The Online Library of Liberty

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• Preface
• The First Epistle to the Thessalonians
• The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians
• The Epistle to the Galatians
• The Epistle to the Galatians
• The Epistle to the Romans
• Essay On the Abstract Ideas of the New Testament
• Essay On St. Paul and the Twelve
• Essay On St. Paul and Philo
• Religion and Theology.

THE FIRST EPISTLE to the THESSALONIANS

INTRODUCTION.

The greater number of the Epistles of St. Paul may be arranged conveniently in two groups: the first comprehending the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans; the second, the Epistles of the Imprisonment, including under this term the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon.

Reading the Epistles in chronological order, many will be tempted to trace in them a gradual development of idea and doctrine. Others, again, will seek to impress upon them the same fixed type of truth held from the beginning, ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’ Could a person lay aside previous conceptions, and resign himself to the letter of the text, he would not find either of these views supported by an examination of the Epistles themselves. There is no system which is presupposed in them; nor can any be constructed out of them without marring their simplicity. They have almost wholly a practical aim, and are fragmentary and occasional. Ordinary letters arise out of the incidents of the day; so these have to do with real events and feelings passing between the Apostle and the churches. There is a growth in the Epistles of St. Paul, it is true; but it is the growth of Christian life, not of intellectual progress,—not of reflection, but of spiritual experience, enlarging as the world widens before the Apostle’s eyes, passing from life to death, or from strife to peace, with the changes in the Apostle’s own life, or the circumstances of his converts. There is a rest also in the Epistles of St. Paul, discernible not in forms of thought or types of doctrine, but in the person of Christ Himself, who is his centre in every Epistle, however various may be his modes of expression, or his treatment of controversial questions.

There is one mode of expression we naturally adopt when near, another at a distance—one in the fullness and vigour of life, another in the near approach of death—one in joy, another in sorrow—one in sympathy with others, another when at variance with them. Change of sphere will often produce a corresponding change in the style and cast of our thoughts. What we have long or often meditated upon, we express differently from what flashes upon us for the first time; what comes to us sealed by the experience of many years, assumes a different character in our minds from what with equal confidence we believed and acted upon in the fervour of first conviction.

These are the kind of differences which separate the first from the second of the two main divisions of the writings of St. Paul.

And before this there is a prior stage, in which he is on the threshold of the conflict, and not wholly (shall we say?) aware of the great thoughts which were hereafter, by the will of God, to spring up within him. Such is the inference which we are led to draw when, from the perusal of the later Epistles, we turn to those which are universally agreed to be first in date,—the Epistles to the Thessalonians,—and read them not as ‘dead words,’ but as witnesses of the Apostle’s mind and life.

It is a comparatively short period of time which can be allowed—not more than four or five years at the utmost— between the date of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, written from Athens or Corinth, and the Epistle to the Galatians, written probably during the Apostle’s stay at Ephesus or in its neighbourhood. More than half the Apostle’s ministry had already elapsed ere he set his hand to this the first of his extant writings,—one among many, as he implies in a passage in the Second Epistle, iii. 17, and therefore not to be looked upon too curiously, as part of a scheme which was to be completed in the series of Epistles. It is a fragment, the earliest we possess, of the Apostle’s life and the History of the Church. Nothing is gained for the interpretation of the Epistle, by attempting to combine it artificially with his later writings. No such connexion could have been present to the mind of the Apostle. The real light which they receive from one another is that of contrast. Two writings of the same author could not be more different than the Epistles to the Thessalonians and that which follows next in order, the Epistle to the Galatians. The latter is fervid and abrupt, full of interrogation and argument, and abounding in allusions to the Old Testament; it has the tone of one speaking with authority; parts of it are written under what may be termed the feeling of persecution (vi. 14-18), the subdued, painful sense that ‘he bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ The Epistles to the Thessalonians are perhaps the least impassioned, and most regular in style, of any of St. Paul’s Epistles: they contain no single quotation from the Old Testament, and very few questions; they are not argumentative at all; they advise rather than command; nor are they marked by any of the Apostle’s deepest and most inward feelings.

GENUINENESS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE.

The First Epistle to the Thessalonians is not deficient in external evidence for its genuineness. It is quoted by Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian; is named in the Muratori fragment; and had a place among the ten Pauline Epistles, which were admitted into the Canon of Marcion, by whom it was ranked fifth in the list of St. Paul’s writings. Like all the other books of the New Testament, it is said to have been corrupted by him, or rather, if Epiphanius may be trusted (Haereses, p. 371), he left nothing of the original. The question of the relation of Marcion to the canon of Scripture is obscure, and one which, as we have no means of determining it from the Epistle to the Thessalonians, it would be out of place to discuss here. The fact, however, that he inserted the Epistle in his canon, is a proof that a writing under this name, identified by quotations of Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian, as the one which we possess, must have been received as a genuine work of St. Paul, at least as early as the middle of the second century.

It is not in consequence of any deficiency of external, but, as is supposed, of internal evidence, that doubts have been raised of late years respecting the genuineness of the Epistle. In some respects it has been thought too like, in others too unlike, undoubted writings of the Apostle, for us to maintain that it is from his hand. The critic by whom these difficulties have been chiefly urged, is Dr. Baur, of Tübingen, whose objections may be regarded as a summary of all that can be said on that side of the argument1 . They may be conveniently arranged under the following heads:—

• i. Absence of individuality, and of doctrinal statements.
• ii. The tone of a later age discernible in ii. 14-16.
• iii. Inconsistency with the Acts of the Apostles, in relation to some points of fact.
• iv. Perpetual reference to the events recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, indicative of the sources whence the Epistle was compiled.
• v. Verbal similarities to passages in the other Epistles of St. Paul, leading to a suspicion of designed imitation.
• vi. Discrepancies from the other Epistles in modes of thought, especially traceable in iv. 13-18.

i. Absence of individuality (eigenthümlichkeit) and of doctrinal statements. ‘It is made up of nothing but wishes, instructions, admonitions—contains no doctrinal subject-matter at all, with the single exception of the mention of the coming of Christ, iv. 13-18.’

There is a difficulty in meeting such objections as these, because, whatever real weight they may have, they ultimately resolve themselves into the impression of an individual critic, who, if he be gifted with the faculty of writing clearly, easily masters the judgement of his reader. Sometimes they come to us with overwhelming force; at other times we wonder that we can have been influenced by them at all. How an author ought to have written, is a question in which imagination has a wide range; a meagre induction, gathered from a few short works, is not a sufficient criterion of how he must have written everywhere and at all times. Baur’s objections labour under the fallacy of presenting one side of the question only. Grounds of suspicion are endless; and in answer we can only accumulate the probabilities opposed to them. On the same ground with Baur, it may be argued with great truth, that the very absence of individuality agrees with the incidental character of the Epistles. Why should we expect them all to bear marks of ‘originality?’ Might not the Apostle write as a man writes to his friends, without seeking to impart any new truth? Does not the First Epistle to the Thessalonians arise naturally from a real occasion—the return of Timothy with news respecting the converts—an occasion just similar to that of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians? Is not one doctrine enough in the space of five short chapters? And is the disproportion between the doctrinal and practical sections any greater than in the case of some of the other Epistles?

Slight as these presumptions are, they may be fairly placed in the scale against an argument such as Baur’s. If it were admitted that the absence of doctrinal ideas makes the Epistle unworthy of St. Paul, it makes it also a forgery without an object.

ii. The tone of a later age discernible in chap. ii. 16: ‘For the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost;’ which is supposed to be an after-reflection on the destruction of Jerusalem.

To the Apostle, reading the future in the present, the state of Judea at any time during the last thirty years before the destruction of the city, would have been sufficient to justify the expression, ‘wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.’ The fearful looking for of judgement was natural, not only to Christians, but to Jews themselves, to Josephus as well as to St. Paul. The passage must not, however, be strained beyond its natural meaning. The word ὀργή, wrath, in other places (Rom. i. 18; ii. 8) refers at least as much to final impenitence and hardness of heart, ‘the spiritual wrath of God,’ as to temporal judgements. And the connexion in which it occurs here, ‘forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles, that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway,’ shows the Apostle to be speaking, not of punishment, but of reprobation1 .

iii. Inconsistencies with the Acts of the Apostles in some points of fact. These are: (1) The statement of the Acts that Silas and Timotheus, being left behind at Berea, came up with the Apostle at Corinth, after he had left them (Acts xviii. 5), compared with the fact recorded in the Epistle that Timothy was sent back from Athens to Thessalonica, 1 Thess. iii. 1; (2) the impression conveyed by the Acts xvii. 1-5, that the Thessalonian Church was of Jewish origin, compared with the impression conveyed by 1 Thess. ii. 14 that it was Gentile; and (3) the statement that the persecution which the Thessalonians endured was of their own countrymen, which is nevertheless recorded in the Acts to have been stirred up by Jews.

What reconciliation of these opposite views is possible need not be considered [in the present connexion]. It is sufficient here to observe, that the discrepancies alluded to are not greater than those between the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistle to the Galatians, in the account of the council. If these latter discrepancies have never led any critic to doubt the Epistle to the Galatians, neither is there any reason why similar discrepancies should be assumed as fatal to the Epistle to the Thessalonians.

Another objection is based on the indications afforded by the Epistle, that the Church to which it is addressed had been already long established. Their faith is known in every place, i. 9; they had a regular Church government, v. 12; and some of their members had died since the Apostle’s visit to them, iv. 13, although, according to the narrative of the Acts, but a few weeks, or at the most a few months, could have elapsed. Compare Acts xvii. 1-8, xviii. 1-5.

The answer to this objection is to be sought in the peculiar circumstances of the early Church, in which a year might be said to be like a day, and a whole life to be crowded into the moment of conversion. Men living in expectation of the coming of the Lord lost their measure of time; every hour was fraught to them with feelings and events. Nor must the language of the Apostle himself be too strictly interpreted when speaking of the Church, as seen by the eye of faith and love idealised before him. Compare 1 Cor. i. 9, especially as contrasted with the after tone of the Epistle; Rom. i. 8. Further it may be observed, that some kind of organization was established by St. Paul, immediately on his first declaration of the Gospel everywhere among the new converts, Acts xiv. 23; and that nothing is implied in the word προιστάμενοι but what must have existed in the Jewish Synagogue, and would naturally spring up in the Christian Church. The death of even one or two members of the Church might be sufficient to suggest the inquiry what became of the departed.

iv. Reference to the events recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, indicative of the sources whence the Epistle was compiled.

Baur supposes the forger of the Epistle to have had before him, either the Acts of the Apostles themselves, or earlier documents from which the Acts of the Apostles were compiled. The Epistle appears to him to add nothing to the events narrated there.

Opposite probabilities are: (1) The natural manner in which the events referred to are introduced. To go back to what happened while he was yet with them, is quite in character with the writings of the Apostle. In 1 Thessalonians, as in the Epistle to the Galatians, he recalls his converts to the moment of their first conversion; as in the Corinthians he appeals to the witness of his own life, and awakens their sympathies by the mention of persecutions which he suffered for their sakes. There is scarcely one of his Epistles which has not several allusions of this kind. Hence there is no sort of improbability that many such might occur in the Thessalonians. But, on the other hand, it must be observed, (2) that these resemblances to the Acts relate only to the persecution which the Apostle had endured at Philippi (ii. 2), to the persecution of the Thessalonian Church (ii. 14), and to his own stay at Athens; and (3) that the discrepancies just noticed are of themselves opposite probabilities. For is it likely that a forger, carefully reading the Acts of the Apostles when compiling his Epistle, could have committed so clumsy an error as to send back Timothy and Silas, not from Corinth, but from Athens? or would he have lighted upon so crude an invention as to send back Timothy at all, to satisfy the longing desire of the Apostle about his converts, when Timothy had just come from the place to which he was sent? Or again, is it probable that he would have fallen into the inconsistency of representing that [as] a Gentile which the Acts rather intimates to have been a Jewish Church? Or that persecution as raised by Gentiles, which the Acts informs us originated with Jews? The greatest carelessness must be attributed to him, to account for such oversights. But the greatest ingenuity would have been required to imitate the style and topics of St. Paul, as he must be supposed to have done. It is a refinement not to be thought of, that he purposely differed from the Acts of the Apostles, with the view of concealing the sources from which his information was derived.

v. The next argument of Baur is of a more subtle kind, and can only be justly appreciated by a careful comparison of the passages on which it is based. He thinks that in 1 Thessalonians he can trace a repetition of the same thoughts that occur elsewhere in the writings of St. Paul; or, in other words, he supposes the Epistle to be a sort of cento ingeniously made up from other places.

The instances given by him are as follows:—

That these are striking similarities is not to be doubted. The whole question turns upon the point, Of what nature is the similarity?

There is one kind of resemblance between two passages which indicates that one of them is an imitation or transcript of the other, while another kind proves them only to have been the production of the same mind. Even exact verbal agreements do not necessarily show more than that the same words have been used twice over by the same person. St. Paul, when writing nearly at the same time to the Ephesians and Colossians, might to both Churches repeat the same topics expressed in the same words, without this repetition necessarily shaking the genuineness of either Epistle. On the other hand, the portion of the Second Epistle of St. Peter and of the Epistle of St. Jude which is common to both is such as to demand a different explanation.

