tence in one way and
finished it in another. He sometimes began a sentence, and, going off
to another topic, never finished it at all. He is not always easy
reading. But these evidences of a free, spontaneous writing are only
occasional. The greater part of the letters of Paul are very clear,
simple, forceful statements of what he wishes to say.

Paul was not merely a Jew. He was a citizen of the great world of the
Roman empire. He had been brought up in a city where Greek culture and
civilization were very flourishing. His travels brought him into
contact with all the varying forms of Greek life. He visited Athens.
He made long stays in Corinth, where the commerce of the world crowded
the docks, and sailors and merchants from all parts of the great
empire were to be met in the streets. He lived for nearly three years
in the great city of Ephesus, where the courtiers of the governor of
the province, fresh from all the latest fashions of Rome, jostled the
priests of the great temple of Diana, one of the seven wonders of the
ancient world. Before the end of his life he was a prisoner in Rome
itself, the one city into which all the world poured its
representatives, where the fair-haired men from distant Britain in the
North met the dusky Ethiopian from Africa, and the Spaniard from the
Atlantic coast walked the street with the Scythian from the distant
East. Paul the prisoner lived for two whole years in his own hired
house, and had permission to receive all who came to him. During this
time, and for two years of previous imprisonment, he was in daily
contact with the Roman soldiery. This cosmopolitan man, with his wide
experience of many phases of Roman and Greek life, has dropped here
and there in his writings many pictures from the civilization with
which he was in touch. He used it to illustrate the Christian life.
The athlete in the theater gave him a picture of the earnest, eager
strife of the Christian. The soldier with his clanging armor suggested
to him the armor by which a Christian might meet his foes. The temples
that studded every great town taught him how the Christian was himself
the temple of the living God. Thus it happens that the most lasting
memorial, the most widely read allusions, to the great civilization of
Greece and Rome come from this wandering preacher of an obscure faith
who at last {415} was a despised prisoner at Rome. How it would have
astonished the crowds at Ephesus who shouted, "Great is