce scowl turned on the hated Christian—Paul passed to his dungeon, and there, as the gate clanged upon him, he sat down, chained night and day, without further hope—a doomed man.
To visit him now was no longer to visit a man against whom nothing serious was charged, and who had produced a most favourable impression on the minds of all who had been thrown into relation with him. It was to visit the bearer of a name which the Emperor and his minions affected to detest; it was to visit the ringleader of those who were industriously maligned as the authors of a calamity more deadly than any which had afflicted the city since its destruction by the Gauls. Merely to be kind to such a man was regarded as infamous. No one could do it without rendering himself liable to the coarse insolence of the soldiers.7 Nay, more, it was a service of direct political danger. Rome swarmed with spies who were ready to accuse any one of laesamajestason the slightest possible occasion. Now who but a Christian would visit a Christian? What could any respectable citizen have to do with the most active propagandist of a faith which had at first been ignored as contemptible, but which even calm and cultivated men were beginning to regard as an outrage against humanity?8 And if any Christian were charged with being a Christian on the ground of his having visited St. Paul, how could he deny the charge, and how, without denying it, could he be saved from incurring the extremest danger?
Under these circumstances the condition of the Apostle was very different from what it had been three years before. His friends had then the freest access to him, and he could teach Christ Jesus with all boldness undisturbed. Now there were few or no friends left to visit him; and to teach Jesus Christ was death. He knew the human heart too well to be unaware how natural it was that most men should blush to associate themselves with him and his chain. One by one his Asiatic friends deserted him.9 The first to leave him were Phygellus and Hermogenes.10 Then the temptations of the present course of things, the charm of free and unimperilled life, were too much for Demas, and he too—though he had long been his associate—now forsook him. Crescens departed, perhaps on some necessary mission, to the Churches of Galatia, and Titus to those of Dalmatia. He had dispatched Tychicus to Ephesus shortly before he wrote this letter. One friend alone was with him—the beloved physician, the faithful, unobtrusive, cultivated Luke.11 Of hardship Paul recked nothing; he had spent a life of endless hardship, and had learnt a complete independence of the outward elements of comfort; but to one situated as he was, and liable to constant pain, to be utterly companionless would have been a trial too hard to bear.
A single happy unexpected visit broke the continuity of his loneliness, and cheered him amid the sense of desertion. The good–hearted Ephesian Onesiphorus, who had already made himself conspicuous among the Christians of his native city by his active kindliness, came to Rome. He knew that St. Paul was somewhere in that city as a prisoner, and he rose above the timid selfishness of his fellow–countrymen. He set about searching for the captive Jew. In a city thronged with prisoners, and under a government rife with suspicions, upon which it acted with the most cynical unscrupulousness, it was by no means a safe or pleasant task to find an obscure, aged, and deeply implicated victim. Had Onesiphorus been less in earnest, it would have been easy for him to make an excuse to other Christians, and to his own conscience, that he had not known where Paul was, and that he had looked for him but could not find him. But he would not abandon his earnest search until it led him to the side of the Apostle.12 Nor was he content with a single visit. Glad to face the shame and scorn of befriending one whose condition was now so abject, he came to the Apostle again and again, and refreshed his soul with that very consolation—the sense of human sympathy—for which most of all it yearned.13 Probably the death of this true and warm–hearted Ephesian took place at Rome, for St. Paul utters a fervent wish that he may find mercy of the Lord in the great day, and in writing to Timothy he sends a greeting to his household, but not to him.14 The tone of intense gratitude which breathes through the few verses in which the Apostle alludes to him makes us feel that the brave and loving friendliness of this true brother, contrasted as it was with the cowardly defection of the other Asiatics, was the brightest gleam of light which fell on the dense gloom of the second imprisonment.