Which of these two alternatives we adopt, will depend chiefly on what we know of the author. The recurrence of the same thoughts or topics in two different works, may or may not be a presumption against the genuineness of both or either of them.

(1) Is it the way of an author to repeat himself? If we were able to say no, a strong presumption would be raised against the genuineness of a work which seemed to be but a repetition of his other writings. But if he were in the habit of repeating himself, the repetitions would be no disproof of the genuineness of the work in which they occurred.

They would be a slight presumption in its favour, or even a considerable one if made in a manner which was characteristic of the writer.

(2) The argument from similarity against the genuineness of one of two writings has a very different force when applied to a classical author or to the fluent rhetorician of a later age, and to a writer like St. Paul, whose style is constrained and vocabulary limited. Great masters of language are never at a loss for words; it is otherwise with those who are stammering in a foreign tongue.

(3) Similarities in words and terms only are not a presumption in favour of forgery, but rather the reverse, in the case of two works bearing the name of the same person. The forged book in ancient times was not a tessellated work of phrases and expressions derived from other writings of the supposed author. Whole passages were interpolated with an object, or perhaps without one, as they chanced to be remembered. But nothing would have been gained by stealing words.

Now, it must be observed: (a) That the parallels which we have quoted in no instance extend to whole verses, like that of St. Jude and St. Peter; (b) that they occur in a writer who, in his undoubtedly genuine Epistles, is remarkable for such repetitions. Not to mention the parallelism of the Ephesians and the Colossians, the very passages, which we have already quoted from the two Epistles to the Corinthians, closely resemble similar expressions in the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans. Compare 1 Cor. ii. 4, iv. 3, 4 with Gal. i. 10; or 2 Cor. xii. 7 with Gal. iv. 14; or Rom. xiv with 1 Cor. viii; or the deferred intention in 2 Cor. xiii. 1 with Rom. i. 13; or the unwillingness to enter on another man’s labours in Rom. xv. 18-24 with 2 Cor. x. 14-16; or Gal. iii. 6-12 with Rom. iv. 3-11. Almost every Epistle of St. Paul has a network of thoughts and expressions derived from the rest. And hence we infer that the passages in the Thessalonians quoted by Baur are rather to be regarded as an indication of the genuineness than of the spuriousness of the Epistle; because they are quoted in the manner in which St. Paul repeats himself; and (c) they are not of a kind which a forger could easily have invented.

It might be truly said of the early Ecclesiastical forgeries that nothing could exceed the readiness with which they were received; but, on the other hand, nothing could exceed the clumsiness of their falsification. They made no attempt to imitate the style of the author whose name they bore; they commonly carried on their face the object with which they were written. A forgery so ingenious as the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, containing so many latent resemblances to the genuine writings of the Apostle, would be unique in Ecclesiastical literature.

Paley remarks, that a writer of the second century would never have thought of attributing to St. Paul the expectation of the immediate end of the world, which had already been refuted by the course of events. Put in a slightly different point of view, the argument is perfectly just. He who may be supposed to have written the First Epistle to the Thessalonians in the second century, was probably a believer in the immediate advent of Christ. But whatever may have been his own belief, he would have felt the anachronism of putting into the mouth of one long since dead, words that implied that he would be alive when it took place. And the whole spirit of such a belief would have led him to have supported it by present immediate inspiration rather than by the testimony of an Apostle who had himself fallen asleep.

(4) Lastly: Many positive evidences may be urged in favour of the genuineness of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. Among these we reckon the last of Baur’s objections (above, p. 5).

vi. Without laying greater stress on this argument than it deserves, we pass on to enumerate other internal evidences that the Epistle is St. Paul’s. Such are:—

(1) The desire to see the face of his converts, iii. 6, 10, and delayed intention to come to them, ii. 18. Compare Rom. i. 13, xv. 22; 1 Cor. xvi. 1; 2 Cor. i. 16, xiii. 1; Phil. i. 8; Philem. 22.

(2) The lively sympathy with them throughout the Epistle. Such passages as ii. 17, iii. 5, 10, are good instances of this. He is taken from them in presence, not in heart; he lives if they stand fast in the Lord; they desire to see him, even as he them. These expressions show the same sort of reciprocity between the Apostle and his converts as is traceable in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. In both there is the same sensitiveness to every human as well as spiritual consolation, the same loneliness when separated from them, and the same joy at the good news of Titus and Timothy. Compare 1 Thess. ii. 17, iii. 6, with 2 Cor. vii. 5, 7, ii. 12, 13; also Phil. iii. 25, 29; Col. i. 7, 8. Yet great as is the similarity of thought, there is no similarity of language, such as that into which an imitator would naturally have fallen.

(3) The frequent and characteristic mention of himself. As in the Galatians, he perpetually recurs to the time when he was yet with them. It is through himself, in the remembrance of himself, that he would implant in them the image of Christ. And yet that which he especially seeks to recall, is the very absence of any claim or pretension on his part. He did not seek praise when he might have done so; he did not receive the maintenance to which, as an Apostle, he had a right, 2 Cor. xi. 9, xiii. 13, 14. Does not this remind us of him who did glory and did not glory, seeming, as it were, to assert and deny himself at once? And yet the favourite word καυχα̂σθαι nowhere occurs in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians.

(4) The delicate manner in which reproof and admonition are conveyed, as what they already knew and practised, and had no need that the Apostle should teach them, iv. 9, v. 2.

(5) The germs of thoughts and of precepts which may be traced in a more developed form in later Epistles. Thus the practical exhortations at the end of the Epistle, are more fully worked out in the twelfth chapter of the Romans; the figure in v. 8 is expanded in Eph. vi. 13-17. A slighter example of the same growth is traceable in the expression, ‘Whether we wake or sleep we may live together with him,’ in v. 10, compared with the common phraseology of the Romans, Galatians, and the later Epistles. Another is the reference to the heathen origin of the Thessalonians, in i. 9; compare 1 Cor. xii. 2; Eph. ii. 11; Gal. iv. 8; also the mention made of the relation of the Church to those that are without, iv. 12 (compare Col. iv. 5; Cor. vi. 1), as well as of unity within, v. 13. A similar growth is observable in the allusion to the duty of the Church to support the teachers of the Gospel, when placed side by side with the larger manner in which the same subject is treated in 1 Cor. ix; 2 Cor. xi. 8, 9; xii. 13. In all these instances there is the kind of difference that we should expect to find between a thought or precept often dwelt upon and frequently repeated, and the same thought expressed for the first time in few words by a comparatively unpractised writer.

It has been objected against the genuineness of this Epistle, that it contains only a single statement of doctrine. But liveliness, personality, similar traits of disposition, are far more difficult to invent than statements of doctrine. A later age might have supplied these, but it could hardly have caught the very likeness and portrait of the Apostle. The strength of this argument is considerably increased when it is placed side by side with another of a wholly different kind, derived from mannerisms of style and language. Such are:—

(1) The expansion and association of words traceable in passages, such as i. 2-6, 7, 8; ‘Going off upon a word’ or thought, ii. 18, v. 4; ‘harping back upon one,’ ii. 1; cf. i. 9, iii. 5; cf. 1; elucidation of one expression or one verse by another in apposition with it, as in i. 9, iv. 3, 6; the aggravation and accumulation of language in such passages as i. 2, 3, 5, 8; the apparent unmeaningness of some emphatic expressions, ii. 5, iii. 11, v. 27; the recurrence of the same forms of speech and thought at the commencement of successive verses and paragraphs, i. 9, ii. 1, ii. 3, 5, ii. 7, 11, iii. 1, 5, often traceable at a great distance, as in i. 6, ii. 14; play of words, iv. 9; exaggeration, iv. 10; climax, ii. 8, i. 5, in the latter passage with the favourite οὐ μόνον ἀλλὰ καί; negative and positive statements of the same thought, ii. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; interrogative and positive statements, ii. 19, 20.

(2) Peculiarities of another class, found in the Epistles to the Thessalonians as well as in other writings of St. Paul, are the following:—

The play of words δεδοκιμάσμεθα, δοκιμάζοντι, in ii. 4; the paradox in i. 6 ἐν θλίψει πολλῃ̂ μετὰ χαρα̂ς πνεύματος ἁγίου (compare Col. i. 24; 2 Cor. vii. 10, viii. 1); the mixed metaphor respecting the day of the Lord in v. 5, also in the same passage the double use of κλέπτης, κλέπτας (compare Rom. xiii. 12; 1 Cor. iii. 15; and the inversion of thought in Rom. vii. 1-7); the substitution of the present for the future, in iii. 19 (compare Rom. ii. 16); verbal antithesis of prepositions, i. 5 ἐν ὑμɩ̂ν δι’ ὑμα̂ς, iv. 7 ἐπὶ ἀκαθαρσίᾳ, ἀλλ’ ἐν ἁγιασμῳ̑, ii. 3 οὐκ ἐκ πλάνης οὐδὲ ἐν δόλῳ; pleonasms as in i. 3, ii. 9, v. 23; repetition of γάρ in several successive verses, i. 8—ii. 1; use of γάρ in question, ii. 19, iii. 9; resumption of sentence after a digression with διὰ τονˆτο, iii. 5, iii. 7; the use of the double ἵνα, iv. 1; peculiar uses of words and expressions such as εὐαγγέλιον for the preaching of the Gospel, 1 Thess. i. 5; ἀγών Col. iii. 1; 1 Thess. ii. 2, to express the passionate earnestness of his feelings towards his converts; χαρὰ ἢ στέϕανος 1 Thess. ii. 19; Phil. iv. 1, said also of his converts; ἵνα μὴ ἐπιβαρωˆ 2 Cor. ii. 5; δυνάμενοι ἐν βάρει εἰ̂ναι 1 Thess. ii. 6, of his burdening the Church with his maintenance. Compare also the following:—

ἀπὼν τῳ̑ σώματι, παρὼν δὲ τῳ̑ πνεύματι 1 Cor. v. 3; ἐν προσώπῳ καὶ μὴ ἐν καρδίᾳ 2 Cor. v. 12; προσώπῳ οὐ καρδίᾳ 1 Thess. ii. 17.

Such intricate similarities of language, such lively traits of character, it is not within the power of any forger to invent, and, least of all, of a forger of the second century.

THESSALONICA.

Thessalonica, called in more ancient times Halia, Emathia, and Therma, now Salonichi, was a populous city, the capital of one of the Roman divisions of Macedonia, situated at the north-east corner of the Thermaic Gulf.

It is not one of the objects of the present work to enter minutely either into the history of the cities to which the Epistles were addressed, or into the local features of the country in which they were situated. To fill the mind with historical pictures or descriptions of scenery, will not in any degree help us to feel as the Apostles felt, or think as they thought, any more than the history of the reign of George the Third, or a description of the scenery of Somersetshire or Cornwall, would enable us to understand the life and character of Wesley or Whitfield. Interesting as such pictures may be, they tend to withdraw us from a higher interest, which is to be found only in the private character of the Gospel narrative itself.

It is not in the first, but in the second century, that the Church comes into contact with the world. The life of Christ and His Apostles stands in no relation to the public history of their time. None of the great events of the world appears to touch them; no edict of the Roman emperors, with the single exception of the command of Claudius that the Jews should depart from Rome, has the least effect on the fortunes of the infant communion. Even in this case, we arrive at no other result than that Aquila and Priscilla met with St. Paul at Corinth, and may conjecture of the possible influence of the dispersion of so many Jews throughout the empire. No name of any Christian convert in the New Testament can be certainly identified with the name of any one known to us from profane history.

Neither are the descriptions of particular cities or countries at all more instructive. The fact, that at Thessalonica there were many thousand Jews, is of very slight importance in connexion with an Epistle addressed to Gentiles; it is not more than a probability, that we can trace in the erring Galatians the spirit of the worshippers of Cybele or of the followers of Montanus. No amount of research into the history of the time, would inform us of the first question respecting all the Epistles, whether they were addressed to Jews or Gentiles.

Such historical or topographical inquiries are of interest to the antiquarian; they are like the relaxation of foreign travel after severe study: but they have no real connexion with the interpretation of Scripture; and they tend to withdraw the mind from the true sources of illustration of the Epistles, and the true nature of the earliest Christianity. They lead us away from the internal relation of all Jewish and heathen thought to the truths of the Gospel, to a relation between the Church and the world which is purely accidental and external. They tend to give a national and historical character to Christianity, ere yet it appeared to the eye of man as a phenomenon of history. It is not the least danger of such inquiries that they fill up the void of materials by innumerable conjectures.

