Prisca and Aquila and the house of Onesiphorus..... Do thy diligence to come before winter. Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren.

The Lord be with thy spirit. Grace be with you.

Whether Timothy was able to reach Rome in time to see the Apostle before his martyrdom, we can only guess. From an allusion to Timothy in the Epistle to the Hebrews, it may be plausibly gathered that he did reach Rome in time to see his friend and father in the faith, and perhaps that he shared his imprisonment. We can only hope that it was so.

What was the after-life of Timothy we have no means of knowing. It is sufficient to know that he, no less than the great Apostle whose life and Epistles we have been considering, is numbered with the saints.

May we all have grace to follow S. Paul, even as he followed Christ, that so we too may finish our course with joy, and receive from the Master's hands-S. Paul's Master and ours-the crown of righteousness; that being faithful unto death, we too may receive the crown of life.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.

DARE say you know that very many eminent biblical scholars, both in ancient and modern times, have come to the conclusion that the Epistle to the Hebrews, though a book of the greatest value, and the most undoubted inspiration, is not the work of S. Paul. Yet so many others have come to an opposite conclusion, that we may include it in our readings on the Life and Epistles of this great Apostle.

As to the question to whom it was written, there can be no doubt that it was written to Hebrew Christians; and but little doubt that these Hebrew Christians were members of the Mother Church of Jerusalem, of whom we read in the early chapters in the Acts of the Apostles.

Nor can there be much doubt that this Epistle was written only two or three years before the destruction of Jerusalem, and when the Jewish war had begun. The time of which our Lord had warned His disciples had come. Jerusalem was already being surrounded by armies, the great tribulation was at hand, tribulation such as had not been from the beginning of the world, nor ever should be.

It was the time when, as our Lord had forewarned them, they should be hated of all men; when many should stumble, and should deliver up one another, and should hate one another; when many false prophets should arise, and lead many astray; when, because iniquity should abound, the love of the many should wax cold.

It is in full accord with these solemn warnings spoken before by Christ, that the writer of this Epistle addresses the Churches of Judea and Jerusalem. We can hardly fail to mark the specially earnest tone of its exhortation, nor to perceive that its warnings are directed not against heresy, but against apostasy.

The history of the Church of Jerusalem is a very sad one. Its first beginnings were like a lovely morning of which we say it is too bright to last. Who has not read with delight the description of their simple life in the Acts of the Apostles? And who can think without sorrow of the fearful calamities through which they had to pass, and of the terrible apostasy into which so many of them fell?

It was not so much that they had shifted their ground, that they had given up their belief, as that they had made no advance. They remained stationary when they ought to have "gone on unto perfection." They were like a pool of water cut off by the receding tide, which feels no longer the ebb and flow of the great ocean, and becomes day by day shallower and more bitter.

They were in extreme peril; as spiritual beings, there was before them "a boundless better, a boundless worse." And a crisis was at hand which would bring them to the test, which would show that though nominally Christians, many of them were in reality Jews, and regarded their faith in Christ as a

T

mere appendage, and that a separable appendage to their Judaism. A crisis was at hand which would shake not earth only, but also heaven; not the earthly polity of the nation only, but their divine polity as the Israel of God.

If they would only be warned in time, if they would but rise to a higher and truer faith in Christ, as the Son of God, they would pass unscathed through the great tribulation, they would find that though the old Jerusalem was gone, the new Jerusalem was still their home; though the temple was destroyed, there remained a temple not made with hands; though the daily sacrifice had ceased, they would find that in the Christian Church "

still an altar."

they had

But unless they rose to a higher and truer faith in Jesus as the Son of God, they would not be able to keep the faith they had. They would begin, nay, they had begun, to think of Him merely as man, as a great Prophet, as the Reformer and Restorer of the Old Covenant: they thought of Jesus as the Messiah, they did not doubt that, but they had lost, or were beginning to lose, the belief that He was the Son of God.

They seem to have thought more of their circumcision than their baptism, more of the temple sacrifices than of the Eucharist, more of their standing in the law than of their standing in the Gospel, more of the intervention of angels than of the mediation of the Eternal Son.

The writer of this Epistle had as his object in writing it, to show that in every respect their position and privileges as Christians were far higher, far nobler, than their former position as Jews. That the Jewish Covenant, the Temple, the Sacrifices, might all pass away, but that the New

Covenant, the New Jerusalem, the "pure offering," would be for them, and for all, abiding realities.

It would seem that the current belief of the Hebrew Christians, as it regarded Christ more and more as a man, was beginning to settle down into a belief in angels as controlling the spiritual world, and as guiding and guarding the children of the Covenant. With these thoughts in his mind, and with these objects in view, the writer of the Epistle, without any preamble, plunges into the midst of his subject.

He begins by reminding these Hebrew Christians that God had revealed Himself gradually to man.

Ch. i. 1: God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son [or in a Son], whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become by so much better than the angels, as He hath inherited a more excellent name than they.

Then follows the first of the solemn warnings of the Epistle.

Ch. ii. 1 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them. For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?

Then, again, speaking of the angels, he declares that whatever may have been the case in the Jewish age, the Christian age, the New Dispensation, is in no way subject unto angels. For the Psalmist had said