Part 6

This catastrophe may very likely be connected in some way with the strange event so powerfully described in the nineteenth chapter of Acts. It happened this way. There was a man in Ephesus named Demetrius. He was a silversmith and made little silver images of the goddess Diana which he sold in great numbers to the people. These images were little copies of the great statue of Diana which the Ephesians believed had fallen down from heaven, and so it was looked upon with awe and was very sacred. One of the most beautiful temples in the world—one of the seven “wonders”—had been built to Diana in Ephesus and in this temple stood the famous statue. Now Demetrius made a great deal of money selling his silver images to those who visited the temple. But suddenly he discovered that people were not buying as many of his silver Dianas as they used to do. He began to wonder what was happening and he hit upon the idea that all the trouble was caused by the preaching of Paul! Paul was calling people to Christ and when they believed in Christ, they no longer worshipped Diana. They stopped going to her temple and they did not care to have copies of the great statue. Demetrius was losing money. His business was in danger. Something must be done. He called together all the silversmiths and stirred them up to do something at once to drive Paul out of the city. “Just see,” he cried, “how our trade is going down! We are losing all our business! We are making no money! This stranger has come to our city and he has told people that gods are not made of silver and gold; that gods made by hands are no gods at all! He has carried people away with his new ideas. They won’t buy our images now. Not only is our business in danger, but our whole city will suffer as well. People will stop coming to see the great temple which all the world admired. We must act. We must save the city and defend the great goddess!” Then all the silversmiths and goldsmiths and coppersmiths and workers in iron and brass began to make processions through the city, shouting as they marched, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” The whole city was aroused. People rushed out of their houses to see what was happening and a great commotion and excitement followed. The throng pressed into the immense city theatre and everybody kept shouting, some one thing and some another, as generally happens in a vast mob of excited people. Paul tried to get into the theatre. He was, as usual, ready to face the danger and stand his ground. But his friends kept him back and would not let him risk his life in such a wild and seething and furious crowd. When any one tried to speak the mob drowned the voice of the speaker with their shouts. A man named Alexander—perhaps he was “Alexander, the coppersmith,” who, Paul says, did him “much evil,” a little later—tried to speak, when suddenly the vast throng of excited people began crying again, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” For two hours nobody could stop this cry which went on and on, with the continual shout, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” At last the town-clerk of the city got the people quiet and made a sensible speech to them, telling them if they had any charge against Paul the right thing to do was to take the matter to the courts and not to get up a riot and endanger the liberty and reputation of the city. Then he sent the people away to their homes.

How this uproar affected Paul we do not know. What danger threatened him now because of the hate of Demetrius and the silversmiths we cannot tell. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but in some way Paul escaped from the city, never to go back again. He got to Troas in safety and then crossed over the Ægean at the same place where he crossed the first time he entered Europe, and reached Macedonia where he was among his friends.

Here in Macedonia where Paul was waiting, worn and perplexed and weary—but not cast down—Titus came to him from Corinth and told him the good news that his letter to Corinth had done its work, had saved the day, and that now his church there was ready to be faithful to him. Nothing in his life ever touched his soul with more joy than did that report which Titus brought. If you wish to see how he felt, you must read the first nine chapters of Second Corinthians, for he wrote those chapters just after Titus came to him. It makes you love Paul to find how eagerly he loved his friends and his churches, and to see how much he suffered when they did wrong or turned against him. Soon after this he went to Corinth and spent three months there with his old and new friends of that city.

XVIII

“READY TO BE BOUND”

There were many things to do in Corinth, on this last visit of Paul’s life to the city where he had worked so long and suffered so much. He had many things to tell them. There were many changes to make in the management of the church. There were many families to visit and all the time there were new people being added to the church. Then Paul was raising a great fund of money which he hoped to carry up to Jerusalem on his return, for the support of the church in that city. Finally he had letters to write to his other churches, advice to give them, difficulties to settle and problems to solve. Perhaps the most important thing he did during this stay in Corinth—certainly the most important for us—was to write a letter, which we now call an Epistle, to the Christians in the city of Rome. It is the longest of all Paul’s Epistles and the one in which he sets forth most carefully and fully his entire message about Christ. He had not been to Rome yet and he had not met the Christians there, but he was planning to go to Rome, after he had been to Jerusalem, on his way to Spain and he wanted to prepare the Christians in the great capital of the empire for the teaching which he expected to give them when he arrived. He little thought as he was writing this wonderful letter that when he did come to Rome he would come chained to two soldiers and that this would be the end of his journey! He told the people at Rome, in this letter, how hard he had tried as a young man to make himself perfect, how he had resolved to keep the law and be absolutely righteous, and how miserably he had failed. “When I meant to do right,” he wrote, “I did wrong. The things I wanted to do I did not do. The things I did, were just those things which I ought not to have done. And when I was defeated and beaten and hopeless then suddenly I discovered the love of God which Christ revealed to me. I found a power to live by, which delivered me from the old power of sin in my nature. Now through that love and that power I am more than conqueror. I know now that nothing can ever separate me from the love of God. Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything that has ever been made in the universe, can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