The traveller in Greece or in Asia who has followed in the footsteps of the Apostles, who has beheld with his own eyes the same scenes that were looked upon by St. Paul and St. John, is loth to believe that he can add nothing to our knowledge of the Seven Churches, or of the labours of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Those scenes have a never-dying interest; but it is for themselves alone. Fain would we imagine the sight upon which St. Paul looked, when standing on Mars’ Hill, he beheld ‘the city wholly given to idolatry;’ fain would we see in fancy the desert rocks of the sea-girt isle, on which St. John gazed when he wrote the Apocalypse. But we must not transfer to the ancient world our own impressions of nature or of art. Of that sensibility to the beauties of scenery, or of that romantic recollection of the past, which are such remarkable characteristics of our own day, there is no trace in the writings of the New Testament, nor any reason to suppose that they had a place in the minds of its authors.

Taking the other aspect of the subject, we are far from denying that the birth of Christianity is the most interesting of historical facts; but its interest is also for itself alone: it is not derived from any political influence which the Gospel at first exercised, or from any political causes which may have favoured or given rise to it. In the vastness of the Roman world, it is as a small isolated spot, the light, as it were, of a candle, which must be sought for, not in the court of Caesar, nor amid the factions of Jerusalem, but in the upper chamber in which the disciples met when ‘the number of the names together was about an hundred and twenty, and the doors were shut for fear of the Jews.’ It is one of those minute facts which escape the eye of the contemporary historian, and must not be drawn before its time into the circle of political events. Its first greatness is the very contrast which it presents with the greatness of history. Strange it is to think of the contemporary heathen world, of Tiberius at Capreae, of the Roman senate, of the solid framework of the Roman empire itself. But when this first feeling of surprise has passed away, we become aware that the page of Tacitus, or even of Josephus, adds nothing worth speaking of to our knowledge of the earliest Christianity. The most remarkable fact supplied by them is their unconsciousness of its importance.

SUBJECT OF THE EPISTLE.

It does not detract from the value of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to say that it is without an object. That is, it has no other object but to confirm their faith and remind them of what they owed to the Apostle, as a motive for their continuance in the lesson which he had taught them. The greater part of it is a simple narrative of ‘his manner of entering into them’ and its results. As though he had said, ‘Remember who it was who showed you these things; who spoke to you disinterested words; who drew you towards him with cords of love, as a nurse among her children, as a father with his sons.’ The burden of the first three chapters is his love to them and theirs to him; his anxiety to hear of them and to see them. But love cannot abstain from exhortation; not that it has new commands to give, or fresh lessons to impart, but the very excess of love pours itself forth in thrice-told admonitions and consolations. Trite precepts are repeated by the Apostle as by a parent, not because his children know them not, but in the hope that this time they may strike home upon them with some peculiar force or influence.

From the personal narrative which, in the first half of the Epistle, he has made the vehicle of his instruction, he passes on to a more general lesson. There is no peculiar appropriateness in the manner in which the topics of the fourth and fifth chapters follow one another. They are, first, purity; secondly, love of the brethren; thirdly, the state of the departed, and the coming of Christ; fourthly, peace and order; these are followed by particular and apparently disjointed precepts. It is not impossible to trace a connexion of the second and fourth with the third in the series; for affection for one another may have led to an inquiry ‘concerning them which are asleep,’ and the belief in the approaching Advent, with which the anxiety about the dead was connected, was probably the source of disorder in the Church. Compare 2 Thess. ii. 2. But however interesting such an association may be, we cannot feel certain that it had any real existence in the Apostle’s mind. More naturally we may suppose that, as in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, he writes without connexion, as the several subjects occur to him, or may have been suggested by the news of Timothy, as in the former case by certain of the household of Chloe.

The subject which stands out most prominently in this latter portion of the Epistle, is the state of the departed. The formula with which it is introduced reminds us of the similar formula at the commencement of the tenth chapter of the First of Corinthians, ‘Moreover, brethren, I would not have you ignorant;’ which, in the same way, forms a transition to a fresh topic. It is closely connected with that which is the undercurrent of the whole Epistle, the near approach of the coming of Christ; and probably arises out of some inquiry made of the Apostle by those who were sorrowing for lost friends or kinsmen, who seemed to them not only to have passed, like the Israelites of old, from the presence of God, but from the hope of Messiah’s kingdom.

The ground of consolation (1 Thess. iv. 14, ‘If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will Christ bring with him’) is the same as that of 1 Cor. xv. 21, ‘Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead;’ though the form is different. It is the object of the Apostle to do away with the dreary thought which we infer the Thessalonians to have entertained, that they were for ever separated from the dead. Their heaven was on earth, where they were expecting the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostle comforts them with the assurance that, even if they should not go to the dead, the dead should return to them; that in that kingdom they were not to be parted, but together, the living with the dead and both with Christ.

EVILS IN THE CHURCH OF THE APOSTOLICAL AGE.

Were we, with the view of forming a judgement of the moral state of the early Church, to examine the subjects of rebuke most frequently referred to by the Apostle, these would be found to range themselves under four heads:—first, licentiousness; secondly, disorder; thirdly, scruples of conscience; fourthly, strifes about doctrine and teachers. The consideration of these four subjects, the two former falling in with the argument of the Epistle to the Thessalonians, the two latter more closely connected with the Romans and the Galatians, will give what may be termed the darker side of the primitive Church.

1. Licentiousness was the besetting sin of the Roman world. Except by a miracle, it was impossible that the new converts could be at once and wholly freed from it. It lingered in the flesh when the spirit had cast it off. It had interwoven itself in the pagan religions; and, if we may believe the writings of adversaries, was ever reappearing on the confines of the Church in the earliest heresies. It was possible for men ‘to resist unto death, striving against sin,’ yet to fall beneath its power. Even within the pale of the Church, it might assume the form of a mystic Christianity. The very ecstasy of conversion would often lead to a reaction. Nothing is more natural than that in a licentious city, like Corinth or Ephesus, those who were impressed by St. Paul’s teaching should have gone their way, and returned to their former life. In this case it would seldom happen that they apostatized into the ranks of the heathen: the same impulse which led them to the Gospel, would lead them also to bridge the gulf which separated them from its purer morality. Many may have sinned and repented again and again, unable to stand themselves in the general corruption, yet unable to cast aside utterly the image of innocence and goodness which the Apostle had set before them. There were those, again, who consciously sought to lead the double life, and imagined themselves to have found in licentiousness the true freedom of the Gospel.

How the consciences of men were aroused to the sense that sins of the flesh were really sins, may be seen by the manner in which the Apostle speaks of them. His tone respecting them is very different from that of moralists, or of common conversation even among serious men in modern times. He says nothing of the distrust which they infuse into society, or the consequences to the individual himself.

It is a new and hitherto unheard of language in which the Apostle denounces sins of impurity. They are not moral evils, but spiritual. They corrupt the soul; they defile the temple of the Holy Ghost; they cut men off from the body of Christ. Of morality, as distinct from religion, there is hardly a trace in the Epistles of St. Paul. He cannot appeal to public opinion, for public opinion does not exist; the Gospel itself has to make the standard to the level of which it will raise the world. Fornication and uncleanness were mildly, when at all, censured by heathen philosophy. From within, not from without, the nature of sin has to be explained; as it appears in the depths of the human soul, in the awakening conscience of mankind. Even its consequences in another state of being are but slightly touched upon, in comparison with that living death which [sin] itself is. It is not merely a vice or crime, or even an offence against the law of God, to be punished here or hereafter. It is more than this. It is what men feel in themselves, not what they observe in those around them; not what shall be, but what is; a terrible consciousness, a mystery of iniquity, a communion with unseen powers of evil.

But although such is the tone of the Apostle, there is no violence to human nature in his commands respecting it. He knew how easily extremes meet, how hard it is for asceticism to make clean that which is within, how quickly it might itself pass into its opposite. Nothing can be more different from the spirit of early ecclesiastical history on this subject, than the moderation of St. Paul. The remedy for sin is not celibacy, but marriage. Even second marriages are, for the prevention of sin, to be encouraged. In the same spirit is his treatment of the incestuous person. He had committed a sin not even named among the Gentiles, for which he was to be delivered unto Satan, for which all the Church should humble themselves; yet upon his true repentance, no ban is to separate him from the rest of the brethren, no doom of endless penance is recorded against him. Whatever might have been the enormity of his offence, he was to be forgiven, as in heaven, so on earth.

The manner in which the Corinthian Church are described as regarding this offence before the Apostle’s rebuke to them, no less than the lenient sentence of the Apostle himself afterwards, as well as his constant admonitions on the same subject in all his Epistles, must be regarded as indications of the state of morality among the first converts. Above all other things, the Apostle insisted on purity as the first note of the Christian character; and yet the very earnestness and frequency of his warnings show that he is speaking, not of a sin hardly named among saints, but of one the victory over which was the greatest and most difficult triumph of the cross of Christ.

2. It is hard to resist the impression which naturally arises in our minds, that the early Church was without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; as it were, a bride adorned for her husband, the type of Christian purity, the model of Apostolical order. The real image is marred with human frailty; its evils, perhaps, arising more from this cause than any other, that in its commencement it was a kingdom not of this world; in other words, it had no political existence or legal support; hence there is no evil more frequently referred to in the Epistles than disorder.

This spirit of disorder was manifested in various ways. In the Church of Corinth, the communion of the Lord’s Supper was administered so as to be a scandal; ‘one was hungry, and another was drunken.’ There was as yet no rite or custom to which all conformed. In the same Church, the spiritual gifts were manifested without rule or order. It seemed as if God was not the author of peace, but of confusion. All spoke together, men and women, apparently without distinction, singing, praying, teaching, uttering words unintelligible to the rest, with no regular succession or subordination (1 Cor. xiv). The scene in their assemblies was such, that if an unbeliever had come in, he would have said they were mad. There is no other Church into which we have the same particular insight; but it is not likely that more regularity was observed in the Galatian Church, which was distracted between St. Paul and the false teachers, than in the Corinthian, which still, though in disorder, acknowledged his authority. In the Church to which the Epistle of Jude is addressed, the worst heretics are described as joining in the love feasts of its members, ‘feeding without fear.’ The Second Epistle of Peter uses nearly the same words to the Jews of the dispersion. (Jude 12; 2 Pet. ii. 13.)

Evils of this kind in a great measure arose from the absence of Church authority. Even the Apostle himself persuades more often than commands, and often uses language which implies a sort of hesitation whether his rule would be acknowledged or not. The freedom with which the Church of Corinth challenges particulars in his life and conduct (1 Cor. ix) reminds us rather of the license of a modern congregation in censuring a minister of the Gospel, who was under its control, than of the position which we should expect an Apostle to have held in the minds of the first converts. The diverse offices, the figure of the members and the body, do not refer to what was, but to what ought to have been; to an ideal of harmonious life and action, which the Apostle holds up before them, which in practice was far from being realized. The Church was not organized, but was in process of organization. Its only punishment was excommunication, which, as in modern so in primitive times, could not be enforced against the wishes of the majority. In two cases only are members of the Church ‘delivered unto Satan’ (1 Cor. v. 5; 1 Tim. i. 20). It was a moral and spiritual, not a legal control that was exercised. Hence the frequent admonitions given, doubtless, because they were needed: ‘Obey them that have the rule over you.’

A second kind of disorder arose from unsettlement of mind. Of such unsettlement we find traces in the levity and vanity of the Corinthians; in the fickleness with which the Galatians left St. Paul for the false teachers; almost (may we not say?) in the very passion with which the Apostle addresses them; above all, in the case of the Thessalonians. How few, among all the converts, were there capable of truly discerning their relation to the world around! or of supporting themselves alone when the fervour of conversion had passed away and the Apostle was no longer present with them! They had entered into a state so different from that of their fellow-men, that it might well be termed supernatural. The ordinary experience of men was no longer their guide. They left their daily employments. The great change which they felt within, seemed to extend itself without and involve the world in its shadow. So ‘palpable to sense’ was the vision of Christ’s coming again, that their only fear or doubt was how the departed would have a share in it. No religious belief could be more unsettling than this: that to-day, or to-morrow, or the third day, before the sun set or the dawn arose, the sign of the Son of man might appear in the clouds of heaven. It was not possible to take thought for the morrow, to study to be quiet and get their own living, when men hardly expected the morrow. Death comes to individuals now, as nature prepares them for it; but the immediate expectation of Christ’s coming is out of the course of nature. Young and old alike look for it. It is a resurrection of the world itself, and implies a corresponding revolution in the thoughts, feelings, and purposes of men.

A third kind of disorder may have arisen from the same causes, but seems to have assumed another character. As among the Jews, so among the first Christians, there were those who needed to be perpetually reminded, that the powers that be were ordained of God. The heathen converts could not at once lay aside the licentiousness of manners amid which they had been brought up; no more could the Jewish converts give up their aspirations, that at this time ‘the kingdom was to be restored to Israel,’ which had perhaps been in some cases their first attraction to the Gospel. A community springing up in Palestine under the dominion of the Romans, could not be expected exactly to draw the line between the things that were Caesar’s and the things that were God’s, or to understand in what sense ‘the children were free,’ in what sense it was nevertheless their duty to pay tribute. The spirit of those Galileans, ‘who called no man Lord,’ must have sometimes found its way into the early Christian Church. When men are ‘wrestling against principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in heavenly places,’ they do not find it easy to reconcile their course of action with the bidding of those ‘who sit in Moses’s seat.’ That one of the chief apprehensions of the Apostle was this tendency to rebellion, is proved by the frequency of the exhortations to obey magistrates, and the energy with which he sets himself against it.

