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Let us note first a few general facts of place and people. We find ourselves away from what we call the land of the book, away from the mother city of our religion, in the centre of Asia Minor, what is now Turkey in Asia, amongst the Galatian churches, in Macedonia, north of Greece Proper, with the people of Thessalonica, now Salonichi, the capital of one of the Roman divisions of that country, a luxurious and populous town; in the new Corinth, a kind of international city, Roman and Grecian, on the famous isthmus which connects the two parts of Greece, and in Rome, the great world metropolis of that day, and destined to play so important a part in the future of that forming society of the followers of Jesus. Of the churches in these places all except that in Rome were gathered by the writer of our letters. Of the origin of the Roman Church we have no historic account whatever. does duty simply as something to dispute about. The letters indicate that the members of the congregations in Galatia and Rome were a kind of Gentile Jews or Jewish Gentiles, whilst in Corinth and Thessalonica the converts would seem to have been gathered chiefly from the heathen people. And we may call attention here to the wide dispersion of the Jews at this time in the Roman world, and to their marvellous earnestness and success in making converts to their religion. It was anything but a dying faith. Indeed, it was giving the best evidence of life in its capacity to put forth a new form. Everywhere you found Jews, and Jews who were capable of mediating between the philosophies of Greece and the old sacred faith which came by Moses. The Jew Philo of Alexandria was a contemporary of Jesus. Two of the five quarters inhabited by Jews; there was a million of Jews in Egypt; the abounded in Rome, and attracted, as the Christians hardly did he notice of Roman writers, like Seneca and Tacitus, and theres had long been translated into Greek, since the clexander a widely spoken language. Therever acting to the Book ets, a Jew

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cient Judaism and Canity which has been too mu

The Jews who were the smoke of the spirit of their relig

religion; they could receive it for themselves, and give it to the outside world as a new and advanced and spiritualized Judaism, and undoubtedly there were many who had been at once attracted and repelled by Jewish proselytizers but were at once brought into the Christian society. We easily gather in this way what must have been going on in the work of spreading the gospel during these first eighteen years of which we have in the Book of Acts such a slender and scarcely digested account. There was the train all ready to be fired, and the spark dropped out of the heavens, and the flame ran through the world beyond the power of any to stay it. The Roman Church, so far as any trustworthy account of its original is concerned, would seem to have founded itself. The time had come for it. Travelers carried the tidings in their minds and hearts, and the word was everywhere the fruit of their lips. The story of Jesus was incessantly told. It fashioned for itself sentences of its own which were continually repeated, as sure to come out in the same form as stereotype editions of a book are sure to correspond. It was adapted to the common people, and they heard it gladly. Once in a man's soul, he carried it with him wherever he went, and a necessity was laid upon him to publish it as from heart to heart, and as he journeyed by the way, and as the Spirit gave him utterance, as we read in the case of Philip the Evangelist and the treasurer of Queen Candace. The air was full of it, just as when the time has come for some movement in science, and the same discovery is made in widely separate places by different investigators, and we have questions as to precedence which are sure never to get settled. Noostly machinery was necessary; missionary boards were exterorized, there was no need to translate scriptures into foreign tongues or the dialects of perishing tribes of savages and barbans, somehow it

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which we propose

Coming now to the examination of our rs we will begin with the earliest, those to the people in Thessalica. It has been proposed by one and another critic, and not wout some reason,

to invert the order of these two Epistles, but it is not essential to our purpose whether the one or the other be read first.

I. We ask, first, What do the letters disclose concerning the authorship? From the opening sentence it would seem to have been threefold, for they both begin with a greeting from three persons, Paul, Silvanus or Silas, and Timothy, but as we read on we soon learn that the writings are from one mind and one heart, and that the two who are associated with the first named are fellowworkers but not fellow-writers. The "we" is the "we" of an author. "We sent Timothy our brother," expressly excludes Timothy from the authorship, and indeed Paul breaks out individually in the first letter, and closes the second with his own underwriting. The author of the letters is the chief missionary by whom those addressed had been brought into the new belief and the new life; they are a part of the fruit of his labors in the cause of the new religion, and he is bound to them in the strongest and most tender bonds, as the father is bound to his children. He takes no official title, perhaps because he associates other names with his own, perhaps because he was not yet as afterwards called an "apostle ;" but he writes with all the authority of a natural and providential spiritual and moral guide, and expresses the most entire satisfaction with the ready zeal of his converts whose fame he tells them has gone far and wide. His labors amongst them have been wholly disinterested and altogether at his own charges. The letter distinctly implies that he had lived amongst them for a considerable time, pursuing the every day occupation which, in some form or other, an excellent Jewish custom provided for its learned class, making known meanwhile his priceless convictions, it is likely in an altogether informal way, because a necessity was laid upon him to proclaim what was so dear and so vital. The eveal a man of a very ardent temperament, borne along by it. His supply of language is scarcely propord to the wealth of his nature and the urgency of his message, so that his sentences chase one another, and as perhaps we should see without surprise in a letter, produce but a slight impression of method and orderly distribution of thought. He writes as one who is profoundly sensible of the reality of Divine Guidance, and upon whose heart the finger of a Living