He told these unseen friends of his in the far-away city how to live the new way day by day in the difficult world. He told them not to overcome evil by doing evil in return but to overcome it by being good and by doing good. He told them not to worry, or fret, or be disturbed, when things were hard and difficult, but to keep calm and steady and full of faith in the love of God, and when they had done the best they could, to leave it all with God. They were, as far as possible, to live in peace and love with all kinds of people and no matter what others did to them, they were to go right on loving them and doing good to them.

When he had sent off his great epistle, and had done all that he could to strengthen the church in Corinth and had received a large collection for Jerusalem and had gathered his friends around him, Paul said farewell to Corinth and started on his return journey, accompanied by a number of companions. He went back through Macedonia—Berœa, Thessalonica, Philippi—and then across the Ægean to Troas where he had first heard the call to go to Europe. There must have been a church there on “the plains of windy Troy,” for Paul remained seven days and held meetings far into the night, but we do not know very much about this church by the Simois River—only that one of the young men there went to sleep while the meeting was going on and fell out of a window in the third story to the ground! Here at Troas Paul found again his old friend, the writer of the Diary—“the We Narrative”—who joined the party for the journey to Jerusalem. They went part of the way by land and part of the way by sea, stopping at Assos and Mitylene, touching at the famous island of Samos, and disembarking at Miletus. Here at Miletus, the leaders of the church at Ephesus came down to see the man whom they had learned to love, to hear his message and to say farewell to him. It was probably not safe for Paul to go to Ephesus with its beasts. There were too many dangers there for him. After all his years of work and his perils in that city it was a joy to see the men and women with whom he had lived and laboured and to have one more chance to speak to them about the highest things in life. It was a very solemn time as they gathered on the seashore and Paul told them of the troubles and dangers that lay before them and before him. He then told them that they would never see each other again. They loved him as though he had been a father to each one and they all wept as he left them to go into the ship to sail for Syria. As they went on their way Paul realised, from what he heard at every port where the ship stopped, that it would be very dangerous for him in Jerusalem. He had not been in the Holy City since the great conference there with Peter and James and John. Since that time tremendous things had happened across the world. Paul had succeeded, but the more he succeeded the more the Jews hated him. They had made trouble for him in every city. They had come to regard him as a traitor and as the enemy of their race and they were eager to get rid of him forever. He knew how they felt. He saw the danger ahead. He understood that if he went to Jerusalem it would be like going into the lion’s mouth. But he was determined to go, danger or no danger, for Paul was a hero. He had a great gift to carry up to the poor and needy Christians in Jerusalem and he must have thought that he could win them over and make them see his truth at last. He believed that this was the greatest opportunity of his life. Perhaps now, after all the wonderful work around the Ægean Sea he might be able to make his own people see the truth that had meant so much to the Greeks and to the Galatians. Perhaps now he could join both branches together—those who were Jewish Christians and those who were Gentile-Christians—and have one great world church with no division in it. It was worth trying anyhow. It was worth any kind of risk. The great gift would soften their hearts and he would plead with them, and then it would be done! When prophets on the way told Paul how dangerous the risk was, he said to them: “Do not talk to me of danger. Do not try to change my course. I am _ready_, not only to be bound in Jerusalem, but if necessary to die there for this cause”—and on he went, like the hero he was.

He very soon found that he was in the midst of enemies. James told him that there were many thousands of Christian-Jews who had heard serious charges against him, how he no longer kept the law of Moses and how he taught his converts that they did not need to become Jews, or to do the things which all good Jews considered necessary and he showed Paul how stern they were sure to be toward him.

He had hardly begun to live in Jerusalem when some Jews discovered him in the city. They gave a cry and raised a mob and rushed at him and seized him. They were so furious that they nearly killed him on the spot, but a Roman captain with a troop of soldiers came up just in time to rescue him and to carry him away to the military castle where the mob could not get at him. But he could hear them cry and shout: “Away with him! away with him!”