3. The third head of our inquiry related to scruples of conscience, which were chiefly of two kinds; regarding either the observance of days, or the eating with the unclean or unbelievers. Were they, or were they not, to observe the Jewish Sabbath, or new moon, or passover? Such questions as these are not to be considered the fancies or opinions of individuals; but, as mankind are quick enough to discover, involve general principles, and are but the outward signs of some deep and radical difference. In the question of the observance of Jewish feasts, and still more in the question of going in unto men uncircumcised and eating with them, was implied the whole question of the relation of the disciple of Christ to the Jew, just as the question of sitting at meat in the idol’s temple was the question of the relation of the disciple of Christ to the Gentile. Was the Christian to preserve his caste, and remain within the pale of Judaism? Was he in his daily life to carry his religious scruples so far as to exclude himself from the social life of the heathen world? How much prudence and liberty and charity was necessary for the solution of such difficulties!

Freedom is the key-note of the Gospel, as preached by St. Paul. ‘All things are lawful.’ ‘There is no distinction of Jew or Greek, barbarian or Scythian, bond or free.’ ‘Let no man judge you of a new moon or a Sabbath.’ ‘Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ And yet, if we go back to its origin, the Christian Church was born into the world marked and diversified with the features of the religions that had preceded it, bound within the curtains of the tabernacle, coloured with Oriental opinions that refused to be washed out of the minds of men. The scruples of individuals are but indications of the elements out of which the Church was composed. There were narrow paths in which men walked, customs which clung to them long after the reason of them had ceased, observances which they were unable to give up, though conscience and reason alike disowned them, which were based on the traditions of half the world, and could not be relinquished, however alien to the spirit of the Gospel. Slowly and gradually, as Christianity itself became more spread, these remnants of Judaism or Orientalism disappeared, and the spirit which had been taught from the beginning made itself felt in the hearts of men and in the institutions of the Church.

4. The heresies of the Apostolical age are a subject too wide for illustration in a note. We shall attempt no more than to bring together the names and heads of opinion which occur in Scripture, with the view of completing the preceding sketch.

There was the party of Peter and of Paul, of the circumcision and of the uncircumcision. There were those who knew ‘Christ according to the flesh;’ those who, like St. Paul, knew Him only as revealed within. There were others who, after casting aside circumcision, were still struggling between the old dispensation and the new. There were those who never went beyond the baptism of John; others, again, to whom the Gospel of Christ clothed itself in Alexandrian language. There were prophets, speakers with tongues, discerners of spirits, interpreters of tongues. There were seekers after ‘knowledge, falsely so called;’ ‘spoilers of others with philosophy and vain deceit,’ ‘worshippers of angels, intruders into things they had not seen.’ There were those who looked daily for the coming of Christ; others who ‘said that the Resurrection was passed already.’ There were some who maintained an Oriental asceticism in their lives, ‘forbidding to marry, commanding to abstain from meats.’ There were individuals, like Hymenaeus and Alexander, who had ‘made shipwreck of their faith;’ like Phygellus and Hermogenes, who had ‘turned away’ from St. Paul; like Diotrephes, the leader in the Church of Ephesus, who refused to ‘receive’ St. John. There were national differences, Jewish Sectarian tendencies, heathen systems of philosophy; stones of another workmanship built into the fabric of the Christian Church. There was the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, the synagogue of Satan, who ‘said that they were Jews, and are not,’ ‘the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess.’ There were wild heretics, ‘many Antichrists,’ ‘grievous wolves, entering into the fold,’ apostasy of whole churches at once. There were mingled anarchy and licentiousness, ‘filthy dreamers, despising dominion, speaking evil of dignities,’ of whom no language is too strong for St. Paul or St. John to use, though they seem to have been separated by no definite line from the Church itself. There were fainter contrasts, too, of those who agreed in the unity of the same spirit, aspects, and points of view, as we term them, of faith and works, of the Epistle to the Romans and the Epistle to the Hebrews.

How this outline is to be filled up must for ever remain, in a great degree, matter of speculation. Yet there is not a single trait here mentioned which does not reappear in the second century, either within the Church or without it, more or less prominent as favoured by circumstances or the reverse. The beginning of Ebionitism, Sabaism, Gnosticism, Montanism, Alexandrianism, Orientalism, and of the licentiousness which marked the track of some of them, are all discernible in the Apostolical age. They would be more correctly regarded, not as offshoots of Christianity, but as the soil in which it grew up. We are surrounded by them, in the Epistles of St. Paul, as truly as the Israelites were surrounded by their enemies when they first took possession of the Promised Land. They are not errors which arose when men began to speculate on the truths of the Gospel: Gnosticism, in particular, would be more nearly described as the mental atmosphere of the Greek cities of Asia, a conducting medium between heathenism and Christianity, in the magic light of which all religions faded and reappeared. None of them pass away at once; some even acquire a temporary principle of life, and grow up parallel with the Church itself. As opinions and tendencies of the human mind, many linger among us to the present day. Only after the destruction of Jerusalem, with the spread of the Gospel over the world, as the spirit of the East moves towards the West, Judaism dies away, to rise again, as some hold, in the glorified form of a mediaeval Church.

Such is the reverse side of the picture of the Apostolical age; what proportions we should give to each feature it is impossible to determine. We need not infer that all Churches were in the same disorder as Corinth and Galatia; or like Sardis, in which only ‘a few names had not defiled their garments;’ nor can we say how far the more flagrant evils were tamely submitted to by the Church itself. There was much of good that we can never know; much also of evil. The first Christians stood alone in the world: many of them were ready to venture their lives for the faith; most of them had probably suffered persecution — a difference between ourselves and them than which none can be greater. And perhaps the general lesson which we gather from the preceding considerations is, not that the state of the primitive Church was better or worse than our first thoughts would have suggested, but that its state was one in which good and evil exercised a more vital power, were more subtly intermingled with, and more easily passed into, each other. All things were coming to the birth, some in one way, some in another. The supports of custom, of opinion, of tradition, had given way; human nature was thrown upon itself and the guidance of the Spirit of God. There were as many diversities of human character in the world then as now; more strange influences of religion and race than have ever since met in one; a far greater yearning of the human intellect to solve the problems of existence. There was no settled principle of morality independent of and above religious convictions. All these causes are sufficient to account for the diversities of opinion or practice, as well as for the extremes which met in the bosom of the primitive Church.

THE FIRST EPISTLE to the THESSALONIANS

1Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ; Grace unto you, and peace [from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ].

1.2 We give thanks to God always for you all, making 1.3 mention of you ^aat^// our prayers; remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope ^bof^// our Lord Jesus Christ, in the 1.4 sight of ^cour God and^// Father; knowing, brethren 1.5 beloved ^dof God, your election, that^// our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your 1.6 sake; and ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy 1.7 of the Holy Ghost: so that ye were ^ean ensample^// to 1.8 all that believe in Macedonia and ^fin^// Achaia. For from you ^ghas been^// sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and ^fin^// Achaia, but^h-// in every place your faith to God-ward is spread abroad; 1.9 so that we need not to speak any thing. For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to 1.10 serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, which ⁱdelivereth^// us from the wrath to come.

2 For yourselves, brethren, know our entrance in 2.2unto you, that it was not in vain: but^k-// after that we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention. 2.3 For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor 2.4of uncleanness, nor in guile; but as we were ¹approved^// of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God which ^mproveth^//2.5our hearts. For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloke of covetousness; God 2.6 is witness: nor of men sought we glory, neither of you, nor of others, when we might have been burdensome, 2.7as the apostles of Christ. But we were ⁿbabes^// among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her ^oown^//2.8children: so being affectionately desirous of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were 2.9 dear unto us. For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: ^p-// labouring night and day, because we would not be ^qburdensome^// unto any of you, we 2.10preached unto you the gospel of God. Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and ^rrighteously^// and unblameably we behaved^s-// among you that 2.11believe: as ye know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a father doth his 2.12children, that ye would walk worthy of God, who ^tcalleth^// you unto his kingdom and glory.

2.13And for this cause ^uwe also thank^// God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which 2.14 effectually worketh also in you that believe. For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judæa are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as 2.15they have of the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and ^xthe^// prophets, have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: 2.16 forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway. ^yBut^// the wrath ^zhas^// come upon them to the uttermost.

2.17BUT we, brethren, being ^abereaved in being^// taken from you for a short time in presence, not in heart, ^bwere the more abundantly earnest^// to see your face 2.18with great desire. Wherefore we would have come unto you, even I Paul, once and again; but Satan 2.19 hindered us. For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our 2.20Lord Jesus Christ at his coming? For ye are our 3glory and joy. Wherefore when we could no longer ^ccontain,^// we thought it good to be left at Athens 3.2alone; and sent Timotheus, 1 our brother, and fellow-worker with God, in the gospel of Christ, to establish 3.3 you, and to comfort you concerning your faith, that no man should be moved by these ^dtribulations^// ; for 3.4yourselves know that we are appointed thereunto, for verily, when we were with you, we told you before that we should suffer tribulation; even as it came to 3.5pass, and ye know. For this cause, when I could no longer forbear, I also sent to know your faith, lest by some means the tempter have tempted you, and our 3.6labour been in vain. But now when Timotheus came from you unto us, and brought us good tidings of your faith and ^elove,^// and that ye have good remembrance of us always, desiring greatly to see us, as we also to 3.7 see you: therefore, brethren, we were comforted ^fin^// you, in all our affliction and distress by your faith: 3.8 for now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord. For 3.9what thanks can we render to God again for you, for all the joy wherewith we joy for your sakes before 3.10our God; night and day praying exceedingly that we might see your face, and might perfect that which is 3.11lacking in your faith? Now our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus Christ direct our way 3.12unto you. And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all 3.13 men, even as we do toward you: to the end he may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before ^gour God and Father,^// at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints.

41 FURTHERMORE then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, even as ye do walk, that ye would abound more and more. 4.2For ye know what commandments we gave you by 4.3the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: 4.4 that every one of you should know how to 4.5^hget himself his own^// vessel in sanctification and honour: not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which 4.6know not God: that no man go beyond and defraud his brother in the matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all these things, as we also forewarned 4.7you and testified. For God called us not unto uncleanness, 4.8but in sanctification. He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who giveth unto you his holy Spirit.

4.9But as touching brotherly love1 we need not to write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God 4.10to love one another. And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, to increase more and more; 4.11and to study to be quiet, and do your own business, and work with your hands, as we commanded you; 4.12that ye may walk honestly towards them that are without, and may have lack of nothing.

4.13 But we would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, 4.14even as the others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. 4.15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the 4.16Lord shall not prevent them which sleep; because the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of 4.17God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: 4.18and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

5 But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have 5.2no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief 5.3in the night. 1 But when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not 5.4 escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that 5.5that day should overtake you as ⁱthieves^// : ^kfor^// ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day. 5.6We are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and 5.7be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and 5.8they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the 5.9hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to ^lobtaining of^// salvation by our Lord 5.10Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake 5.11or sleep, we may live together with him. Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.

5.12And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among you, and are over you in the Lord, and 5.13admonish you; and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake. ^m-// Be at peace among yourselves. 5.14Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, 5.15 be patient toward all men. See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is 5.165.17good, both among yourselves, and to all men. Rejoice 5.18evermore; pray without ceasing; in every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ 5.195.20concerning you. Quench not the Spirit; despise not 5.21 prophesyings. ⁿBut^// prove all things; hold fast that 5.22 which is good; abstain from ^oevery kind^// of evil. 5.23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless in the coming of our Lord 5.24Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

5.25Brethren, pray for us ^ptoo.^// Greet all the brethren 5.26with an holy kiss. I charge you by the Lord that 5.27this epistle be read unto all the^q-// brethren.

5.28The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.^r-//

Annotations

ON THE BELIEF in the COMING OF CHRIST IN THE APOSTOLICAL AGE
1 THESS. III, IV.

‘Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’

(Luke xvii. 21.)

The belief in the near approach of the coming of Christ is spoken of or implied in almost every book of the New Testament; in the discourses of our Lord himself, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles; in the Epistles of St. Paul no less than in the Book of the Revelation. The remains of such a belief are discernible in the Montanism of the second century, which is separated by a scarcely definable line from the Church itself. Nor is there wanting in our own day a dim and meagre shadow of the same primitive faith, moving around, and sometimes within, the pale of our own communion. There are still those who argue, from the very lapse of time, that ‘now is their salvation nearer than when they believed.’ All religious men have at times blended in their thoughts earth and heaven; while there are some who have raised their passing feelings into a system of doctrinal truth, and have seemed to see in the temporary state of the first converts the type of Christian life in all ages.

