The Cloak and the Books

Tue cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments. A.V.

The cloak which I left behind at Troas, at Carpus’ house, bring when thou comest, and the books, particularly the parchments.

Wuat a prosaic message, what a matter-of-fact com- 2 Tim. iv. mission! Such may be the reader’s first reflection; he 13.

may almost wonder that Holy Scripture has room for peace such details. But the God of Scripture has room in eet His heart for every detail of human life; and human life

is mainly written in prose, and in detail, and is matter

certainly of fact. Poor and shallow is that conception

of life which thinks scorn of the commonest of common things; they are the very substance of man’s story.

But then also this simple sentence, read from An Affecting another side, is one of the most moving in all the Sestesce. Epistles of St. Paul. It shows us the great saint and prophet exposed to a pathetic bodily need, and anxious also, in those last days in the prison vault, while a violent death is waiting for him outside its door, to get back the books he loved. It was still summer when he wrote. But winter would be coming soon, in the large ancient sense of ‘ winter,’ when the equinoctial storms began; and he would be bitterly cold, in common clothing, underground.

He had left a warm cloak, in Greek a pheloné, in Latin a penula, behind him, at Troas, in the house of one

2 Tim. iv. Carpus, his friend; just possibly the house where

13. that memorable Eucharist was held (Acts xx. 7), when Eutychus fell from the upper window. Perhaps it was in that house that the persecutors had seized him, to carry him for the last time to Rome; in the ruthless hurry his travelling-cloak was left behind, and also his books, some apparently of papyrus, but some, and those the dearest to him (were they not the scrolls of Holy Scripture, his stay and his joy?), made of the costlier vellum. And he would fain be warm while he yet lived, in that body emaciated with sufferings. And he would fain read once more, even with eyes dimmed by use and perhaps by disease, but through which the deathless mind could still be looking. So Timothy is to ask Carpus for the cloak, and for the books, and to bring them with him.

Tindale’s In a later age, in the sixteenth century, a re-Letter. quest curiously similar was made by a true disciple of St. Paul’s, that great Christian and great Englishman, William Tindale, whose translation of the New Testament is practically the basis of our versions of to-day, Authorized and Revised. In 1535, immured by the persecutor at Vilvorde, in Belgium, he wrote, not long before his fiery martyrdom, a Latin letter to the Marquis of Bergen, Governor of the castle. ‘I entreat your lordship, and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I must remain here for the winter you would beg the Commissary to be so kind as to send me, from the things of mine which he has, a warmer cap; I feel the cold painfully in my head. Also a warmer cloak, for the cloak I have is very thin. He has a woollen shirt of mine, if he will send it. But most of all,

The Cloak and the Books

my Hebrew Bible, Grammar, and Vocabulary, that 2 Tim. iv. I may spend my time in that pursuit.’ 13.

Did the saints, each in his affliction, live to need the warmth after all, and to need the books? As to St. Paul we cannot know. He may have been spared till ‘winter,’ and may have thankfully wrapt the old friendly folds again round him, and bent over the beloved books again. But it is more likely that before that could happen he had passed through death to life, and sunned himself in the light of the Lord, and ‘seen all knowledge’ in His face.

However, the request stands here, legible for us. A ‘Touch It touches the heart, age after age, with its strangely of Nature’ simple intimation of human needs, bodily and mental, in that life so natural amidst the supernatural. Is it not also one of the surest of the many sure strokes of internal witness to the authentic authorship of the Epistle? I dare to say that the insertion of just such a ‘touch of nature’ was, at that date, beyond the finest conception of a fabricator. We feel, we see, the veritable Paul in this simple verse; it is himself.

One note may be added as we leave the passage. A Note on Some expositors have suggested that the pheloné Phelon. was not a common cloak but a ceremonial one, a ‘vestment’; that it was in fact a ‘chasuble,’ the ephod-like robe worn at a later age in the ministry of the Holy Communion, and to which the word pheloné is as a fact applied. But the history of the term makes this impossible. No certain use of pheloné for a sacred vestment is discoverable for seven long centuries after St. Paul’s day. Just possibly the word here may mean a case for books. But the far highest probability makes it mean a cloak for common use.

2 Tim. iv.
14, 15.

A Note

of Truth.

Alexander
a Secret
Enemy.