XIX

IN THE PRISON AT CÆSAREA

Standing on the steps of the castle, with the angry, surging people in front of him Paul beckoned for silence and then spoke to the most difficult audience he ever addressed. He calmly told them the story of his life. He gave them an account of that great moment on the road to Damascus when Jesus met him and called him to a new life and a new mission. He explained to them how he tried to tell the good news to his own people and how God sent him to the great world of Gentiles. Then, all of a sudden, the people cried out in a fury: “Away with such a fellow from the earth.” They threw off their garments and would have ended his life in a moment if they could have reached him. It was another scene like the one which occurred when Jesus was on his way to Calvary, and when Stephen was being hurried out of the gates of Jerusalem and Paul himself held the garments of the men who threw the stones.

This time the crowd was powerless for they could not get their victim. The soldiers guarded him and took him into the castle where he was to be scourged, that is beaten with rods. The soldiers tied Paul up to the wall with thongs and were ready to begin the terrible scourging when he quietly asked the centurion if it was lawful to scourge a Roman citizen who had not been found guilty of any crime. The centurion went out and told the chief captain that Paul was a Roman, and he immediately stopped the scourging. The next day Paul had an opportunity to address the great council of the Jews in the presence of Ananias, the high-priest, but the council divided in their opinion of Paul, some approving of him and some disapproving, until they nearly tore him in pieces in their excitement. Once more the soldiers saved him by rushing in and carrying him away to the castle. Meantime, a band of men got together and formed a secret plot to kill Paul and have done with him. This time it was not the Roman soldiers who saved him. It was his nephew. Paul, we remember, had a sister in Jerusalem. And in some way her son discovered this plot. He got into the castle and told his uncle, who brought him to a centurion and the centurion took the young man to the chief captain where he told all he knew of the plot. The brave boy saved his uncle’s life, for the chief captain, when he heard the boy’s story, ordered two hundred soldiers and seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen to take Paul by night to Cæsarea, where the Roman governor had his home and headquarters and where Paul would be safe until his trial was over. He was taken at first to Herod’s palace, though we may be pretty sure that the part in which Paul lived was more like a prison than a palace, but this wonderful man had something in his soul which changed even prisons into palaces.

Soon after his arrival, Ananias, the high-priest, with a lawyer named Tertullus, came down to Cæsarea to lay before Felix, the Roman governor, the charges against Paul. Tertullus made a speech charging Paul with being “a pestilent fellow,” “a mover of insurrections” up and down the empire wherever he travelled. He said Paul was “a ringleader of the Nazarenes” and that he did things contrary to the laws and customs of the Jews. Tertullus made out as bad a case as he could and the other Jews who had come down with him added whatever they could think of against the prisoner.

Then Felix made a sign that Paul might speak in his own defence. He declared, in calm and persuasive words that he had never wilfully stirred up the crowd, or encouraged a riot. He told the governor that his whole business in the world was to live the way of life that God had revealed as the true way. A little later Paul spoke again before Drusilla, a Jewess, who was Felix’s wife. He spoke so powerfully this time of righteousness and self-control and the perfect way of life and of the future of joy and woe, that the old Roman governor trembled as he listened. But he did not change his life. He was weak of will and he had woven a chain of habits which he could not break. He had heard that Paul had brought great sums of money to Jerusalem and he hoped that Paul would offer a large bribe for his liberty so that Felix kept him in prison two years. Felix saw him occasionally and gave him a chance to offer a bribe, which never was offered! Thus two long years dragged by. Paul was longing to go on with the work that had been changing the world. He was eager to see his old friends and to help them in their troubles, but all the time he was fast bound with chains in the strong prison at Cæsarea. There is in the Second Epistle to Timothy a fragment of a letter which Paul may have written from Cæsarea. He asks Timothy to bring him the cloak which he left at Troas. The prison by the sea was a cold place. And more touching still, he asks him to bring his books—I wish we knew the titles of these books—and his pieces of parchment, so that he could write letters to his churches and to his friends. After two years had dragged by, there came a change of governors. Porcius Festus succeeded Felix. The Jerusalem Jews made a great effort to prejudice the new governor against Paul and he proposed to push the trial through at once and have the case settled. It was evident that Paul could hardly have a fair trial in Cæsarea. The Jews were full of passion against him. They were ready to use all the ways known to them to secure his condemnation and death. And Paul saw that he had little chance of escape in the local court, so that as the crisis approached he used his privilege as a Roman citizen and appealed to be tried before Cæsar in Rome, and Festus immediately granted the appeal.