The influence which this belief exercised on the beginnings of the Church, and the manner in which it is interwoven in the writings of the New Testament, render the consideration of it necessary for the right understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles. Yet it is a subject from which the interpreter of Scripture would gladly turn aside. For it seems as if he were compelled to allow ‘that St. Paul was mistaken, and that in support of his mistake he could appeal to the words of Christ Himself.’ Nothing can be plainer than the Apostle’s meaning; he says, that men living in his own day will be ‘caught up to meet the Lord in the air;’ and yet, after eighteen centuries, the world is as it was. The language which is attributed in the Epistle of St. Peter to unbelievers of that age has become the language of believers in our own:—‘Since the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same from the beginning.’ No one can now be looking daily for the visible coming of Christ any more than, in a land where nature is at rest, he would live in expectation of an earthquake. Not ‘the hardness of men’s hearts,’ but the experience of eighteen hundred years has made it impossible, consistently with the laws of the human mind, that the belief of the first Christians should continue among ourselves.

Why, then, were the traces of such a belief permitted to appear in the New Testament? That is a question which we debate with ourselves the moment the difficulty is perceived, which receives various answers. There are some who say, ‘as a trial of our faith;’ while others have recourse to the double senses of prophecy, to divide the past from the future, the day of judgement from the destruction of Jerusalem. Others cite its existence as a proof that the books of Scripture were compiled at a time when such a belief was still living, and this not without, but within the circle of the Church itself. It may be also regarded as an indication that we were not intended to interpret Scripture apart from the light of experience, or violently to bend life and truth into agreement with isolated texts. Lastly, so far as we can venture to move such a question of our Lord himself, we may observe that his teaching here, as in other places, is on a level with the modes of thought of his age, clothed in figures, as it must necessarily be, to express ‘the things that eye hath not seen;’ limited by time, as if to give the sense of reality to what otherwise would be vague and infinite, yet mysterious in this respect too, for of ‘that hour knoweth no man;’ and that, however these figures of speech are explained, or these opposite aspects reconciled, their meaning, breaking through the horizon of earth, has been the stay and hope of the believer in all ages, who knows, nevertheless, that the Apostles have passed away, and no ‘sign has yet appeared in the clouds,’ and that ‘the round world is set so fast that it cannot be moved.’

But instead of regarding this or any other fact of Scripture as a difficulty to be explained away, it will be more instructive for us to consider the nature of the belief and its probable effect on the infant communion. In its origin it was simple and childlike, the belief of men who saw but a little way into the purposes of Providence, who never dreamed of a vista of futurity. It was not what we should term an article of faith, but natural and necessary, flowing immediately out of the life and state of the earliest believers. It was the feeling of men who looked for the coming of Christ as we might look for the return of a lost friend, many of whom had seen Him on earth, and could not believe that He was taken from them for ever. Those who remembered the Lord would often say one to another, ‘Yet a little while, and we do not see Him; and again a little while, and we shall see Him.’ And sometimes, as years rolled on, they would ask the question which they had once asked in His lifetime, ‘What was this that He said? we cannot tell what this was which He said.’ Let us imagine them, ‘with their lamps lighted and their loins girded,’ in the spirit of our Lord’s discourses, waiting for His appearing. The night is far spent, the day is at hand; already they see the streaks of the morning light. And then again the light fails and fades; it was the light as of a distant city: the hour is not yet come; their own wishes had made them fancy it nearer than it was. Time passes; one by one the fathers fall asleep; at last, ‘a lingering star with lessening ray, the beloved Apostle alone remains;—the saying goes forth ‘that that disciple should not die;’ and the daylight indeed appears, but it is the light not of another world but of this.

So we may trace in a figure the thoughts of the first disciples respecting the coming of the Lord, towards whom they yearned, and the end of the world; the course of events silently rebuking them and saying, ‘It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.’ But the belief in the expectation of the coming of Christ has other aspects also which are equally interesting and important. It was the beginning of the Church. It was the feeling of men who, in the language of St. Paul, were ‘baptized into one body and drunk of one spirit;’ the kingdom of God creating itself in the heart of man, when, in modern language, it was still an idea and not an outward institution, — the liquid ore, as it were, melted by the heavenly flame, but not cast in the mould. It was the feeling of men who had an intense sense of the change that had been wrought in themselves, and to whom this change seemed like the beginning of a greater change that was overflowing on the world around them. It was the feeling of men who looked back upon the past, of which they knew so little, and discerned in it the workings of the same spirit, one and continuous, which they felt in their own souls; to whom the world within and the world without were reflected upon one another, and the history of the Jewish race was a parable, an ‘open secret,’ of the things to come. It was the feeling of men who were living not amid the aspirations of prophecy, but in the hour of its fulfilment; who clothed their own times in its glorious imagery; to whom the veil that was on the face of Moses was done away in Christ. It was the putting of the garment of the old dispensation upon the new. It was the feeling of men who were saying, Lord, how long? whom their own sufferings assured that there was a righteous judge who would not always delay. It was the feeling of men who were living far above and away from earth, in a spiritual kingdom, who scarcely thought either of the past or the future in the eternity of the present.

Let those who think this is an imaginary picture recall to mind and compare with Scripture, either what they may have read in books or experienced in themselves as the workings of a mind suddenly converted to the Gospel. Such an one seems to lose his measure of events and his true relation to the world. While other men are going on with their daily occupations, he only is out of sympathy with nature, and has fears and joys in himself, which he can neither communicate nor explain to his fellows. It is not that he is thinking of the endless ages in which he will partake of heavenly bliss; rather the present consciousness of sin, or the present sense of forgiveness and of peace in Christ, is already a sort of hell or heaven within him, which excludes the future. It is not that he has an increased insight into the original meaning of Scripture; rather he seems to absorb Scripture into himself. Least of all have persons in such a state of mind distinct or accurate conceptions of the world to come. The images in which they express themselves are carnal and visible, often inconsistent with each other, scarcely intelligible to minds which are not in sympathy with them, yet not the less the realization to them of a true and lively faith. The last thing that they desire, or could comprehend, is an intellectual theory of another life. They seem hardly to need either statements of doctrine or the religious ministrations of others; their concern is with God only.

Substitute now for a single individual, the three thousand who were converted on the day of Pentecost, the ‘multitude of Jews that believed, zealous for the law;’ conceive them changed at the same instant by one spirit, and we seem to see on a larger scale the same effects following. Their conversion is an exception to the course of nature; itself a revelation and inspiration, a wonder of which they can give no account to themselves or others, not the least wonderful part of which is their communion with one another. The same Divine power, which originally formed men into nations, forms them into a church now, and almost literally gives them a new language and a new speech. They come into being with common hopes and fears, at one with each other, separated from mankind at large, in new relations to their own country and kindred. They see God looking upon themselves and other men, not, as heretofore, ‘winking at the times of that ignorance,’ but distinctly conscious of all their acts. What they feel within themselves spreads itself over the world. All men are in the presence of God: good and evil quicken into life beneath His searching eye; there is a fellowship of the saints on one side, and a mystery of iniquity on the other. They do not read history, or comprehend the sort of imperfect necessity under which men act as creatures of their age. The same guilt which they acknowledge in themselves, they attach to other men; the same judgement which would await them, is awaiting the world everywhere. In the events around them, in their own sufferings, in their daily life, they see the preparations for the great conflict between good and evil, between Christ and Belial, if, indeed, it be not already begun. The circle of their own life includes in it the destinies of the human race itself, of which it is, as it were, the microcosm, seen by the eye of faith and the light of inward experience. This is what the law and the prophets seem to them to have meant when they spoke of God’s judgements on His enemies, of the Lord coming with ten thousand of His saints. And the signs which were to accompany these things are already seen among them, ‘not in word only, but in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance.’

To us the preaching of the Gospel is a new beginning, from which we date all things, beyond which we neither desire nor are able to inquire. To the first believers it was otherwise; not the beginning of a new world, but the end of a former one. They looked back to the past, because the veil of the future was not yet lifted up. They were living in ‘the latter days,’ the confluence of all times, the meeting-point of the purposes of God. They read all things in the light of the approaching end of the world. They were not taught, and could not have imagined, that for eighteen centuries servants of God should continue on the earth, waiting, like themselves, for the promise of His coming. They were not taught, and could not have imagined, that after three centuries the Church, which they saw poverty-stricken and persecuted, should be the mistress of the earth, and that, in another sense than they had hoped, the kingdoms of this world should become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. Instead of it they beheld in a figure the heavens opening, and the angels of God ascending and descending; the present outpouring of the Spirit, and the evil and perplexity of the world itself, being the earnest of the things which were shortly to come to pass.

It has been often remarked, that the belief in the coming of Christ stood in the same relation to the Apostolic Church that the expectation of death does to ourselves. Certainly the absence of exhortations based upon the shortness of life, which are not unfrequent in the Old Testament, and are so familiar to our own day, forms a remarkable feature in the writings of the New Testament, and in a measure seems to confirm such an opinion. And yet the similarity is rather apparent than real; or, at any rate, the difference between the two is not less remarkable. For the feeble apprehension which each man entertains of his own mortality, can bear no comparison with that living sense of the day of the Lord which was the habitual thought of the first Christians, which was not so much a ‘coming’ as a ‘presence’ to them, as its very name implied (παρουσία). How different also was the event looked for, no less than the anticipation of it! There is nothing terrible in death; it is the repose of wearied nature; it steals men away one by one, while the world goes still on its way. We fear it at a distance, but not near. Only in youth sometimes it seems hard to die; the language of old men is, ‘I have lived long enough.’ But the day of the Lord was an inversion of the course of nature; it was a change, not to the individual only, but to the world; a scene of great fear and great joy at once to the whole Church and to all mankind, which was in its very nature sudden, unexpected, coming ‘as a thief in the night, and as travail upon a woman with child.’ Yet it might be said to be expected too, for the first disciples were sitting waiting for it ‘with their lamps lighted and their loins girded.’ It was not darkness, nor sleep, nor death, but a day of light and life, in the expectation of which men were to walk as children of the light, yet fearful by its very suddenness and the vengeance to be poured on the wicked.

Such a belief could not be without its effect on the lives of the first converts and on the state of the Church. While it increased the awfulness of life, it almost unavoidably withdrew men’s thoughts from its ordinary duties. It naturally led to the state described in the Corinthian Church, in which spiritual gifts had taken the place of moral duties, and of those very gifts, the less spiritual were preferred to the more spiritual. It took the mind away from the kingdom of God within, to fix it on signs and wonders, ‘the things spoken of by the prophet Joel,’ when the sun should be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood. It made men almost ready to act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, from the sense of what they saw, or seemed to see, in the world around them. The intensity of the spiritual state in which they lived, so far beyond that of our daily life, is itself the explanation of the spiritual disorder which seems so strange to us in men who were ready to hazard their lives for the truth, and which was but the natural reaction against their former state.

It is obvious that such a belief was inconsistent with an established Ecclesiastical order. A succession of bishops could have had no meaning in a world that was to vanish away. Episcopacy, it has been truly remarked, was in natural antagonism to Montanism; and in the age of the Apostles as well, there is an opposition, traceable in the Epistles themselves, between the supernatural gifts and the order and discipline of the Church. Ecclesiastical as well as political institutions are not made, but grow. What we are apt to regard as their first idea and design, is in reality their after-development, what in the fullness of time they become, not what they originally were, the former being faintly, if at all, discernible in the new birth of the Church and of the world.

Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that the meagreness of those historical memorials of the first age which survived it, has been the result of such a belief. What interest would be attached to the events of this world, if they were so soon to be lost in another? or to the lessons of history, when the nations of the earth were in a few years to appear before the judgement-seat of Christ? Even the narrative of the acts and sayings of the Saviour of mankind must have had a different degree of importance to those who expected to see with their eyes the Word of life, and to us, to whom they are the great example, for after-ages, of faith and practice. Among many causes which may be assigned for the great historical chasm which separates the life of Christ and His Apostles from after-ages, this is not the least probable. The age of the Apostles was an age, not of history, but of prophecy.

And now ‘the fathers have fallen asleep, all things remain the same as at the beginning.’ More clearly than in former times, we see the discrepancy between the meaning of Scripture and the order of events which history discloses to us. The fact stares us in the face. We feel no satisfaction or security in attempting to conceal it; we cannot do so if we would. It is right, therefore, that we should be assured, that even if the Apostles were mistaken, ‘our faith’ is not ‘vain.’ Our hope of life and immortality is not taken away, because the language of St. Paul in some passages seem to fix the times and the seasons which our Saviour, in His last words on earth, tells His Apostles, ‘it is not for you to know.’

The subject of the preceding essay may be considered apologetically; that is, with a view to meet objections in two ways—either as affecting theology, or belief and practice.

