Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/575

 is no reason to suppose that he confined all his labor entirely to the city; on the contrary, it is quite certain, that the numerous smaller gospel fields throughout the adjacent country, must have attracted his attention, and it appears, from the commencement of his second epistle to the Corinthians, that many throughout all Achaia had received the gospel, and had been numbered among the saints. Corinth, however, remained the great center of his operations in Greece, and from this place he soon after directed another epistle to one of his apostolic charges in Macedonia,—the church of Thessalonica. Since his former epistle had been received by them, there had arisen a new occasion for his anxious attention to their spiritual condition, and in his second letter he alludes distinctly to the fact that there had been misrepresentations of his opinion, and seems to imply that a letter had been forged in his name, and presented to them, as containing a new and more complete account of the exact time of the expected coming of Christ, to which he had only vaguely alluded in the first. In the second chapter of his second epistle, he renews his warning against these delusions about the coming of Christ, alluding to the fact, that they had been deceived and disturbed by misstatements on this subject, and had been led into error, both by those who pretended to be inspired, and by those who attempted to show by prediction, that the coming of Christ was at hand, and also by the forged epistle pretending to contain Paul's own more decisive opinions on the subject. He exhorts them to "let no man deceive them by any of these means." He warns them moreover, against any that exalt themselves against the doctrines which he had taught them, and denounces all false and presumptuous teachers in very bitter terms. After various warnings against these and all disorderly persons among them, he refers to his own behavior while with them, as an example for them to follow, and reminds them how blamelessly and honestly he behaved himself. He did not presume on his apostolic office, to be an idler, or to eat any man's bread for naught, but steadily worked with his own hands, lest he should be chargeable to any one of them; and this he did, not because his apostolic office did not empower him to live without manual labor, and to depend on those to whom he preached for his means of subsistence, but because he wished to make himself, and his fellow-laborers, Silas and Timothy, examples for their behavior after he was gone. Yet it seemed that, notwithstanding the pains he had taken to incul