make you
perfect, establish, strengthen, settle you._ That is the wish
wherewith he commits them to God--God, who alone bestows grace, and
not a single grace, but all grace richly in one, who has called you
through Christ that ye might have Eternal glory, not through any
desert of your own, but for Christ's sake; if ye have Him, ye have
through faith, without merit of yours, Eternal glory and salvation,
which will prepare you, that you may be strong, grow, and stand, and
that ye may be able to accomplish much; and to this end He will
strengthen and establish you, that ye may be able to bear and suffer
all.

V. 11. _To him be praise and power for ever and ever, Amen._ Praise
is the sacrifice that we as Christians should offer up to God. He
only adds, in conclusion:

V. 12. _By your faithful brother Silvanus, (as I suppose), have I
written briefly, to admonish and manifest that this is the true grace
of God wherein ye stand._ Although I well know (he would say) that
you have heard this before and know it well, so that you do not need
that I should teach it unto you, yet have I written this to you (as
those that are truly Apostles should do), that I might also admonish
you that you abide therein, since you are tried and exercised; and
you are not to imagine that I preach any otherwise than as you have
already heard.

V. 13. _The Church that is at Babylon greets you._ Such was the
practice of writing in the Epistles the farewell. _The Church at
Babylon_, says he, _greets you_. I suppose, but am not fully
confident, that he here meant Rome, for it has been generally
supposed that the Epistle was written from Rome. Still, there were
two Babylons,--one in Chaldea, the other in Egypt, which is now Al
Cair. But Rome is not called Babylon, except figuratively, in the
sense, as was said above, of thronging corruption. Thus, Babel means,
in the Hebrew, a confusion. So, perhaps, he has called Rome a
confusion, or Babel, since _there_ was also such disorderly conduct,
and a confused multitude of all kinds of shameful practices and
vices; and whatever in the whole world was scandalous had flown
together there. In this same, he says, is a church gathered of such
as are Christians, who greet you. But I will readily leave every one
to hold it as he will, for no importance attaches to it.

_My son, Marcus, also._ Some say that he here means Mark, the
Evangelist, and calls him his son, not literally, but
spiritually,--as Pa