Before the time came for Paul to start on his momentous journey to Rome, King Agrippa and his wife Bernice came to Cæsarea to bring greetings to the new governor and they heard from Festus of the famous prisoner who had appealed to Cæsar. King Agrippa very much desired to see Paul and to hear him speak and Festus arranged for Agrippa to hear him. The king sat on a throne with much splendour. All the distinguished persons of the court were there. Soldiers with helmets and with the Roman eagles were stationed round the hall. And into the midst Paul was led by his guard and then was given permission to speak. It was a great moment for the prisoner. His one thought was to make some of these people understand his great message. Once more he told the story of his life and how the light had shined upon him at Damascus and how he had obeyed the heavenly message which came to him then. He thought he might make the king Agrippa see that God always meant to send His Son to bring light and life to the world and he was telling him about the great prophecies in the Old Testament when suddenly Festus interrupted. He told Paul that he was wild and deluded, that he had thought over these things until he had lost his reason. Unmoved Paul answered and said “I am not deluded. I am calm and sober. I am talking about things which are absolutely certain and real. King Agrippa knows that these things are so.” Then turning to the king, he said, “King Agrippa dost thou believe what our prophets have said? I know that thou must believe.”

Then king Agrippa found it difficult to answer. It would not do to have a prisoner go on talking that way to a king and yet this prisoner seemed to be right. King Agrippa shrugged his shoulders and said: “With a very little argument you seem to think you can make _me_ a Christian!” Paul with dignity raised his chained hands and said: “Whether my argument is little or great, I would to God that not only thou but everybody here who hears me speak to-day might feel what I feel, and see what I see, and have the kind of life I have and become such a person as I am—only without these chains which are on my hands!”

After Paul had retired King Agrippa said to Festus: “If this man had not appealed to Cæsar he might have been set free.”

XX

THE STORMY JOURNEY TO ROME

The journey from Cæsarea to Rome was at best a long and dangerous one. Paul was accustomed to the sea, for he had taken sea voyages ever since his early youth. He had already been shipwrecked three times and once he had clung to a piece of the wreck for twenty-four hours before he was rescued. But this was the first time he had gone on board ship as a prisoner and it was a new experience to be at sea in the charge of soldiers. The change from the prison in Cæsarea to the ship was, however, a welcome one, and now at last he was going to Rome and, he hoped, to freedom.

He was in the charge of the Augustan cohort, with Julius for centurion and there were other prisoners besides himself. A little band of friends attended him and among them was the writer of the famous “We-Diary” who has given us a wonderful account of this journey. The ship touched first at Sidon where the good-hearted centurion allowed Paul to go on shore, to visit his friends and to have a good home meal, which must have been a welcome change after the long tedious period of prison fare. Then they sailed under the lee of Cyprus and skirted the shore of Paul’s beloved Cilicia. There were the mountains of his childhood in the distance—Amanus in the east, Taurus in the west. He could see the gleaming of the Cydnus on its way to the sea and imagination pictured the beautiful city on both banks of the river where he played and dreamed as a boy—the city he would never see again. Next came Pamphylia on whose shores he had landed years before and his mind ran on over the hills to a precious group of churches in the cities of Galatia.

From the city of Myra in the province of Lycia they found an Alexandrian ship sailing for Italy and the centurion transferred his prisoners to it. They went far to the south of the Ægean, around whose shores the great work of Paul’s life had been done and where now groups of friends were praying for him. The ship took them to the south of the great island of Crete and finally the wind forced them to put into Fair Havens near the middle of the island. Paul warned the centurion not to go on because of the certain danger of the voyage in the stormy season, but the master of the vessel was determined to have the ship sail and as soon as a favourable wind appeared they launched forth. But the ship had not been long at sea when a Mediterranean hurricane struck it and drove it on through the desperate waters. The ship was wrenched and twisted by the fury of the storm and it leaked seriously so that the sailors were compelled to put undergirding around it to tighten up the seams. In the fearful danger they threw overboard the freight which the ship was carrying and finally they threw out the tackling and furniture of the ship to make it as light as possible. For fourteen days and nights they floundered about in the Sea of Adria at the mercy of the wind and the boisterous billows. No sun appeared by day and the nights were appallingly dark. Fear lay on everybody except one and all hope was gone in the minds of everybody but one. This one man had no fear and he was full of hope and confidence. He had never seen battles such as the centurion with his cohort had been through, but he had passed through great experiences and he had learned to trust God absolutely. He had received five terrible beatings from the Jews; three times he had been given the Roman scourge. He had been in many prisons. He had faced death again and again on his journeys. He had often been where no escape seemed possible, when an unexpected door had opened and he had gone on in safety. He was the man, then, for this dreadful hour. He had the hero spirit and he could calm the others and kindle their courage.