The Witness of the Epistle to Itself

AcTING on my initial explanation I have offered no technical discussion of literary and historical problems in connexion with our Epistle. I havesimply expressed my convictions, and have asked the reader rather to take them for granted for the while than to listen to arguments over the authentic Pauline authorship.

I modify this rule at this point just so far as to say a few words on one item of internal evidence to that authorship which to my own mind is as weighty as possible. It has everything to do with what we have been thinking in regard of the heart-sorrows of Paul and of Timothy, and the trials to their faith.

As a fact, the Letters to Timothy and to Titus, after Modern having been accepted as authentic without misgiving alive: throughout the ages, have been, within the nineteenth Pastoral century, severely and in many quarters, doubted or FPistles. denied to be St. Paul’s. Many acute students, some of them far from irreverent in spirit, have taken this line. It has been said in particular that the style of expression is seriously unlike that of the Apostle’s other Letters; that the state of church-organization shewn in them is too advanced for his time; that it is impossible to fit them into his biography, supposing that biography to close with the close of the Acts of the Apostles.

I believe that every one of these difficulties may be

The Evidence of the
uman

Heart. accounted for while we maintain the authenticity of the Letters — except indeed the last. As to that last, I admit that it is impossible to find a credible place for the three ‘ Pastorals’ within the narrative of the Acts. But can any reasonable student think that the writer of the Acts means us to understand that St Paul died at the end of the ‘two whole years in his own hired house’? Rather, is there not ground for the guess (by Professor Ramsay, if I remember aright) that St. Luke intended a third volume to follow, a sequel to his Gospel and to the Acts, but that God willed otherwise, and that the narrative accordingly closes abruptly, short of its goal? If so, there is left ample room for an after-time in which to place the ‘Pastorals’; and that class of objection falls accordingly.

But all this leaves untouched the internal evidence to which I now point. Few students doubt that these three Epistles, authentic or not, stand or fall together; so curiously, so amply are they alike in their indefinable literary character and ar. If one stands therefore, all stand together. Now this Second Epistle to Timothy stands, with a standing, as I maintain, immovable, upon the evidence borne by that inimitable accent of the sorrow-burthened human soul which sounds all throughout its utterances. I have often found it difficult deliberately to read these short chapters through without finding something like a mist gathering in the eyes. The writer’s heart beats in the writing. You can almost see his tears fall over the dear past and the harrowing present. Meanwhile a noble gravity, the very tone of the man who knows that he is on his way to death, and that he must say his last words clearly and decisively, now or never,

The Witness of the Epistle to Itself

suffuses the whole composition. The writer is alternately strong with the resolute man’s last calm courage, and tender as a yearning and solitary woman when he begs the beloved one to whom he writes to ‘come to him, if he possibly can, ‘before winter,’ because he is so awfully alone.

Now here is an element which, I am bold to say, Could Fabriin a writing produced within the first generations of ate Bate Christianity, cannot but indicate an absolute authenticity. I appeal to those who know the history of literature, especially to those who have given attention to attempts at elaborate imitation preserved in the literature of antiquity. I ask them whether they think that anyone, in Christian circles, within, let us say, one hundred and fifty years of the death of our Lord, was in the least likely to have made not merely a passable imitation of an apostolic letter in some style, but an imitation in this style. Was there a genius within those circles at once so deep, so tender, and so perverted, as to have fabricated such sentences as these? — ‘I am mindful of thy tears’; ‘TI know whom I have believed’; ‘ At my first answer all men forsook me; nevertheless the Lord stood by me, and strengthened me.’ But to quote even such sentences in their isolation is not enough; we must read the Letter over. The human heart is in it everywhere. And fabricators, certainly of that age, did not well understand the human heart.

It is Paul himself; the original, the authentic man. And in Paul was Jesus Curist. Then let us read, let us listen, let us believe. We shall find the dying Letter full of living messages, carried to us by a sure messenger’s hand, direct from Him.

2 Tim. i.
I, 2.

The two
Friends in

the Prison.

The
Signature.