“Bonum agonem subituri estis, in quo agonothetes Deus vivus est, xystarches Spiritus Sanctus, corona aeternitatis, bravium angelicae substantiae, politia in coelis, gloria in saecula saeculorum.”—TERT. adMart. 3.
“Qui desiderat dissolvi et esse cum Christo, patienter vivit et delectabiliter moritur.”—AUG.
“Lieblich wie der Iris Farbenfeuer
Auf der Donnerwolke duft’gem Thau
Schimmert durch der Wehmuth düstern Schleier
Hier der Ruhe heitres Blau.”—SCHILLER.
DID Paul ever get that cloak, and the papyri and the vellum rolls? Did Timothy ever reach him?1 None can tell us. With the last verse of the Second Epistle to Timothy we have heard Paul’s last word. In some Roman basilica, perhaps before Helius, the Emperor’s freedman, in the presence of some dense, curious, hostile crowd of Jews and Pagans, he must have been heard once more, in his second defence, or on the second count of the indictment against him; and on this occasion the majority of the assessors must have dropped the tablet C—the tablet of condemnation—into the voting urn, and the presiding judge must have pronounced sentence of decapitation on one who, though condemned of holding a dangerous and illegal superstition, was still a Roman citizen. Was he alone at his second trial as at his first? Did the Gentiles again hear of Jesus and the Resurrection? Did he to them, as to the Athenians prove that the God whose Gospel he had been commissioned to proclaim was the same God after whom their fathers had ignorantly groped, if haply they might find him, in the permitted ages of ignorance, before yet, in the dispensation of the times, the shadow on the dial–plate of eternity had marked that the appointed hour had come? All such questions are asked in vain. Of this alone we may feel convinced—that he heard the sentence pronounced upon him with a feeling akin to joy—
“For sure, no gladlier does the stranded wreck
See, through the grey skirts of a lifting squall,
The boat that bears the hope of life approach
To save the life despaired of, than he saw
Death dawning on him, and the end of all.”
But neither respecting his bearing nor his fate do we possess any particulars. If any timid, disheartened, secret Christians stood listening in the crowded court if through the ruined areas which marked the sites of what had once been shops and palaces before the conflagration had swept like a raging storm through the narrow ill–built streets—if from the poorest purlieus of the Trastevere or the gloomy haunts of the catacomb any converted slave or struggling Asiatic who believed in Jesus had ventured among the throng, no one has left a record, no one even told the story to his fellows so clearly as to leave behind him a floating tradition. We know nothing more. The last word has been spoken. The curtain has fallen on one of the noblest of human lives.
They who will may follow him in imagination to the possible scene of his martyrdom, but every detail must borrowed from imagination alone. It may be that the legendary is also the real scene of his death. If so, accompanied by the centurion and the soldiers who were to see him executed, he left Rome by the gate now called hy his name. Near that gate, close beside the English cemetery, stands the pyramid of C. Cestius, and under its shadow lie buried the mortal remains of Keats and Shelley, and of many who have left behind them beloved or famous names. Yet even amid those touching memorials the traveller will turn with deeper interest to the old pyramid, because it was one of the last objects on which rested the eyes of Paul. For nearly three miles the sad procession walked; and doubtless the dregs of the populace, who always delight in a scene of horror, gathered round them. About three miles from Rome, not far from the Ostian road, is a green and level spot, with low hills around it, known anciently as AquaeSalviae, and now as TreFontane.There the word of command to halt was given; the prisoner knelt down; the sword flashed, and the life of the greatest of the Apostles was shorn away.2
“Dulce sonat æthere vox
Hiems transiit, occidit nox,
Imber abiit moestaque crux,
Lucet io perpetua lux.”—BALDE.
