could be calculated on as reasonably certain; they entered on long journeys, but regarded them as open to

modification or even frustration; in indicating their plans they knew that they would be re garded by others

as attempting something great and strange. But St. Paul's method and language seem to show clearly that

such journeys as he contemplated were looked on as quite natural and usual by those to whom he spoke or

wrote. He could go off from Greece or Macedonia to Palestine, and reckoned with practical certainty on

being in Jerusalem in time for a feast day not far distant.

It is the same with others: Aquila and Priscilla, Apollos, Silas, Epaphroditus, Timothy, etc., move back and

forward, and are now found in one city, now in another far distant. Unobservant of this characteristic, some

writers have argued that Romans 16:3 could not have been addressed to correspondents who lived in Rome,

because Aquila and Priscilla, who were in Ephesus not long before the Epistle was written, are there spoken

of as living among those correspondents. Such an argument could not be used by people who had fully

understood that independence of mere local trammels and connections, and quite a marvellous freedom in

locomotion, are a strongly marked feature of the early Church. That argument is one of the smallest errors

into which this false prepossession has led may scholars.

Communication by letter supplemented mere travelling. Such communication is the greatest factor in the

developing of the Church; it kept alive the interest of the Christian congregations in one another, and

strengthened their mutual affection by giving frequent opportunity of expressing it; it prevented the

strenuous activity of the widely scattered local Churches from being concentrated on purely local matters

and so degenerating into absorption in their own immediate surroundings. Thus it bound together all the

Provincial Churches in the one Universal Church. The Christian letters contained the saving power of the

Church; and in its epistolary correspondence flowed its life -blood. The present writer has elsewhere

attempted to show that the early Bishops derived their importance in great degree from their position as

representatives of the several congregations in their relations with one another, charged with the duty of

hospitality to travellers and the maintenance of correspondence, since through this position they became

the guardians of the unity of the Universal Church and the channels through which its life -blood flowed.

The one condition which was needed to develop epistolary correspondence to a very much greater extent in

the Roman Empire was a regular postal service. It seems a remarkable fact that the Roman Imperial

government, keenly desirous as it was of encouraging and strengthening the common feeling and bond of

unity between different parts of the Empire, never seems to have thought of establishing a general postal

service within its dominions. Augustus established an Imperial service, which was maintained throughout

subsequent Roman times; but it was strictly confined to Imperial and official business, and was little more

than a system of special Emperor's messengers on a great scale. The consequence of this defect was that

every gre at organisation or trading company had to create a special postal service for itself; and private

corespondents, if not wealthy enough to send their own slaves as letter-carriers, had to trust to accidental

opportunities for transmitting their letters.

The failure of the Imperial government to recognise how much its own aims and schemes would have been

aided by facilitating communication through the Empire was connected with one of the greatest defects of

the Imperial administration. It never learned that the strength and permanence of a nation and of its

government are dependent on the education and character of the people: it never attempted to educate the

people, but only to feed and amuse them. The Christian Church, which gradually established itself as a rival

organisation, did by its own efforts what the Imperial government aimed at doing for the nation, and

succeeded better, because it taught people to think for themselves, to govern themselves, and to maintain

their own union by their own exertions. It seized those two great facts of the Roman world, travelling and

letter-writing, and turned them to its own purposes. The former, on its purely material side, it could only

accept: the latter it developed to new forms as an ideal and spiritual instrument.