ned unto me; that is Paul's minimising euphemism
for the grim realities of imprisonment, or perhaps for some recent
ominous turns in his circumstances. To him they are not worth dwelling
on further, nor is their personal incidence worth taking into account;
the only thing which is important is to say how these things have
affected his life's work. It is enough for him, and he believes that it
will be enough even for his loving friends at Philippi to know that,
instead of their being as they might have feared, and as he sometimes
when he was faithless expected, hindrances to his work, they have turned
out rather to 'the furtherance of the gospel.' Whether he has been
comfortable or not is a matter of very small importance, the main thing
is that Christ's work has been helped, and then he goes on to tell two
ways in which his imprisonment had conduced to this end.

'My bonds became manifest in Christ.' It has been clearly shown why I
was a prisoner; all the Praetorian guard had learned what Paul was there
for. We know from Acts that he was 'suffered to abide by himself with
the soldier that kept him.' He has no word to say of the torture of
compulsory association, night and day, with the rude legionaries, or of
the horrors of such a presence in his sweetest, sacredest moments of
communion with his Lord. These are all swallowed up in the thought as
they were in the fact, that each new guard as he came to sit there
beside Paul was a new hearer, and that by this time he must have told
the story of Christ and His love to nearly the whole corps. That is a
grand and wonderful picture of passionate earnestness and absorbed
concentration in one pursuit. Something of the same sort is in all
pursuits, the condition of success and the sure result of real interest.
We have all to be specialists if we would succeed in any calling. The
river that spreads wide flows slow, and if it is to have a scour in its
current it must be kept between high banks. We have to bring ourselves
to a point and to see that the point is red-hot if we mean to bore with
it. If our limitations are simply enforced by circumstances, they may be
maiming, but if they come of clear insight and free choice of worthy
ends, they are noble. The artist, the scholar, the craftsman, all need
to take for their motto 'This one thing I do.' I suppose that a man
would not be able to make a good button unless he confined himself to
button-making. We see round us abundant exampl