At last the time came when the Apostle had to stand before the great Roman tribunal. What was called in Roman law the primaactiocame on.15 The Scriptures were written with other objects than to gratify our curiosity with the details of historic scenes, however memorable or however important. That which God has revealed to us in Scripture is rather the œconomy—the gradual unfolding and dispensation—of His eternal scheme for the salvation of mankind, than the full biography of those whose glory it was to be entrusted with the furtherance of His designs. Eagerly should we have desired to know the details of that trial, but St. Paul only tells us a single particular. His silence once more illustrates the immense difference between ancient and modern correspondence. A modern, in writing to a dear friend, would have been sure to give him some of the details, which could hardly fail to interest him. It may be said that these details might have been supplied by the bearer of the letter. It may be so; but if we judge St. Paul by his own writings, and by the analogy of other great and spiritually–minded men, we should infer that personal matters of this kind had but little interest for him. Accustomed to refer perpetually to his high spiritual privileges—digressing incessantly to the fact of his peculiar Apostolate—he yet speaks but little, and never in detail, of the outward incidents of his life. Theydid but belong to the world’s passing show, to the things which were seen and evanescent. Two vivid touches alone reveal to us the nature of the occasion. One is the deplorable fact that not a single friend had the courage to stand by his side. He had to defend himself single–handed. No patronus would encourage him, no advocatus plead his cause, no deprecatorsay a word in his favour. “No man took his place by my side to help me; all abandoned me; God forgive them.” The other is that even at that supreme moment, with the face of the threatening tyrant fixed loweringly upon him, and the axed fasces of the lictors gleaming before his eyes, his courage did not quail. If man forsook him, God strengthened him. If even Luke left him to face the court alone, the Lord Himself stood by him. He spoke, and spoke in a manner worthy of his cause. How much heathen literature would we freely sacrifice for even a brief sketch of that speech such as Luke could so well have given us had he only been present! How supreme would have been the interest of a defence uttered by St. Paul in the Roman forum, or in a Roman basilica! Alas! the echoes of his words have died away for ever. We only know what he who uttered it tells us of it. But he was satisfied with it. He felt that the Lord had strengthened him in order that, through his instrumentality, the preaching of the Gospel might be fulfilled to the uttermost, and that all the Gentiles might hear it. And he was successful—successful, we cannot doubt, not merely that he might prolong his days in useless and hopeless misery, but for some high design, and perhaps among other reasons that he might leave us his last precious thoughts in the Second Epistle to his dearest convert. But the danger had been imminent, and the too–certain result was only postponed. “I was rescued,” he says, “out of the lion’s mouth.” Each juror received three voting tablets—one marked with A., for Absolvo; another with C., for Condemno; and a third with N.L., for Nonliquet, or “not proven.” The majority of votes had been of the third description, and the result had been the ampliatio, or postponement of the trial for the production of further evidence. But St. Paul was not deceived by any false hopes. “I was rescued out of the lion’s mouth. The Lord shall deliver me”—not necessarily from death or danger, but— “from every evil work,16 and shall save me unto His heavenly kingdom.” Death by martyrdom was no such “evil work;”17 from that he did not expect to be saved—nay, he knew, and probably even hoped, that through that narrow gate an entrance might be ministered unto him abundantly into Christ’s heavenly kingdom. But he must have passed through perilous and exciting hours, or he would have hardly used that metaphor of the lion’s mouth,18 prompted perhaps by a reminiscence of the powerful image of the shepherd prophet, “As the shepherd tears out of the mouth of a lion two legs and the piece of an ear.”19
But who was the lion? Was it Satan?20 or Helius, the Præfect of the city? or Nero?21 or is the expression a merely general one? Even if so, it is not impossible that he may have pleaded his cause before Nero himself. The power of deciding causes had been one which the Roman Emperors had jealously kept in their own hands; and if the trial took place in the spring of A.D. 66, Nero had not yet started for Greece, and would have been almost certain to give personal attention to the case of one who had done more than any living man to spread the name of Christ. Nero had been intensely anxious to fix on the innocent Christians the stigma of that horrible conflagration, of which he himself had been dangerously suspected, and the mere suspicion of which, until averted into another channel, had gone far to shake even his imperial power. And now the greatest of the Christians—the very coryphœus of the hated sect— stood chained before him. He to whom popularity, forfeited in part by his enormous crimes, had become a matter of supreme importance, saw how cheaply it could be won by sacrificing a sick, deserted, aged, fettered prisoner, for whom no living soul would speak a word, and who was evidently regarded with intense hatred by Gentiles from Asia, by the dense rabble of the city, and by Jews from every quarter of the world. Cicero has preserved for us a graphic picture of the way in which, nearly a century and a half before this time, a screaming, scowling, gesticulating throng of Jews, undeterred by soldiers and lictors, surrounded with such threatening demonstrations the tribunal before which their oppressor, Flaccus, was being tried, that he, as his advocate, though he had been no less a person than a Roman Consul, and “father of his country,” was obliged to plead in low tones for fear of their fury. If in B.C. 59 the Romish Jews could intimidate even a Cicero in their hatred to a Flaccus, is it likely that they would have abstained from hostile demonstrations against an enemy so detested and so perfectly defenceless as St. Paul?
