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Updated: June 18, 2025
Many of them had probably felt the degradation and tasted the bitterness of the servile condition. Would they have been likely to interpret the apostle's letter under the bias of feelings friendly to slavery! And put the slaveholder's construction on its contents!
But the incarnation of religion in art defeated its own ends; sensuousness was introduced in place of the calm, unearthly spirituality of the earlier masters. Compare the cartoon of S. Paul preaching at Athens, in which he has all the majesty of a Casar in the Forum, with the lowly spirit of the Apostle's life!
Secondly, because the apostle's design in this exhortation was, and is, that the naming of the name of Christ might be accompanied with such a life of holiness as might put an additional lustre upon that name whenever named in a religious way; but this cannot be applied to every manner of naming the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that great apostle's greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final.
'That I may finish my course. Now 'course, in our modern English, is far too feeble a word to express the Apostle's idea here. It has come to mean with us a quiet sequence or a succession of actions which, taken together, complete a career; but in its original force the English word 'course, and still more the Greek, of which it is a translation, contain a great deal more than that.
It would be prudent at the time to conceal it, and the habit of concealment may have survived the need for it. But two points suggest themselves in regard to the Apostle's flight. There may be a better use for an Apostle than to kill him, and Christ's boldest witnesses are sometimes bound to save themselves by fleeing into another city.
They take no strength out of the hand, and they put much strength and buoyancy into the heart. I proclaim the contemplation of coming glory as one of the secrets of the apostle's optimism which enabled him to labor and endure in the confident spirit of rejoicing hope.
So we may, from the change of the Apostle's name, gather this lesson, never out of date, that the only way to help people is to go down to their level. If you want to bless men, you must identify yourself with them. It is no use standing on an eminence above them, and patronisingly talking down to them.
The learned Doctor Whedon, in commenting on the forty-fourth verse of the fifteenth chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, where the great apostle speaks of the resurrection, says the expression natural body, as distinct from spiritual body, fails utterly to convey to the mind of the English reader the apostle's true idea.
But another lesson which may be learned from this cursory notice of the Apostle's martyrdom is how small a thing death really is! Looked at from beside the Lord of life and death, which is the point of view of the author of this narrative, 'great death' dwindles to a very little thing. We need to revise our notions if we would understand how trivial it really is.
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