A Pathetic Thanksgiving

I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day; greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy. A.V.

I give thanks to our God, whom I worship as my fathers did before me with a pure conscience, that I keep unintermitted my recollection concerning thee in my petitions, by night and by day; yearning for a sight of thee, (remembering thy tears,) that I may be filled with joy.

THE initial address of the Letter is over and the 2 Tim. i. substance of the message now begins. The form 3) 4-

of the beginning is highly characteristic of St. Paul.

Again and again in other days, writing to the Churches, he had opened his Epistles thus, weaving

together his thanksgiving and his prayer. Now for

the last time, to this greatly loved individual, he

will open so again.

It is a beautiful and pathetic thanksgiving. What His Thanksoccasions it is the fact that he has Timothy always ®’7”78: in his heart, always in his prayers. It is as if he had felt that in these sorrowful closing days he might have found himself faltering in the exercise and tender joy of this sacred friendship, might have had his heart’s sight of Timothy confused and almost lost in the valley of the shadow of death. So he ‘gives thanks to God’ that it is otherwise; he is grateful to the grace

3) 4. which keeps his life-worn heart young enough still to embrace his dear one in the tenacious arms of prayer. ‘By night and by day’ Timothy is present to him before the throne of grace. As the cheerless days in the deep prison close and open upon him; as he lies waking in the night; as he sits thinking, alone or with Luke, when the pale light shines again; he is constantly telling the Lord about Timothy, and asking for him mercy, and cheer, and the drying of his tears, and, if it be possible, that Paul may see him once again, to the great, the perfect joy of his aged and yearning heart.

In passing he drops one notable word about his relations with his God. ‘Him I worship, as my

With a Pure fathers did before me, with a pure conscience.’

Conscience.

Here two points present themselves to our notice. First, he asserts the purity of his conscience, just as years before he had done, in even stronger terms (Acts xxiii. 1), before the unjust High Priest : — ‘I have conducted myself as regards God with all good conscience up to this day.’ Are we surprised at what looks so much like a self-righteous claim in this great preacher of penitence? Is this really a contradiction to such words as those of Eph. ii. 3, where he says that ‘we’ (note the self-including and self-condemning pronoun) ‘once lived our life in the desires of our flesh, doing the willings of our flesh and of our minds, and were by nature children of wrath, just like the rest of men’? Not at all. It is the self-same conscience which here asserts its purity and there feels its load. Here, to Timothy, he only affirms that his worship was the worship not

A Pathetic Thanksgiving

of the hypocrite but of the devotee; that it was 2 Tim. i. single-minded in this respect, that he meant it to the 3, 4- uttermost. There, to the Ephesians, he joins himself with them as a lost sinner, ‘totally depraved,’ that

is to say, morally damaged throughout his whole being. True, he had bowed his head to his fathers’ God in a devotion perfectly sincere. Yet none the less he was then an unsaved sinner still, corrupted, lost. He had yet himself to discover. He had yet

to learn to ‘fly for refuge’ to the God whose majesty

he had owned but whose holiness he had but half seen, and whose love he had not seen at all.

Yet that ‘pure conscience’ was not nothing. It was indeed no merit. But it was a great gift of mercy that he had been true, not false, that he had meant his adoration.

Then, secondly, so had his ‘fathers’ done before As did his him. Very moving is this backward look towards Fathers. them. St. Paul came of a line of ancestors who were sincerely godly according to their light. Compared with the light in which he now walked their day was cloudy. But they too had meant their adoration; and their almost beatified descendant here clasps that fact with a loyal affection to his heart, as, with that instinct of retrospect which is frequently so strong in dying men, he reaches back to his pious ‘fathers’ and feels their spiritual oneness with himself before their God.

It is just so that Latimer bids us think of our ‘fathers,’ in the times of shadow before the Reformation, with thoughts of peace and hope. For fidelity to God and His truth, even to the fire of 3) 4- martyrdom, means in its nature no narrowness of sympathy and no narrowness of hope.

Thus, thinking of his ‘ fathers,’ he expresses now a yet tenderer affection towards his ‘dear child.’ The ‘tears’ of Timothy’s parting agony start, as it were, in Paul’s own eyes. And his own soul is faint with a ‘homesick yearning’ (the Greek verb means no less) for one more sight of Timothy on the mortal shore. And by night and by day he prays that it yet, even yet, may be.