Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/567

 he declares himself to have been anxious to know whether by some means the tempter might not have tempted them, and his labor have thus been in vain. But he now informs them how he has lately been greatly comforted by the good news brought from them by Timothy, who had assured the apostle of their faith and love, and that they had great remembrance of him always, desiring much to see him, as he them. Making known to them the great joy which these tidings had caused in him, he now affectionately re-assures them of his high and constant regard for them, and of his continued remembrance of them in his prayers. He then proceeds briefly to exhort them to a perseverance in the Christian course, in which they had made so fair an outset, urging upon them more especially, those virtues which were peculiarly rare among those with whom they were daily brought in contact,—purity of life, rigid honesty in business transactions, a charitable regard for the feelings of others, a quiet, peaceable, inoffensive deportment, and other minuter counsels, according to the peculiar circumstances of different persons among them. The greater portion of this brief letter, indeed, is taken up with these plain, practical matters, with no reference to any deep doctrinal subjects, the whole being thus evidently well-suited to the condition of believers who had but just begun the Christian course, and had been in no way prepared to appreciate any learned discussion of those obscure points which in later periods were the subject of so much controversy among some of Paul's converts. Their dangers hitherto had also been mainly in the moral rather than in the doctrinal way, and the only error of mere belief, to which he makes reference, is one which has always been the occasion of a great deal of harmless folly among the ignorant and the weak minded in the Christian churches, from the apostolic age to this day. The evil however, was considered by the apostle of so much importance, that he thought it worth while to briefly expose its folly to the Thessalonians, and he accordingly discourses to them of the day of judgment, assuring them that those who might happen to be alive at the moment of Christ's coming, would derive no peculiar advantage from that circumstance, because those who had died in Christ should rise first, and the survivors be then caught up to meet the Lord in the air. But as for "the times and the seasons,"—those endless themes for the discursive nonsense of the visionary, even to the present day and hour,—he assures them that there was no need at all that he should