But this was not all, or nearly all. St. Paul was at the same time engaged in organising a great collection throughout all the churches where he had ministered on behalf of the poor Christians at Jerusalem, and he was compelled to walk most warily and carefully in this matter. Every step he took was watched by foes ready to interpret it unfavourably; every appointment he made, every arrangement, no matter how wise or prudent, was the subject of keenest scrutiny and criticism. With all these various matters accumulating upon him it is no wonder that St. Paul should have written of himself at this very period in words which vividly describe his distractions: "Beside those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, the care of all the churches." And yet St. Paul gives us a glimpse of the greatness of his soul as we read the epistles which were the outcome of this period of intense but fruitful labour. He carried a mighty load, but yet he carried it lightly. His present anxieties were numerous, but they did not shut out all thoughts upon other topics. The busiest man then was just the same as the busiest man still. He was the man who had the most time and leisure to bestow thought upon the future. The anxieties and worries of the present were numerous and exacting, but St. Paul did not allow his mind to be so swallowed up in them as to shut out all care about other questions equally important. While he was engaged in the manifold cares which present controversies brought, he was all the while meditating a mission to Rome, and contemplating a journey still farther to Spain and Gaul,[219] and the bounds of the Western ocean. And then, finally, there was the care of St. Paul's own soul, the sustenance and development of his spirit by prayer and meditation and worship and reading, which he never neglected under any circumstances. All these things combined must have rendered this period of close upon twelve months one of the Apostle's busiest and intensest times, and yet St. Luke disposes of it in a few brief verses of this twentieth chapter.
[218] I do not wish to decry the industry and learning of German critics, to whom I owe much, as my various references show; but I am always suspicious of their historical conclusions, simply because they are pure students, and are therefore ignorant of life and men. The more industrious and secluded a life a man may lead, so much the more ignorant of the practical world a man becomes, and so much the more unfitted to be a real historian, who must know men as well as books. History is a picture of real life in the past, and to paint it a man must know real life in the present. As well might we set an academic scientist who regarded all lines as straight and all bars as rigid to build the Forth Bridge, as set a man who knows nothing of human nature and how it acts under the stress of practical affairs to write the story of human life two thousand years ago. We may take and use German investigations, but we should apply English common sense and experience to test German conclusions. This rule is, I fear, too much forgotten in a great deal of the literature that is now being pawned off upon the English world in the name of criticism. Surely the fate of Baur's theories ought to be a warning to all young men against swallowing as the latest results of scholarship everything that comes clothed in the German language! The English nation has a reputation for solid common sense. What fools the Germans would be did they take everything English as full of common sense because printed in our language!