Paul before Nero! if indeed it was so, what a contrast does the juxtaposition of two such characters suggest—the one the vilest and most wicked, the other the best and noblest of mankind! Here, indeed, we see two races, two civilisations, two religions, two histories, two aeonsbrought face to face. Nero summed up in his own person the might of legions apparently invincible; Paul personified that more irresistible weakness which shook the world. The one showed the very crown and flower of luxurious vice and guilty splendour; the other the earthly misery of the happiest saints of God. In the one we see the incarnate Nemesis of past degradation; in the other the glorious prophecy of Christian sainthood. The one was the deified autocrat of Paganism; the other the abject ambassador of Christ. The emperor’s diadem was now confronted for the first time by the Cross of the Victim before which, ere three centuries were over, it was destined to succumb.
Nero, not yet thirty years of age, was stained through and through with every possible crime, and steeped to the very lips in every nameless degradation. Of all the black and damning iniquities against which, as St. Paul had often to remind his heathen converts, the wrath of God for ever burns, there was scarcely one of which Nero had not been guilty. A wholesale robber, a pitiless despot, an intriguer, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide, a liar, a coward, a drunkard, a glutton, incestuous, unutterably depraved, his evil and debased nature—of which even Pagans had spoken as “a mixture of blood and mud”—had sought abnormal outlets to weary, if it could not sate, its insatiable proclivity to crime. He was that last worst specimen of human wickedness—a man who, not content with every existing form of vice and sin in which the taint of human nature had found a vent, had become “an inventor of evil things.” He had usurped a throne; he had poisoned, under guise of affection, the noble boy who was its legitimate heir; he had married the sister of that boy, only to break her heart by his brutality, and finally to order her assassination; he had first planned the murder, then ordered the execution, of his own mother, who, however deep her guilt, had yet committed her many crimes for love of him; he had treacherously sacrificed the one great general whose victories gave any lustre to his reign; among other murders, too numerous to count, he had ordered the deaths of the brave soldier and the brilliant philosopher who had striven to guide his wayward and intolerable heart; he had disgraced imperial authority with every form of sickening and monstrous folly; he had dragged the charm of youth and the natural dignity of manhood through the very lowest mire; he had killed by a kick the worthless but beautiful woman whom he had torn from her own husband to be his second wife; he had reduced his own capital to ashes, and buffooned, and fiddled, and sung with his cracked voice in public theatres, regardless of the misery and starvation of thousands of its ruined citizens; he had charged his incendiarism upon the innocent Christians, and tortured them to death by hundreds in hideous martyrdoms; he had done his best to render infamous his rank, his country, his ancestors, the name of Roman—nay, even the very name of man.