I. Most of the difficulties of theology are self-made, and ready to vanish away when we consider them naturally. They generally arise out of certain hypotheses which we vainly try to reconcile with obvious facts; often they are the opinions of a past day lingering on into the present. The belief of St. Paul in the immediate coming of Christ is not at all different from what we should have expected, or in any degree inconsistent with the laws of the human mind, or, again, unlike the analogy of prophecy and of religion generally. It was a natural interpretation of the old prophetic writings. Our difficulty is really of a different kind—how to reconcile such a belief with the infallibility of the Apostle. He never claims this infallibility; it is we ourselves who love to ascribe it to him. It is true that the Apostle, if infallible, could not have erred respecting the end of the world; and if we could prove that he was infallible, we might deny that he was in error. But the ascription of infallibility to him involves further and almost endless difficulties. For it seems, to use an expression of Bishop Butler’s, as if ‘there would be no stopping,’ until revelation was wholly different from what it is. Its truths should no longer be expressed in human language, or under the limitation of human faculties; they must have dropped from heaven; that is, have found their way into the world out of the course of nature, unconnected with history, in no relation to the thoughts of men, and therefore powerless to assimilate the human heart to themselves.

Not in this way has it ‘pleased God to reveal his Son in us.’ The New Testament came through the Old; it did not rudely break with the former Dispensation. It appropriated the figures of the law, it clothed itself in the imagery of the prophets. It was preached to the poor, and therefore it was on a level with the modes of thought which prevailed in the age in which it was given. It is foolish to admit this in words, and to deny the inferences which unavoidably flow from it. The lesson which it taught was pure and divine, and so far as it was connected at all with facts of history, historically true: but it was not supernaturally guarded against error. It left the Jewish belief in Messiah’s kingdom as it had been before; only it purified, sanctified, spiritualized it. Herein is the great difference between what, without detracting from the divine character of Christianity, we may be permitted to call the error of the Apostles and erroneous assumptions of modern interpreters of prophecy respecting the end of the world. The first was natural, arising out of the circumstances and modes of thought of the first Christians; the other is an intrusion into the unseen future, which experience has shown to be irreverent and unmeaning. The difference is of the same kind as between voluntary error and the unavoidable imperfection of human knowledge in a particular age or country.

But neither is the New Testament to be interpreted apart from the course of events. The world is left to itself to clear up as it goes on; many lessons even in divinity are only learnt by experience. Time may often enlarge faith; it may also correct it. The belief and practice of the early Church, respecting the admission of the Gentiles, were greatly altered by the fact that the Gentiles themselves flocked in: ‘the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.’ In like manner, the faith respecting the coming of Christ was modified by the continuance of the world itself. Common sense suggests that those who were in the first ecstasy of conversion, and those who after the lapse of years saw the world unchanged and the fabric of the Church on earth rising around them, could not regard the day of the Lord with the same feelings. While to the one it seemed near and present, at any moment ready to burst forth; to the other it was a long way off, separated by time and, as it were by place: a world beyond the stars, yet also having its dwelling in the heart of man; as to ourselves it is a world inseparably bound up with our consciousness of a Divine Being. Not at once, but gradually did the cloud clear up, and the one mode of faith take the place of the other. Apart from the prophets, through them, beyond them, springing up in a new and living way in the soul of man, corrected by long experience, as ‘the fathers’ one by one ‘fell asleep,’ as the hope of the Jewish race declined, as ecstatic gifts ceased, as a regular hierarchy was established in the Church, the belief in the coming of Christ was transformed from being outward to becoming inward, from being national to becoming individual and universal, from being Jewish to becoming Christian.

The belief in a future life is not derived from revelation, though greatly strengthened by it. It is the growing sense of human nature respecting itself. Scarcely any one passes out of existence fearing that he will cease to be; perhaps no one whose mind may be regarded as in a natural state. Absurd superstitions, even the painful efforts to get rid of self, in some of the Eastern religions, indirectly bear witness to the same truth. They seem to say, ‘Stamp upon the Soul, crush it as you will, the poor worm will still creep out into the sunshine of the Almighty.’ Nor is the consciousness of another life a mere instinct which, however distorted, still remains: to those who reason it is inseparably connected with our highest, that is, with our moral notions. We feel that God cannot have given us capacities and affections, that they should find no other fulfilment than they attain here; that He cannot intend the unequal measure of good and evil which He has assigned to men on earth to be the end of all: nor can we believe that the crimes or sins which go unpunished in this world, are to pass away as though they had never been; that the cries of saints and heroes, and the work of the Saviour Himself, have gone up unheard before His throne. That can never be. Equally impossible is it to suppose that creatures whom He has endowed with reason are, like the great multitude of the human race, to be sunk for ever in hopeless ignorance and unconsciousness. It is true that the nature of the change which is to come over them and us is not disclosed: ‘The times and the seasons the Father has put in his own power.’ Had it been otherwise, immortality must have overpowered us; the thought of another state would have swallowed up this.

And this sense of a future life and judgement to come has been so quickened in us by Christianity, that it may be said almost to have been created by it. It is the witness of Christ Himself, than which to the Christian no assurance can be greater. He who meditates on this divine life in the brief narrative which has been preserved of it, will find the belief in another world come again to him when many physical and metaphysical proofs are beginning to be as broken reeds. He will find more than enough to balance the difficulties of the manner ‘how’ or the time ‘when;’ he will find, as he draws nearer to Christ, a sort of impossibility of believing otherwise. When we ask, ‘How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?’ St. Paul answers, ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;’ when we raise objections to the narrative which has been preserved of our Saviour’s discourse respecting the last things and the end of the world, may not the answer to this as well as to many other difficulties be gathered from His own words — ‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you they are Spirit, and they are truth?’

There was a sense in which our Saviour said that it was better for His disciples that He should be taken from them, that the Comforter should come unto them. There is also a blessing recorded in the Gospels on those who had not seen and yet had believed. Is there not a sense in which it is more blessed to live at a distance from those events which are the beginning of Christianity, than under their immediate influence, to see them as they truly are in the light of this world as well as of another? If it was an illusion in the first Christians to believe in the immediate coming of Christ, is it not a cause of thankfulness that now we see clearly? Of truth, as well as of love, it may be said there is no fear in truth, but perfect truth casteth out fear. The eye which is strong enough to pierce through the shadow of death, is not troubled because the golden mist is dispelled and it looks on the open heaven.

And though prophecy may fail and tongues cease, though to those who look back upon them when they are with the past, they are different from what they were to those who melted under their influence, the pure moral and spiritual nature of Christianity, the ‘kingdom of God within,’ remains as at the first, the law of Christian love becoming more and more, and all in all.

[1 ]Baur, Paulus, pp. 480-492.

[1 ][Recent critics suspect interpolation here.—Ed.]

[a]in

[b]in

[c]God and our

[d]your election of God. For

[e]ensamples

[f]omit in

[g]omit has been

[f]omit in

[h]add also

[i]delivered

[k]add even

[1]alowed

[m]trieth

[n]gentle

[o]omit own

[p]add for

[q]chargeable

[r]justly

[s]add ourselves

[t]hath called

[u]also thank we

[x]their own

[y]For

[z]is

[a]omit bereaved in being

[b]endeavoured the more abundantly

[c]forbear

[1 ]Reading τὸν ἀδελϕὸν ἡμωˆν καὶ συνεργὸν τονˆ θεονˆ

[d]afflictions

[e]charity

[f]over

[g]God, our Father

[1 ]Reading λοιπὸν οὑ̑ν

[h]possess his

[1 ]Reading ἔχομεν

[1 ]Reading ὅταν δέ

[i]a thief

[k]omit for

[l]obtain

[m]add And

[n]omit But

[o]all appearance

[p]omit too

[q]add holy

[r]add the first Epistle unto the Thessalonians was written from Athens.

[1.]ἐν θεῳ̑ πατρί, in God the Father] is closely connected with the preceding words. All things in their highest aspect, churches, individuals, the actions, feelings, and words of men, are in God and Christ; they pass out of themselves into union with the Divine nature; they rest in God, have their place in Him, ‘take up their abode’ in Him (compare John xiv. 10, 20; Phil. iv. 2; Eph. vi. 1). The nearest approach in classical Greek to this ‘Christian’ signification of the preposition ἐν is its use with the person (ἐν σοί, ἐμοί, ἑαυτῳ̑) in the sense of ‘in the power of.’ Language of this sort can hardly be said to exist among ourselves; it is only repeated from the New Testament. Yet so it was the early Church thought and felt.

[2–10.]Few passages are more characteristic of the style of St. Paul than that on which we are entering. First, as it is the overflowing of his soul in thankfulness for his converts, about whom he can never say too much. Secondly, in the very form and structure of the sentences, which seem to grow under his hand, gaining force in each successive clause by the repetition and expansion of the preceding. A classical or modern writer distinguishes his several propositions, assigning to each its exact relation to what goes before and follows, that he may give meaning and articulation to the whole. The manner of St. Paul is the reverse of this. He overlays one proposition with another, the second just emerging beyond the first, and arising out of association with it, but not always standing in a clear relation to it. Thus in the passage which we are considering, ἀδιαλείπτως μνημονεύοντες, in ver. 3, is a repetition of εὐχαριστονˆμεν πάντοτε and μνείαν ποιούμενοι, in ver. 2. Again, with reference to the latter words themselves, it is not clear whether μνείαν ποιούμενοι is an addition to, or a limitation on, εὐχαριστονˆμεν. A little lower down, ver. 5, the clause ὅτι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, κ.τ.λ., is a sort of after-thought on τὴν ἐκλογήν. In like manner, whether in the words καὶ ὑμεɩ̂ς μιμηταί, in the 6th verse, the Apostle carries in his thoughts the preceding οἴδατε, or not, is uncertain. Ver. 8 is an amplification of ver. 7, and in ver. 8 itself the language of the second clause is varied from that of the first, without any variation of meaning; in ver. 9 the words δουλεύειν θεῳ̑ ζωˆντι καὶ ἀληθινῳ̑, are an extension of the preceding ἐπεστρέψατε πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ἀπὸ τωˆν εἰδώλων. At the commencement of chap. ii we appear to break off and pass on to a new subject, and yet are but resuming the thread of ver. 5 and 6 in the preceding.

Leaving the form, let us go on to the substance. The Apostle is full of thankfulness to God for the conversion of the Thessalonians, which has brought forth such unmistakable fruits of righteousness. These are just in accordance with the manner of their reception of the Gospel, the manner in which he preached and they believed. It seemed to have a peculiar power over them, received with joy amid persecutions; they were as burning and shining lights in all that land. Their conversion was in all men’s mouths, who could not help, of their own accord, telling even the Apostle himself how these idolaters had come to the knowledge of the true God; and how they, like the other disciples, had learned to sit waiting for the day of the Lord. In such manner does the Apostle, in the excess of his affection for them, not without knowledge of the way in which to approach human nature, transform the language of compliment into a spiritual lesson.

[3.]τονˆ ἔργου τη̂ς πίστεως, work of faith,] has been variously explained as meaning the reality of your faith, or the fact of your receiving the Gospel, or the working of your faith. Better your work of faith, that is, the Christian life which springs from faith. (Comp. 2 Thess. i. 11.)

[6.]The suffering that comes from without, cannot depress the spirit of a man who is faithful in a good cause. It is only when ‘from within are fears’ that the mind is enslaved. For in the spiritual world joy and sorrow are not two, but one. The servant of Christ feels a sort of exhilaration at the contrast between himself and the world, similar to that of the soldier on the battle-field, in the presence of danger and death. He is not like another man, but at once above and below others; he has the sentence of death in himself, and is yet more than a conqueror. It is this peculiarity of the Christian character that the Apostle expresses by ‘joy of the Holy Ghost,’ ‘glorying in the Lord,’ ‘fulness of consolation:’ ‘rejoicing in his sufferings, and filling up what was wanting of the afflictions of Christ in his flesh.’ See also the alternations of feeling in 2 Cor. vi. 10: ‘As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing.’ Herein too the Thessalonians were ‘followers of St. Paul as he was of Christ.’ Compare John xii. 23, ‘The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified;’ and the double character of the discourse in the following chapters which precedes our Lord’s passion.

[8.]ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ, in every place.] How could it be said, that the faith of the Thessalonians was known everywhere? It has been sometimes attempted to remove this difficulty by taking οὐ μόνον (not only) with ἐξήχηται (for from you has not only been sounded out), which is objectionable, however, both upon the ground of the order of the words and the poorness of the sense. It is better to admit that the language of St. Paul, uttered in the fullness of his heart, is not to be construed strictly, any more than where he says, in like manner, that the faith of the Romans was known over the whole world (Rom. i. 8), or that the Gospel of which he was a minister was preached to every creature under heaven. He means, in other words, that not only in Greece, but in Asia, wherever there were believers, the news of the Thessalonian conversion had spread, or rather must have spread; he had no need to speak of them, for the report of them had preceded him on his way.

It is not necessary that these latter words should be connected with ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ; the meaning would be assisted if, instead of adopting Lachmann’s punctuation, the clause, ὥστε μὴ χρείαν ἔχειν ἡμα̂ς λαλεɩ̂ν τι, were separated by a colon from ἐξελήλυθεν, and closely joined with the following verse.

