that before St. Paul wrote these letters he had ceased to be an elderly, and had, perhaps rapidly, become an old man. There is nothing impossible in this supposition. The surprising thing is that it has not been more generally recognised as a probable factor in the solution of the problem presented by the Pastorals. When we think of the intensity with which St. Paul had lived his life—always at high pressure—and what a hard life it had been, it would be a marvel indeed if old age with its diminished powers had not come suddenly upon him.
We hold then that the author of the Pastorals was Paul; but “Paul the aged’; much more aged, and more truly so, than when he penned his note to Philemon. We may observe, as a sign of old age, a certain inertia which makes him satisfied to express his meaning in habitual, almost stereotyped, words and phrases ; words and phrases which are only open to the objection—in itself unreasonable—that we have heard them quite recently. The brain no longer responds to the will to utter “ words that burn”; and it seems as fitful in the origination of ‘thoughts that breathe’. It is not that St. Paul is not truly inspired in the Pastorals. These letters satisfy the practical test of inspiration, viz., their yield of matter for thought is never exhausted by study. There are, moreover, several passages in them that have touched the hearts of Christians in every age as nearly as anything the apostle ever wrote. But even in these, perhaps more in these than in less striking paragraphs—for ordinary details of Church life must be dealt with in ordinary language—we detect a failing of power in comparison with the Paul of the earlier letters: the inspiration is as true, but it is not as strong; the heart and arteries and veins do their duty, but the blood does not course so quickly as in the days of youth. To put it quite plainly : the difficulties that meet the student of the Pastoral Epistles lie rather in the logical connexion of the paragraphs than in the profundity of the thoughts expressed in them; and whatever obscurity there may be in some of the expressions used is due in nearly every case to the meagreness of our information concerning the circumstances of the writer and of the Church.
In the earlier epistles, on the contrary, it often happens that the apostle’s thoughts and conceptions are too great for expression. He does not, indeed cannot, formulate them precisely; he gives them the most adequate expression he can; and the Holy Spirit has ever since been leading the Church to a constantly increasing com- prehension of them. But in the Pastorals we do not meet any such struggles between thought and language We are never conscious