Earthly failure could hardly have seemed more absolute. No blaze of glory shone on his last hours. No multitudes of admiring and almost adoring brethren surrounded his last days with the halo of martyrdom. Near the spot where he was martyred it is probable that they laid him in some nameless grave—in some spot remembered only by the one or two who knew and loved him. How little did they know, how little did even he understand, that the apparent earthly failure would in reality be the most infinite success! Who that watched that obscure and miserable end could have dreamed that Rome itself would not only adopt the Gospel of that poor outcast, but even derive from his martyrdom, and that of his fellow Apostle, her chief sanctity and glory in the eyes of a Christian world; that over his supposed remains should rise a church more splendid than any ancient basilica; and that over a greater city than Rome the golden cross should shine on the dome of a mighty cathedral dedicated to his name?
How little did men recognise his greatness! Here was one to whom no single man that has ever lived, before or since, can furnish a perfect parallel. If we look at him only as a writer, how immensely does he surpass, in his most casual Epistles, the greatest authors, whether Pagan or Christian, of his own and succeeding epochs. The younger Pliny was famous as a letter–writer, yet the younger Pliny never produced any letter so exquisite as that to Philemon. Seneca, as a moralist stood almost unrivalled, yet not only is clay largely mingled with his gold, but even his finest moral aphorisms are inferior in breadth and intensity to the most casual of St. Paul’s. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius furnish us with the purest and noblest specimens of Stoic loftiness of thought, yet St. Paul’s chapter on charity is worth more than all they ever wrote. If we look at the Christian world, the very greatest worker in each realm of Christian service does but present an inferior aspect of one phase only of Paul’s many–sided pre–eminence. As a theologian, as one who formulated the doctrines of Christianity, we may compare him with St. Augustine or St. Thomas of Aquinum; yet how should we be shocked to find in him the fanciful rhetoric and dogmatic bitterness of the one, or the scholastic aridity of the other! If we look at him as a moral reformer, we may compare him with Savonarola; but in his practical control of even the most thrilling spiritual impulses—in making the spirit of the prophet subject to the prophet—how grand an exemplar might he not have furnished to the impassioned Florentine! If we consider him as a preacher we may compare him with St. Bernard; yet St. Paul would have been incapable of the unnatural ascetism and heresy–hunting hardness of the great Abbot of Clairvaux. As a reformer who altered the entire course of human history, Luther alone resembles him; yet how incomparably is the Apostle superior to Luther in insight, in courtesy, in humility, in dignity, in self–control! As a missionary we might compare him to Xavier, as a practical organiser to St. Gregory, as a fervent lover of souls to Whitefield, and to many other saints of God in many other of his endowments; but no saint of God has ever attained the same heights in so many capacities, or received the gifts of the Spirit in so rich an outpouring, or borne in his mortal body such evident brand–marks of the Lord. In his lifetime he was no whit behind the very chiefest of the Apostles, and he towers above the very greatest of all the saints who have since striven to follow the example of his devotion to his Lord.
“God buries his workmen, but carries on their work.” It is not for any earthly rewards that God’s heroes have sought—not even for the reward of hoping in the posthumous success of the cause to which they have sacrificed their lives. All questions of success or failure they have been content to leave in the hands of God. Their one desire has been to be utterly true to the best that they have known; their prayers have all been simplified to this alone— “Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God; let Thy loving Spirit lead me into the land of righteousness.” That God has seemed to be careless of their individual happiness they would be the last to complain; though He slay them, yet do they trust in Him. Failure was to St. Paul a word unknown. He knew that to fail—or seem to fail—in the cause of God, was to succeed beyond the dreams of earthly ambition.
His faith had never wavered amid life’s severest trials, nor his hope grown dim amid its most bitter disappointments; and when he passed from the dungeon and the martyrdom to his crown of righteousness, he left the life which he had sown to be quickened by the power of God in the soil of the world’s history, where it shall continue to bear fruit until the end of time, amid the ever–deepening gratitude of generations yet unborn. One who had lived with him, and knew his thoughts and hopes, and had himself preached the faith of Christ in days when to be a Christian was to suffer as a Christian, has written of God’s heroes in words which St. Paul would have endorsed, and in which he would have delighted, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country; and truly, if they had been mindful of that country whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly; wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city.”