[2.]The personal narrative which follows, may be compared with that in the Galatians i. 11 to ii. 14. Alluding to the spirit in which he preached to them, he glances, for an instant, at the persecution which he had just before endured at Philippi, and which had not deterred him from speaking the truth boldly, though at Thessalonica too the conflict was hot. He had spoken as to God and not to men, without covetousness, or guile, or flattery, or vain glory, or any such thing. He had given up his right to support as an Apostle from the excess of his love to them; a love, which would fain have made him lay down his life for their sake. They must surely remember how they had seen him toiling day and night to get his own livelihood; they were the witnesses (and there was a higher witness) of the innocence of his life, and of his gentle and fatherly admonitions to them.

Then changing the person, he gives thanks to God as at first, for their reception of the Word of God; they had become followers of the Churches in Judea, and stood in the same relation to their own countrymen, as these did to the Jews. The persecutions that they suffered, did but recall the thought of what these latter had done to the Lord Jesus, and to their own prophets; enemies, as they were, of God and man, forbidding to preach to the Gentiles that they might be saved. Their evil was tending to a consummation, and the wrath of God was fulfilled upon them.

In the verses which follow, there appears to be an abrupt transition to the longing desire that the Apostle had to see them, and the efforts that he had made to accomplish this purpose. The 15th and 16th verses are a digression which may be regarded as an outburst of indignation at the Jews. As in conversation we sometimes ask, ‘What leads another to say that?’ so here we can but guess the secret thread of association which carries on the mind of the Apostle from one topic to another. The real connexion in what follows may probably be the persecutions of the Thessalonian Church, just slightly touched upon in ver. 14, which quickened the Apostle’s desire to see them, and increased his sense of loneliness in being parted from them. This thread reappears again in the following chapter, iii. 2-9.

[3.]The two senses of παράκλησις, exhortation and consolation, so easily passing into one another (compare ver. 11), are suggestive of the external state of the early Church, sorrowing amid the evils of the world, and needing as its first lesson to be comforted, and not less suggestive of the first lesson of the Gospel to the individual soul of peace in believing.

Many passages in the New Testament lead us to infer, that there existed, in the age of the Apostles, a connexion between the form of spirituality and licentiousness. It is this of which the Apostle declares his innocence, and with which elsewhere he upbraids the false teachers. Compare iv. 7; Tit. iii. 8; James iii. 13; 1 Tim. vi. 3; Jude 4-18.

[6.]Why should the Apostle so repeatedly repudiate the imputation that he sought glory of men? He was one of those who instinctively know the impression produced by his character and conduct on the hearts of others. What was the motive of this ‘vain babbler’ would be a common topic of conversation in the cities at which he preached. ‘To get money, to make himself somebody,’ would be the ordinary solution. Against this the Apostle protests. His whole life and conversation were a disproof of it. It may have been that he was aware also of something in his manner which might have suggested such a thought. It was not good for him to glory, and yet he sometimes ‘spake as a fool.’ Rightly understood this glorying was but an elevation of the soul to God and Christ, or at worst the assertion of himself, in moments of depression or ill-treatment, but to others he might have been conscious that it must have seemed a weakness, and may have been made a ground of imputations from his adversaries.

[9.]It throws a singular light on the life of St. Paul, which reflects itself in some degree on the early Church, to observe that his labours as a preacher of the Gospel were not the sole business which engaged him, but were added to his daily occupation. Such, at least, we know to have been his custom at Corinth, at Thessalonica, at Ephesus, and probably elsewhere. Of the twelve hours of the day, perhaps not more than one, of the seven days of the week, perhaps only the Sabbath, was devoted to the exercise of his spiritual calling. It is natural to ask, what motive could have led him, a man of station and education, unused to toil, brought up in the school of a Rabbi, at an age when the bodily frame refuses to perform any new office, to submit himself to manual labour? Was it that he desired to set the example of Christian life, as well as to teach Christian doctrine, to show that there was no opposition between the Gospel and the daily course of the world? Or may it have been to identify himself with the poorer members of his flock? or to provide for their necessities? or as a religious exercise to keep under his body, and bring it into subjection? or to distinguish himself from the strolling soothsayers who wandered over Greece and Asia, ‘telling some new thing’? or to draw a line between himself and the Judaizing teachers? or from necessity, or, as we should say, to preserve his independence? Whatever higher motives led the Apostle to toil for his bread, the last-mentioned one falls in with that peculiar sensitiveness respecting the charge of receiving money, which is traceable in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, both in reference to himself and Titus receiving support from the Church, as in reference to the collections for the saints. In the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, iii. 4, another motive is also indicated, the desire to set an example to his converts. A third motive, that of charity, is mentioned in the discourse to the elders of the Church of Ephesus. (Acts xx. 34.)

[14.]Wherever the Apostle had gone on his second journey, he had been persecuted by the Jews; and the longer he travelled about among Gentile cities, the more he must have been sensible of the feeling with which his countrymen were regarded. Isolated as they were from the rest of the world in every city, a people within a people, it was impossible that they should not be united for their own self-defence, and regarded with suspicion by the rest of mankind. But their inner nature was not less repugnant to the nobler, as well as the baser feelings of Greece and Rome. Their fierce nationality had outlived itself; though worshippers of the true God, they knew Him not to be the God of all nations of the earth; hated and despised by others, they could but cherish in return an impotent contempt and hatred of other men. What wonder that, for an instant, the Apostle should have felt that this Gentile feeling was not wholly groundless? or that he should use words which recall the expression of Tacitus: ‘Adversus omnes alios hostile odium?’—Hist. v. 5.

For the feelings which the Apostle entertained towards his countrymen at a later period, compare Rom. x. 1:—‘Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they may be saved.’ Yet, both states of mind may have existed together; the one on the surface, called forth by passing events; the other in his ‘heart of hearts,’ deep and silent.

[16.]It has been maintained that this verse must have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem. (See Introductory Essay, on the Genuineness of the Epistle.) Had it been so, it is probable that allusions to the destruction of Jerusalem would have appeared elsewhere in the Epistle, and that this very passage would have spoken more plainly. In all ages, without the gift of prophecy, men have been prone to read the signs of evil in the world. There was enough in the outward state of the Jewish people, as we read the narrative of it in Josephus, or in the impenitency and obstinacy of the Jewish nature, as it revealed itself to the Apostle from within, to be the shadow of events to come. Yet the language of the Apostle seems to indicate, not that they were actually suffering or to suffer punishment, but only that they had reached their final point of reprobation from whence there is no more a way back.

[19.]For you are our hope and joy and crown of glory in the day of judgment. As he says elsewhere:—‘Who is weak, and I am not weak?’ or, in other words, who feels, and I do not feel with him?—so in this passage, their hope is his hope, their joy is his joy; they are his crown of glory at the last day. He does not mean that he is to be rewarded for converting them; it is a higher thought than this which fills the Apostle’s soul. Remembering that hour on which his mind is dwelling, he transfers them to it, and is rapt in his love of them. Compare, for the time, note on Rom. ii. 16; for a similar use of a figure, 2 Cor. iii. 2, ‘Ye are our Epistle;’ and for the general meaning, 2 Tim. iv. 8. ‘Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day;’ and, as the Apostle characteristically adds, ‘not to me only, but to all that love his appearing.’

[3.]καταλειϕθη̂ναι, κ.τ.λ., to be left, &c.] It may be remarked, that these words half agree with the Acts, and half with the Epistle. For they imply that the Apostle was left without companions, and yet there is no mention of his sending away Silas, who was with him at the time of his writing the Epistle, but only Timothy.

Admitting the genuineness of the Epistle, and the confirmation afforded by it to many of the statements of the Acts, we are naturally led to speculate by what arrangement of events the error may be made smallest.

Suppose Silas only to have been left in Macedonia, with a charge to join Paul shortly; Paul, impatient to hear of his new converts, sends Timothy from Athens, who returns with Silas. The only incorrectness then in the narrative of the Acts arises from the ignorance of the writer, that Timothy was not left behind. The account of the Epistle, that Paul was left alone at Athens, although he only sent away Timothy and although Silas and Timothy were with him shortly afterwards, as well as the tone of the Acts, respecting Paul’s eagerness that Silas and Timothy should follow him, agrees with this hypothesis.

[7.]διὰ τονˆτο] takes up the sentence after the long participial clauses. For this good news.

ἄρτι παρεκλήθημεν, now we are comforted. Implying that the Epistle was written immediately after the return of Timothy. The Apostle, though speaking now of what was almost present to himself, still uses the historical tense; possibly, like ἔγραψα in 1 Cor. v. 9, and elsewhere, in reference to the time at which the Thessalonians would receive his letter—as in Latin.

[8.]ὅτι ννˆν ζωˆμεν, for now we live.] The Apostle regards his affliction as a sort of death, from which he is roused to life by the news of his converts. Compare 2 Cor. i. 8-10, and Gal. ii. 20, for a similar figure.

ννˆν refers to the change of feeling occasioned by the arrival of Timothy. When he thought of the persecutions that surrounded him, and the possibility of their falling off from the faith, he was as one ‘having the sentence of death in himself:’ but now in their life he lives.

[13.]All ages which have witnessed a revival of religious feeling, have witnessed also the outbreak of religious passions; the pure light of the one becomes the spark by which the other is kindled. Reasons of state sometimes create a faint and distant suspicion of a new faith; the feelings of the mass rise to overwhelm it.

Allowing for the difference of times and seasons, the feelings of the Roman governors were not altogether unlike those with which the followers of John Wesley, in the last century, might have been regarded by the magistrates of an English town. And making still greater allowance for the malignity and depth of the passions by which men were agitated as the old religions were breaking up, a parallel not less just might be drawn also between the feelings of the multitude. There was in both cases a kind of sympathy by which the lower class were attracted towards the new teachers. Natural feeling suggested that these men had come for their good; they were grateful for the love shown of them, and for the ministration to their temporal wants. There was a time when it was said of the first believers, that they were in favour with all the people (Acts ii. 47), and that ‘all men glorified God for that which was done’ (iv. 21). But at the preaching of Stephen the scene changes; the deep irreconcilable hostility of the two principles is beginning to be felt; ‘it is not peace, but a sword;’ not ‘I am come to fulfil the law,’ but ‘not one stone shall be left upon another.’

The moment this was clearly perceived, not only would the farsighted jealousy of chief priests and rulers be alarmed at the preaching of the Apostles; but the very instincts of the multitude itself would rise at them. More than anything that we have witnessed in modern times of religious intolerance, would be the feeling against those who sought to relax the bond of circumcision as enemies to their country, their religion, and their God. But there was another aspect of the new religion, which served to bring home these feelings even yet more nearly. It was the disruption of the family. As our Lord foretold, the father was against the son, the son against the father, the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A new power had arisen in the world, which seemed to cut across and dissever natural affections (Matt. x. 34). Consider what is implied in the words ‘of believing women not a few;’ what animosities of parents, and brethren, and husbands! what hatreds, and fears, and jealousies! An unknown tie, closer than that of kindred, drew away the individuals of a family, and joined them to an external society. It was not only that they were members of another Church, or attendants on a separate worship. The difference went beyond this. In the daily intercourse of life, at every meal, the unbelieving brother or sister was conscious of the presence of the unclean. It was an injury not readily to be forgotten, or forgiven its authors, the greatest, perhaps, which could be offered in this world. The fanatic priest, led on by every personal and religious motive—the man of the world, caring for none of those things, but not the less resenting the intrusion on the peace of his home—the craftsman, fearing for his gains—the accursed multitude, knowing not the law, but irritated at the very notion of this mysterious society of such real though hidden strength—would all work together towards the overthrow of those who seemed to them to be turning upside down the political, religious, and social order of the world. The utterance of this instinct of dislike, is heard in the words, ‘These men being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, and teach customs which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.’ Acts xvi. 20, 21. (Compare, to complete the picture, the description in the previous verses of the damsel possessed with a spirit of divination, who cried after Paul many days, ‘These men are the servants of the most High God.’)

These considerations, though based only on general principles of human nature, are necessary to make us understand the undercurrent of the Apostolical history, as well as to form a just estimate of the question which we are considering. The actual persecution of the Roman government was slight, but what may be termed the social persecution and the illegal violence employed towards the first disciples unceasing. ‘Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one;’ who would know or care what went on in the Jewish quarter of a great city? How precarious must have been their fate who, with the passions of men arrayed against them, had no protection from the law! They were liable to be persecuted by the Jews, to suffer persecution as Jews, to arm the feelings of all nations against themselves as the professors of an unnational religion. Little reflection is necessary to fill up the details of that image of peril, which the Apostle presents to us in all his Epistles. It is the same vision which is again held up to us in the Book of the Revelation, of the common tribulation of St. John and the Churches, of the sufferings that were to come upon the Church of Smyrna, of the faithfulness of Pergamos in the days when the martyr Antipas was slain, of the two witnesses, and of the souls beneath the altar, saying ‘How long?’ It is the same which reappears in the earliest ecclesiastical history, in the narrative of Hegesippus respecting James the Just. It is the state of life described in the Epistle to the Hebrews of those who ‘had not yet resisted unto blood,striving against sin’ (xii. 4), whose leaders seem to have already suffered (xiii. 7, 23). Except on some accidental occasion, such as the Neronian persecution, there is no reason to suppose that the power of Rome was systematically employed against the first disciples of the Apostles. But it does not diminish their sufferings, that they were the result of illegal violence, such as the tumults at Thessalonica, at Ephesus, or at Jerusalem.

