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For it is plain both by the text and context duly considered, and the apostle's scope in writing of this epistle, 1 Tim. iii. 15, that these elders are officers in the Church.
The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. These after-growths, indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest. If left in due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness, among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as it never could among the dark-browed pines.
"Time is education," I said to myself; for that was what I meant it should be to me. Perhaps I never gave the wage-earning element in work its due weight. It always seemed to me that the Apostle's idea about worldly possessions was the only sensible one, "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content."
It cannot signify, as Greek expositors take it, a company of bishops; for neither was that canon of three bishops and the Metropolitan, or all the bishops in a province, in the apostle's time; neither were these who were now called bishops, then called presbyters, as they say, but apostles, men that had received apostolic grace, angels, &c.
II. The graces that flow from the grace. The Apostle's catalogue of these is not exhaustive, nor logically arranged; but yet a certain loose order may be noted, which may be profitable for us to trace. They are in number seven the sacred number; and are capable of being divided, as so many of the series of sevens are, into two portions, one containing four and the other three.
That is, it does not refer to time, but to the sequence of the Apostle's thought, and is equivalent to 'so then. 'So then abideth faith, hope, charity. The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with the permanent, in Christian experience. If we firmly grasped the truth involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice revolutionised.
Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner. Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, barocco apostle's face with an expression of inquiry.
He resounded in the ears of Felix the noise, the voices, the trumpets. He showed him the small and the great, the rich man and Lazarus, Felix the favorite of Caesar, and Paul the captive of Felix, awakened by that awful voice: "Arise, ye dead, and come to judgment." But not to be precipitate in commending the apostle's preaching.
The apostle's protesting cry is our cry also; we also delight in the law of God after our most inward man.
I suppose that the Apostle's reason for specifying these fiery darts was simply that they were the most formidable offensive weapons that he had ever heard of. Probably, if he had lived to-day, he would have spoken of rifle-bullets or explosive shells, instead of fiery darts.
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