which roused animosity that refused to be allayed. The mission of Philo at this time to the monsterEmperor, to avert his fury, if possible, from the Jewish nation, could not be unknown to any among them; and S. Paul must have looked with doubt and wonder as he remembered the words of the people to Pilate concerning our Lord-'His blood be on us and on our children!' Even heathen Rome was horror-struck, however, at so abrupt an outrage on all right and reason as the reign of Caligula'; and every one seemed relieved when it became known that the Emperor had suddenly died of poison. Yet the event proved to be but little relief, and Caligula's reign was not the time of the end,' not the hour of deliverance for the Church, the final battle with the last antichrist, or the perilous times.' Indeed the mission of the great Apostle of the Gentiles can scarcely be said to have then made a beginning. 187 S. Paul was watching and waiting, till he settled at Tarsus and began some apostolic work in Cilicia. Gal. i. 21. The Church all this time advanced, though at first principally among Jews. The reign of Claudius Times of had now begun, and it began well; for perhaps, indeed, any change was better than what had been ; yet the imperial reform proved to be but shortlived. Meanwhile, we see that the Gospel was spreading to Gentiles also. S. Paul formed a coadjutorship with Barnabas, settled for a time at Antioch, and continued i Unhappily we have lost three of Philo's books, 'What befel the Jews under C. Caligula.' J Lect. II. p. 61. Claudius, More injurious than the preceding reign, Rom. i. 18-31. with him till after the Council at Jerusalem, the tenth year of Claudius. During the three years which next followed, Christianity had penetrated to the west of Asia Minor, and it spread into Macedonia and Greece, before Claudius came to his end; though the new faith seems not yet to have attracted notice in Rome, being probably sheltered by the Synagogue, and so included as a kind of Judaism. And then, if we ask further as to the condition of the Empire during these thirteen years of the Church's steady growth, we must find our answer in the despair of the heathen, and in the yet more excited expectation of Christians that the end was at hand,'' the perilous days;' if so be even yet the worst were reached! The weakness and baseness of Claudius affected the whole heart of Roman society even more than the frantic cruelties and lust of Caligula had done, for they had only been briefly endured. As in the case of his predecessor, assassination was attempted. Next followed conspiracy after conspiracy of sustained malignity, and in remoter parts of the Empire, civil war. One such outbreak, viz. that in Dalmatia k, may have brought under the Apostle's eye some of those hopeless features of social heathenism at which he sometimes glances. It was perhaps a distinction of Claudius, that his misrule and crime deeply infected the provinces, being in nowise concentrated in Rome. Attention was, as is not unusual, diverted from k Suetonius, Claud. standing 189 the moral ruin to the material progress which was conspicuous on every hand. Great works begun in notwithprevious reigns, aqueducts, harbours, roads, were material urged with zeal; but there was everywhere a still progress. more steady social debasement going on side by side with this display. Forms of luxury became more and more revolting, and the population of intoxicated Rome crowded periodically to the forum and the circus, as if to defy all the sacredness of humanity and bid adieu to the remaining dignity of life. It was, in fact, a great realm of moral death that Claudius himself now found that he was ruling over; and the poor gladiators' wild words became in bitter truth the fit greeting from such a people to such a prince-Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant.' But Claudius too passed away, murdered at length Times of by his wife; and was succeeded by his adopted son Nero. Nero's reign coincided with that eventful part of S. Paul's life which began with his residence at Ephesus, and ended with his martyrdom. Let us mark now the moral position. The same historians inform us still as to the facts 1. Nero. Judaism, we first note, had entered on its closing Closing period of period in Palestine. S. Paul's former master, the Judaism. gentle and reverenced Gamaliel, having given place to the energetic Simon, zealots arose everywhere, and all Jewry was at intermittent war within itself. From the third year of Nero, the tyrannical Felix was governor of Judæa, and he continued to be its scourge till the time of S. Paul's removal to 1 Condensed in Sulpicius Severus, Biblio. Max. vi. 325. 20, 24, 40. οὕτως Rome. Up to this period Christians had been en1 Cor. vii. couraged by the Apostle to remain in the position they had hitherto occupied, accepting with a certain (See App. reserve the social system around them m. But there seemed no longer any such remaining resting-place. The confusion was growing every hour. μένειν. in loco.) Nero's own career an the times. The times of Nero may be epitomized in his own story. Human nature, even in its most sensual mood, shudders at what the heathen historian unveils ". Murder, with cruelties that had become to Nero a joy; incest, with debaucheries of the most sickening foulness; matricide of consummate treachery and boldness; and death inflicted at last in terror by his own hand. Such is the summary of the life epitome of of the last, and most loved, of the family of Cæsar; and it is a picture of his age. It is too true, that even the deepest crimes of Nero were connived at, if not allowed, by the self-possessed philosopher who had been his preceptor. But the guilty compliances of Seneca did not screen him from the ferocity of his imperial pupil; and his savage fate was not without justice, though it almost provokes the question, whether the very shadow of virtue had not at length gone from among men? For there then swept on a bewildering series of almost enigmas of crime-slaughters of nobles, conflagrations of the great city, and a remorseless levity in exterminating anything that apparently aimed at all at goodness. And the Roman populace sympathized with even this at last. m Lect. III. pp. 95, 96. n Ann. xiv. 2. • See the Mors Neronis, and H. Savile's treatise. VI.] S. PAUL'S DESCRIPTION OF THE TIMES. 191 description I-4. And the goal was reached: the warnings of the discourse on Olivet were accomplished. The great burning of Rome shook everything. The transition from the old dispensation to the new was no longer postponed. It was this that S. Paul saw S. Paul's when he now wrote to Timothy of the last times,' of them. 'the perilous days' that had opened on them. Times' they were, as he vividly expresses it, all self, and 2 Tim. iii. avarice, and growing insolence and pride;' times of 'blasphemy, irreverence, and heartlessness; of unnatural impurity and even contempt of virtue;' times when the eagerness for all indulgence had become a very delirium of evil'-they are S. Paul's words that we are thus carefully rendering and yet they were times of incorrigible superstitions, and inextinguishable idolatries, in which no true sense of God or conscience seemed any longer to remain. Such were the last days' of the prophecy, the very 'peril' of Humanity. It seemed as though the secret presence of good, the pervading Gospel of God, had exasperated the powers of evil, and that the energy of unnatural evil had no less called up the faith and courage of the sons of God. II. II. S. Paul, contemplating now these dark times that had come, and had been ushered in by the outward portents P foretold by Christ, looked with Apostolic anxiety on all the Churches. Questions New which were now at the very doors, were so distant, the times as to be scarcely thought of as questions a few years since; and especially those which affected the pre P Tacitus, xii. 43; Pliny, ii. 31; Dion Cass. 60. features of in respect of Judaism. |