[4. 4.]τὸ ἑαυτονˆ σκενˆος κτα̂σθαι, to get his own vessel.] It is doubted whether under the image of a vessel is meant ‘the body’ or ‘a wife.’ The meaning of the word κτα̂σθαι, and the opposition of ἑαυτονˆ to πορνείας, and also to πλεονεκτεɩ̂ν τὸν ἀδελϕόν, in ver. 6, is decidedly in favour of the latter interpretation. Compare 1 Cor. vii. 2, for a similar opposition, διὰ δὲ τὰς πορνείας ἕκαστος τὴν ἑαυτονˆ γυναɩ̂κα ἐχέτω. For the figure, compare 1 Peter iii. 7. See also parallels in Schöttgen, which prove the common Jewish use of σκενˆος for a wife. On the other hand, it may be urged that there would be no propriety here, as there is elsewhere, in the description of the ‘body’ under the metaphor of a vessel; when in Rom. ix. 21, the term σκενˆος ὀργη̂ς occurs, this is a continuation of the figure of the potter; when in 2 Cor. iv. 7, the body is called ὀστράκινον σκενˆος, this is to denote its frailty; so in 2 Tim. ii. 20, 21 the metaphor is helped by the surrounding words. But none of these uses shows that σκενˆος in this place could simply mean body.

The exact force of the whole passage may be expressed as follows:—‘This is the will of God—your sanctification:’ by this is meant, ‘your abstaining from fornication, your knowing how to live chastely in a married state.’ This is opposed to ver. 6, the general sense of which is ‘not to covet another man’s wife.’ Two difficulties occur, however, in the attempt to disentangle the connexion. First, it might seem as if St. Paul was enjoining all men to marry. This, however, is modified by ver. 6. Every man is to have his own wife, rather than to defraud his neighbour. In other words, the precept is not absolute; but relative to the sin of adultery and fornication. The second difficulty is the insertion of μὴ ἐν πάθει ἐπιθυμίας, in ver. 5, because it might be said, that though the heathen were distinguished from Christians by immorality, they were not so by an abuse of the marriage-bed in particular. But the words, ἐν πάθει ἐπιθυμίας, though forming an antithesis to ἐν ἁγιασμῳ̑ καὶ τιμῃ̂, need not necessarily, when applied to the heathen, carry us back to κτα̂σθαι τὸ σκενˆος. In ver. 5 these latter words are lost sight of and some general idea gathered from them, such as ‘living’ ἐν πάθει ἐπιθυμίας.

[13.]The Apostle passes on, with a formula that he employs elsewhere (οὐ θέλομεν δὲ ὑμα̂ς ἀγνοεɩ̂ν, ἀδελϕοί), to a new subject, the state of the departed. The train of thought may possibly have been suggested by the previous exhortation to be diligent in their daily occupations, the missing link being that their occupations had been interrupted by the expectation of the coming of Christ. Compare chap. v. 11, 12. It may also have been a reply to an inquiry, or may have originated in the Apostle hearing of the anxiety of the converts, who found that a gloom was cast upon their faith in Christ, by the death of some one of their number. Their sadness was not as to whether or not there was a future state, but whether those who were already dead should participate in the coming reign of Christ. To the Jew of old, death seemed sad, because it took men away from the presence of God. Yet more sad must it have appeared to the uninstructed mind of the first converts, because it took them away in the very hour when it seemed good to live, ‘waiting for the Son from heaven.’

καθὼς καὶ οἱ λοιποί, as the others.] The heathen, as in Ephesians ii. 3, who sorrow as the Apostle, regarding them partly from his own point of view, says of them, or have reason to sorrow for their ignorance of the future.

It would be easy to multiply quotations from classical writers in illustration of this expression, like the words of Theocritus, Idyll. iv. 42 ἐλπίδες ἐν ζωοɩ̂σιν, ἀνέλπιστοι δὲ θανόντες: or the mournful strain of Catullus, v. 4 ‘Soles occidere et redire possent. Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux nox est perpetua una dormienda;’ or the life-like touch of Lucretius, iii. 942 ‘Nec quisquam expergitus exstat, frigida quem semel est vitai pausa secuta;’ or the sad complaints of Cicero and Quintilian over the loss of their children; or the dreary hope of an immortality of fame in Tacitus or Thucydides, or the still more dreary acquiescence in the belief of a future state as a useful terror to man in general, by Chrysippus and others; or the trifling dispute in the Ethics of Aristotle affecting not the fact but a question of words. The silence of the earlier books of the Old Testament is not less awful; and its language where it speaks, though more religious, is in many passages hardly more cheering: ‘The living, the living, he shall praise thee. What profit is there in the grave? Shall they that go down into the pit, declare thy truth?’

[15.]τονˆτο γὰρ ὑμɩ̂ν] The Apostle adds emphatically:—‘And this I say to you not of myself, but by the word of Christ.’ It has been asked respecting this passage, as well as in reference to 1 Cor. vii. 10, whether St. Paul is referring to some special saying of our Lord on these subjects, i. e. resurrection and divorce, or to a revelation which he had received from Him. Neither of the passages supposed to be alluded to (Matt. xxiv. 31, or John v. 25) is sufficiently near in sense to make it safe for us to identify them; while a strong negative argument may be urged on the other side, from the fact of no other quotations in St. Paul’s writings being apparently derived from our canonical Gospels. It may be further adduced as an argument in favour of the supposition that St. Paul is referring to actual words of Christ, that he nowhere speaks of any special truths or doctrines as imparted to himself. When he uses the expression, ‘not I, but the Lord,’ 1 Cor. vii. 12, he is speaking of matters of discipline, not of doctrine.

The question suggests a wider one, which is equally incapable of receiving a precise answer:—‘What did St. Paul know of the life of Christ?’ Two passages only throw any considerable light on this subject. First, 1 Cor. xv. 3-10, in which the Apostle describes himself, not only as preaching to the Corinthians the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ, but as dwelling on the minute circumstances which attested it. Had he told them in like manner of other events in the life of Christ? Had the parables and discourses of Christ interwoven themselves in his teaching? Were the miracles of Christ a witness to which he appealed?

It is instructive to put these questions, even though they remain without an answer. St. Paul must have known numberless persons who had followed the footsteps of the Lord on earth; and yet the only memorial which he has preserved is the short fragment, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive,’ which forms the second of the two quotations alluded to above (Acts xx. 35. Compare 1 Tim. vi. 13; the mention of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, in 1 Cor. xi. 24; also Phil. ii. 7, 2 Cor. viii. 9). Had all the things that were known of Christ in the days of the Apostle been written down, ‘the world itself,’ it might be said, would hardly have contained ‘the books that should be written;’ and yet, as far as we can trace, it was not the sayings or events of the life of Christ, but the witness of the Old Testament prophets, that formed the larger part of St. Paul’s teaching, the ‘external’ evidence by which he supported, in himself and others, the inward and living sense of union with Christ, the medium through which he preached ‘Christ crucified.’

ὅτι ἡμεɩ̂ς οἱ ζωˆντες, that we which are alive.] Is St. Paul speaking here of his own generation only? or are the living at a particular time put for the living in general, these being spoken of in the first person by way of contrast with the dead from whom they are parted? In 1 Cor. xv. 51, according to one reading, the Apostle seems to number himself, not among the living, but among the dead, at the coming of Christ. The mode of thought in the present passage is not precisely similar, but yet not entirely different. We may consider ἡμεɩ̂ς οἱ ζωˆντες as a figure of the living in general, just as οἱ κοιμώμενοι, though primarily referring to the dead in the Thessalonian Church, is also put for the dead in general. It is nevertheless true, that the words imply the immediate expectation of Christ’s coming. The Apostle could not have said ‘we,’ if he had had a distinct perception that the coming of Christ was still far distant.

The Apostle had been speaking of the coming of Christ in the clouds of heaven. The question would naturally arise in the minds of the Thessalonians, ‘When shall these things be?’ But this they already know as far as it can be known. (Compare the turn of iv. 9.) And all that can be known is that ‘The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night.’ The world is lying in darkness, asleep, ready to be surprised. But they are the children of the day, having a light within anticipating the dawn; they may not be asleep, they cannot be surprised; they are to arm themselves as soldiers of Christ, taking the breastplate of faith and the helmet of salvation; for to salvation they are appointed through Christ Jesus, with whom they are one in life and death.

[5. 1.]Many characteristics of St. Paul are crowded in this passage. First, the rhetorical turn, οὐ χρείαν ἔχετε. Secondly, the subtle transition in the use of the metaphor of the day of the Lord to the moral lesson that they are to walk as children of the day. (Compare Rom. xiii. 1-14.) Thirdly, the imagery of v. 8 (compare Ephes. vi); also the going off upon the word σωτηρία, which is made the link of the following verse. Fourthly, the thought of our identity with Christ, in which is still retained the allusion to sleeping and waking. And lastly, in the 11th verse, the resumption of the precept which closes the preceding chapter.

[4.]κλέπτας.] The reading of Lachmann [and the Cambridge Text] has equal or rather greater MS. authority than κλέπτης, which is the reading of the ‘Textus Receptus.’ The question remains somewhat uncertain when argued further on grounds of internal evidence.

On behalf of Lachmann may be urged the old canon of the more difficult reading; the copyist was far more likely to repeat the same case which had occurred in a proverbial expression just quoted than to alter it. The change in the figure itself is also rather in favour of the accusative κλέπτας. For St. Paul transposes figures of speech in other places, as, for example, Rom. vii. 1-6, where the image begins with the law dying, and ends with men dying to the law; or 1 Thess. ii. 7 and 17; or 2 Cor. iii. 16-18. The echo of the word is still in his ears; to avoid repetition, he changes its use. Lastly, the reading κλέπτας gives a point to υἱοὶ ϕωτός. Also the appropriateness of the figure itself, daylight breaking on the thief. Cf. Hom. Il. iii. 11 κλέπτῃ δέ τε νυκτὸς ἀμείνω.

[15.]ὁρα̂τε μή τις.] These words do not mean, ‘Take heed of some one else;’ but ‘Let each one take heed not to return evil for evil, but everywhere pursue after goodness, both in relation to the brethren and to those without the Church.’

It is not strictly true to say that Christianity alone or first forbade to return evil for evil. Plato knew that it was not the true definition of justice to do harm to one’s enemies. The Stoics, who taught the extirpation of the passions, were far enough from admitting of revenge to be the only one which should be allowed to remain. It is a higher as well as a truer claim to make for the Gospel, that it kindled that spirit of kindness and goodwill in the breast of man (which could not be wholly extinguished even towards an enemy), until it became a practical principle; and that it preached as a rule of life for all, what had previously been the supreme virtue, or the mere theory of philosophers.

[21, 22.]The general meaning of these two verses may be paraphrased thus:—‘Discern between good and evil; choose the good, avoid the evil.’ Yet the English translation, ‘try all things,’ naturally suggests thoughts very unlike those of the first century. However apt their application may sound, the true meaning is not ‘make a rational inquiry into all things.’ The organ of discernment was of another and a spiritual kind. In 1 Cor. xii. 10, St. Paul speaks of a gift of the discernment of spirits, and it is in a similar connexion the precept occurs hereafter; the Apostle has been speaking of prophecy and of the spirit, as in the Corinthians the discerning of spirits is spoken of with immediate reference to the spiritual gifts. Bearing in mind, that the whole state of the first believers was extraordinary and spiritual, we shall find the meaning in both passages much the same. The distinction of right and wrong, no less than of matters of faith was to them a discerning of spirits. Let us imagine a community of prophets, agitated by every various spiritual impulse, yet remaining men of a common nature with ourselves, and liable to mistake merely physical effects for spiritual power; what extravagances must have been the result, what mixed good and evil must have blended together under the name of the spirit! To separate and distinguish this among those who held the name of Christ, and yet may have sometimes mingled with it ‘the doctrines of devils,’ must have been the chief office of a discerner of spirits in the first century. It is this discernment of spirits that is partly spoken of in the words πάντα δοκιμάζετε.

[23.]Still the Apostle is thinking of the coming of Christ, against which he prays that they may be preserved, not only in soul and spirit, but in body. Had he a distinct thought attached to each of these words? Probably not. He is not writing a treatise on the soul, but pouring forth, from the fullness of his heart, a prayer for his converts. Language thus used should not be too closely analysed. His words may be compared to similar expressions among ourselves: e.g. ‘with my heart and soul.’ Who would distinguish between the two? Neither did the age in which St. Paul lived admit of any great accuracy in speaking of the human soul; nor does the fluctuating use of such terms in other parts of Scripture imply any precise or exact distinction. Who could define the difference between soul and spirit in the Alexandrian, scholastic, or any other philosophy? least of all should we attempt to do so in Scripture, which no more anticipates the metaphysical distinctions of later ages than their discoveries in astronomy or geology.