And Paul had spent his whole life in the pursuit of truth and the practice of holiness. Even from boyhood a grave and earnest student of the Law of God, he surpassed in learning and faithfulness all the other “pupils of the wise” in the school of the greatest Doctor of the Law; and if the impetuous ardour of his nature, and that commonest infirmity of even noble minds—the pride of erroneous conviction which will not suffer itself to be convinced of error—had for a time plunged him into a course of violent intolerance, of which he afterwards repented with all the intensity of his nature, yet even this sin had been due to the blind fury of misdirected zeal in a cause which he took—or for a time thought that he took—to be the cause of God. Who shall throw the first stone at him? not even those learned and holy men whose daily lives show how hard it is to abdicate the throne of infallible ignorance, and after lives of stereotyped error to go back as humble learners to the school of truth. But, if for a moment he erred, how grandly—by what a life of heroic self–sacrifice—had he atoned for his fault! Did ever man toil like this man? Did ever man rise to a nobler superiority over the vulgar objects of human desire? Did ever man more fully and unmurmuringly resign his whole life to God? Has it ever been granted to any other man, in spite of all trials, obstructions, persecutions, to force his way in the very teeth of “clenched antagonisms” to so full an achievement of the divine purpose which God had entrusted to his care? Shrinking from hatred with the sensitive warmth of a nature that ever craved for human love, he had yet braved hatreds of the most intense description—the hatred not only of enemies, but of friends; not only of individuals, but of entire factions; not only of aliens, but of his own countrymen; not only of Jews, but even of those who professed the same faith with himself.22 Shrinking from pain with nervous sensibility, he yet endured for twenty years together every form of agony with a body weakened by incessant hardship. The many perils and miseries which we have recounted are but a fragment of what he had suffered. And what had he done? He had secured the triumph, he had established the universality, he had created the language, he had co–ordinated the doctrines, he had overthrown the obstacles of that Faith which is the one source of the hope, the love, the moral elevation of the world.
And now these two men were brought face to face— imperial power and abject weakness; youth cankered with guilt, and old age crowned with holiness; he whose whole life had consummated the degradation, and he whose life had achieved the enfranchisement of mankind. They stood face to face the representatives of two races—the Semitic in its richest glory, the Aryan in its extremest degradation: the representatives of two trainings—the life of utter self–sacrifice, and the life of unfathomable self–indulgence: the representatives of two religions—Christianity in its dawning brightness, Paganism in its effete despair: the representatives of two theories of life—the simplicity of self–denying endurance ready to give up life itself for the good of others, the luxury of shameless Hedonism which valued no consideration divine or human in comparison with a new sensation: the representatives of two spiritual powers—the slave of Christ and the incarnation of Antichrist. And their respective positions showed how much, at this time, the course of this world was under the control of the Prince of the Power of the Air—for incest and matricide were clothed in purple, and seated on the curule chair, amid the ensigns of splendour without limit and power beyond control; and he whose life had exhibited all that was great and noble in the heart of man stood in peril of execution, despised, hated, fettered, and in rags.
But Roman Law was still Roman Law, and, except where passions of unusual intensity interfered, some respect was still paid to the forms of justice. For the time, at any rate, Paul was rescued out of the lion’s mouth. There was some flaw in the indictment, some deficiency in the evidence; and though St. Paul well knew that it was but a respite which was permitted him, for the time at any rate he was remanded to his prison. And Nero, if indeed he were “the lion” before whom this first defence had been pleaded, had no further door for repentance opened to him in this life. Had he too trembled, as Paul reasoned before him of temperance, righteousness, and the judgment to come? Had he too listened in alarm as Herod Antipas had listened to the Baptist? Had he too shown the hue of passing shame on those bloated features so deformed by the furrows of evil passion—as, at the Council of Constance the Emperor Sigismund blushed, when John Huss upbraided him with the breach of his pledged word? The Emperor, who stood nearest to Nero in abysmal depravity, and who, like him, being himself unutterably impure and bad, had the innermost conviction that all others were at heart the same, used to address grave men with the most insulting questions, and if the indignant blood mantled on their cheeks, he used to exclaim, “Erubuit, salva resest.”23 “He blushed; it is all right.” But of Domitian we are expressly told that he could not blush; that his flushed cheeks were an impervious barrier against the access of any visible shame.24 And in all probability Nero was infinitely too far gone to blush. It is far more probable that, like Gallio, he only listened to the defence of this worn and aged Jew with ill–concealed impatience and profound disdain. He would have regarded such a man as this as something more abject than the very dust beneath his feet. He would have supposed that Paul regarded it as the proudest honour of his life even to breathe the same atmosphere as the Emperor of Rome. His chance of hearing the words of truth returned no more. About this time he sailed on his frivolous expedition to Greece; and after outraging to an extent almost inconceivable the very name of Roman, by the public singings 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 ditchwater, 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 exhortation, he urges his friend with reiterated earnestness to come, to come at once, to come before winter,25 to come ere it is too late, and see him, and help him, and receive his blessing before he died.