wholly in his

God has written words which it is his privilege to repeat and interpret. In this persuasion and in this service he has been willing to encounter shame and pain, and though his joy is great he is also a sufferer in the cause, inwardly uplifted and refreshed, but weighed down outwardly. So much of the writer's personality comes out from the sentences of the letters, and gives an intense reality to them which almost of itself precludes the suspicion of forgery. We have before us authentic pages from the Book of Human Life; and the men of a later period who testify to the authorship of the writings, and are competent as witnesses to the prevailing opinion of their time, would have been wholly unequal to the task of composing such sentences.

II. Passing now from the writer to those whom he addresses, we find that they are the inhabitants of a city which in the time of the Romans was the capital of Macedonia, and got its name from the sister of Alexander the Great. The orator Cicero, who lived there once as an exile, describes the place as in the heart of the Roman Empire. It was a great emporium for traffic by land and by sea, and a chief station of one of great Roman roads.. Jews have always been prominent in the city, and to-day they number ten or twenty thousand of a population of sixty or seventy thousand. So we are in no mean city. The portion of the inhabitants to whom this letter is addressed are styled a "church." The word so translated is used interchangeably in the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint for synagogue." We know that it got to be applied very soon exclusively to the people who were to be, and presently were, called Christians. From these letters we gather that they were a company by themselves, called out, as the name church or ecclesia implies, living in the world, and engaged in its common occupations, but with faiths, hopes, charities, which were altogether and most characteristically their own, summoned by a Divine Voice, lifted above the common levels of society into new expectations and a higher life. It appears that a greater part of the society, to say the least, had been gathered from amongst heathen: they are described as having turned from idols to serve the living and true God; which could hardly have been said even of Jewish proselytes, that is, of those who had been converted first to

Judaism and then had embraced the new religion. Perhaps many of them had been interested before in the Jewish Church, but had also been repelled by its formalities and its narrowness. We find further that their discipleship had been very costly to them as to their teacher, and that their lives were still sorely embittered and their faith sharply tried by the persecution of those who hated and dreaded the new religion. The opposition came from their own countrymen, just as had been the case with the disciples of Jesus in relation to their brethren amongst the Jews, who, as Paul implies, were especially disturbed not only because the gospel was preached at all, but because it was preached to the Gentiles, the first traces of the great offense which beyond all the other teachers of the new religion Paul was destined to give. As to organization, it must have been of the simplest kind, though already we trace the tendency of intense life to embody itself, and throw out the necessary limbs and instruments. We gather from the directions at the close of the first Epistle that there would seem to have been some whose special function it was to exercise an oversight of the rest as better taught and better fitted to be leaders: they are spoken of as those "who labored amongst them and are over them in the Lord," presiding officers in their assemblies, visitors of the poor, helpers of the feebleminded, consolers of the sick and the sorrowful. And what a few did for the whole, as overseers or bishops, each is called upon to do for the other according to the ability or need of each and the other, in the spirit of a true community. For public religious exercises we find mention of " prophesyings," by which we are not to understand the foretelling of future events, but rather a form of earnest, enthusiastic utterance, needing sometimes the qualifying addition of knowledge, or what is called being tried or proved, tested, we may understand, by the wisest and deepest sense of the society, guided by the experience of the elders, who must not despise the most stammering utterances of the new life, the scarcely articulate voices of the spirit, but will choose out and emphasize the best and really precious. As brethren they greeted each other with a kiss, the common form of ancient salutation amongst near friends, and the beginning of a custom which is described later in the life of the church, as we find in the accounts

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