Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/598

 whom he had waited in vain, with so much anxiety at Troas, as the expected messenger of these tidings of their spiritual condition; and he was now therefore prepared to pass on to them from Macedonia, to which region he tells them he had gone from Troas, instead of to Corinth, because he had been disappointed about meeting Titus on the eastern side of the Aegean. With the exception of these things, the epistle is taken up with a very ample and eloquent exhibition of his true powers and office as an apostle; and in the course of this argument, so necessary for the re-establishment of his authority among those who had lately been disposed to contemn it, he makes many very interesting allusions to his own personal history. The date of the epistle is commonly supposed, and with good reason, to be A. D. 58, the fifth of Nero's reign, and one year after the preceding epistle.

"Chap, ii. 12, 13. 'When I came to Troas to preach Christ's gospel, and a door was opened unto me of the Lord, I had no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus my brother; but taking my leave of them, I went from thence into Macedonia.'

"To establish a conformity between this passage and the history, nothing more is necessary to be presumed, than that St. Paul proceeded from Ephesus to Macedonia, upon the same course by which he came back from Macedonia to Ephesus, or rather to Miletus in the neighborhood of Ephesus; in other words, that, in his journey to the peninsula of Greece, he went and returned the same way. St Paul is now in Macedonia, where he had lately arrived from Ephesus. Our quotation imports that in his journey he had stopped at Troas. Of this, the history says nothing, leaving us only the short account, 'that Paul departed from Ephesus, for to go into Macedonia.' But the history says, that in his return from Macedonia to Ephesus, 'Paul sailed from Philippi to Troas; and that, when the disciples came together on the first day of the week, to break bread, Paul preached unto them all night; that from Troas he went by land to Assos; from Assos, taking ship and coasting along the front of Asia Minor, he came by Mitylene to Miletus.' Which account proves, first, that Troas lay in the way by which St. Paul passed between Ephesus and Macedonia; secondly, that he had disciples there. In one journey between these two places, the epistle, and in another journey between the same places, the history makes him stop at this city. Of the first journey he is made to say, 'that a door was in that city opened unto him of the Lord;' in the second, we find disciples there collected around him, and the apostle exercising his ministry, with, what was even in him, more than ordinary zeal and labor. The epistle, therefore, is in this instance confirmed, if not by the terms, at least by the probability of the history; a species of confirmation by no means to be despised, because, as far as it reaches, it is evidently uncontrived.

"Grotius, I know, refers the arrival at Troas, to which the epistle alludes, to a different period, but I think very improbably; for nothing appears to me more certain, than that the meeting with Titus, which St. Paul expected at Troas, was the same meeting which took place in Macedonia, viz. upon Titus's coming out of Greece. In the quotation before us, he tells the Corinthians, 'When I came to Troas, I had no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus, my brother; but, taking my leave of them, I went from thence into Macedonia.' Then in the seventh chapter he writes, 'When we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but we were troubled on every side; without were fightings, within were fears; nevertheless, God, that comforteth them that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus.' These two passages plainly relate to the same journey of Titus, in meeting with whom St. Paul had been disappointed at Troas, and rejoiced in Macedonia. And amongst other reasons which fix the former passage to the coming of Titus out of Greece, is the consideration, that it was nothing to the Corinthians that St. Paul did not meet with Titus at Troas, were it not that he was to bring intelligence from