interested in it at that time as to desire to return, if ever he should liave tlie ojjportunity. We lind him, also, back at Ephesus, tlio\ij;h he had said to the Eiihesian elders that they should see his face no more, this being his conviction at the time. It is often said that St. Luke would not have ad- mitted this statement into Ac 20 had ho known that the anticipation was to be belied by the good- ness of I'rovidence ; but if he wrote his book at the tiiue the present writer supjioses, he did not know himself that St. I'aul was to be released. From Ephesus it would be easy to get to Spain, if St. Paul actually went there, there being con- stant communication by sea between Ephesus and Mar.seilles.
Under what circumstances he was arrested the second time we have no information ; but, when Nero was persecuting the Christians, the most conspicuous Christian in the world was not likely to escape. It is very interesting to approach Rome, as St. Paul did the first time, along the Appian Way, and see not only the features of nature on which his eyes must have rested, but even some of the works of man, such as the tombs of the Roman nobility on the sides of the road and the remains of the aqueducts, which supplied the city with w^ater, still standing in the fields. After passing through the city-gate, it is uncertain whether he turned to the left towards the Palatine Hill or towards a camp lying in the neighbour- hood where now stands the British Consulate. Two sites are exhibited as liis 'hired house,' one of them being on the borders of the Jewish Quarter. The second imprisonment would be one without xnercy, and no more suitable place for it could have been found than the Mamertine Prison, just outside the bounds of the Forum, at the Capito! end, in which, tradition strongly asserts, both St. Peter and St. Paul were confined before martyrdom. It is an unholy place, a symbol of Roman ferocity and cruelty, with numbers of cells and a hole to let down prisoners into a dungeon, out of which they did not pass till their corpses were thrust into a sewer passing by. But it was not thus that St. Paul ended bis life. It is said that he was beheaded a mile or two out of the city, beside the Via Ostiensis, an<l a monastery, enclosed in a wood of fragrant balsam trees, now marks the spot. A Christian lady, taking posses- sion of the precious dust, buried it on her own ])roperty near by ; and over the rem.ains has been erected one of the noblest architectural structures in the world, the Church of St.-Paul's-outside-the- Walls.
3. Beliefs. — B. Weiss, in Biblical Theolorjy of the NT, divides the teaching of St. Paul into four sections : (1) his gospel before his greatcontroversies began, this being found in 1 and 2 Thessalonians ;
(2) his gospel during the principal controversy of liis life, this being embodied in the four great Epistles, Galatians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians ;
(3) his gospel during his later conflict with in- cipient Gnosticism, as found in what are called the Epistles of the Imprisonment, viz. Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, and Philippians ; (4) his gospel in the period following his first imprison- ment, this being found in the Pastoral Epistles. It has sometimes been hinted that, while Weiss has collected the materials with diligence and grouped them with neatness round these four centres, he has, in so doing, crushed the life out of them. But this is an ungenerous judgment. Weiss's e.xegesis is so searching and his exposition so comprehensive, adapting itself unconstrainedly to the varying phases of the experience and the fortunes of the Apostle, that it may still perhaps be pronounced the most instructive study of the whole subject, in spite of the recent multiplica-
tion of books on NT Theology (Peine, Schlatter, Weinel). The attraction of Weiss's partition lies in the process of development which it exhibits in St. Paul's ideas. Garvie, in Studies of Paul and his Gospel, goes to the opposite extreme, denying altogether that there was a development in St. Paul's mind. He is of opinion that the Apostle had only one gospel, and that it was revealed to him suddenly and catastrophically. He does not deny that the events of his life may have deter- mined the order in which dillerent portions of his doctrine came to full expression, but the whole of his gospel was implicit in his conversion. In this there is a great deal of truth ; yet to sacrifice the idea of development is to lose an element of interest, which not only falls in with the intel- lectual habits of the present day but is inherent in the subject. St. Paul was a living and growing thinker all his days; and, on the face of the docu- ments, there is a marked contrast in the point of view and in the topics absorbing his attention at different stages of his career. If Galatians was the first of all the Epistles, as scholarship at present inclines to suppose, the four-fold division of Weiss falls to the ground ; and, at the opposite end of Weiss's scheme, the investigations of W. LUtgert {Die Irrlehrer der Pastoralbriefe, 1909) tend to identify the false teachers of the Pastoral Epistles with those of Colossians and Ephesians so closely that the teaching in which they are con- futed must be conceived as a unit. Rut, at all events, a two-fold division, into the gospel of his earlier and that of his later writings, is generally acknowledged — the earlier comprising Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and the later Colossians and Ephesians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. Though the later Epistles number seven and the earlier only six, the former are nearly twice as bulky as the latter. Of these two divisions of St. Paul's thinking many designations have been attempted, of which that of Wernle, viz. Apolo- getic and Gnosis, has attracted a good deal of attention. The most obvious and perhaps most useful designation would be from the contro- versialists he was opposing at the difl'erent periods, or perhaps from his own leading doctrine in each period. We shall, however, content ourselves with speaking of the earlier and the later Paulinism.