venture to communicate the Gospel which he preached "privately," in a secret conference, to the chief apostles, who still guided it. The decree of the council or assembly of Acts xv., as it was but a partial assertion (valuable, indeed, as such, in the way of compromise and conciliation) of the principles which St. Paul preached, so was it but a hesitating, wavering approximation to the boldness with which Stephen had proclaimed that the "customs which Moses had delivered" were needless, and would pass away. (2) The work of those who were most conspicuous among the refugees is of special interest. Philip, Stephen's fellow-worker among the Seven, the only one of whose work we know anything, carries on his labours first among the hated Samaritans, with whom the Jews of Palestine "had no dealings;" is then sent to the Ethiopian proselyte; then to the port of Cæsarea, where he would be brought into constant contact with men of other races, and predominantly, of course, with Romans. His preaching must have become known there, and clearly prepared the way for the conversion, and yet more for the reception, of Cornelius. It would seem, indeed, to have been the method, one might almost say the policy, of Philip's work, to labour in a new field, upon which the Apostles, left to themselves, were not likely to have entered, and then to bring it before them as a fait accompli, which they could not hesitate to recognise as a divine work. (3) The notice of the church's mission-work, in Acts xi. 19, 20, has a special interest in this connexion. The majority of those who "were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen," travelled to Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, "preaching

the word to none but unto the Jews only." So far their work was simply a continuation of his, not an expansion. But "some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene,"-men, i.e., who had been brought into direct, close contact, which, if not of antagonism, must have been of intimate fellowship, with Stephen; and "they, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Greeks,* preaching the Lord Jesus." That work was the first true assertion of the church's catholicity. Those wandering refugees were the first evangelists of the Gentiles. It may be, for the chronology is left unfixed, that their work preceded even the conversion of Cornelius; but, even if it were after it in order of time, it was not like that, apparently personal and exceptional, but wide and systematic. Through these unknown, unnamed teachers, † the disciples of Stephen, the work was done in earnest, for which he had offered up his life. Upon those "prophets" of the New Testament, no less than upon the "Apostles" themselves, the Church of Christ was to be built. (4) No study of St. Paul's character can be complete which fails to take into account the impression left on his life and teaching by the words and by the martyrdom of Stephen. True, not even they availed to slake the white heat of the persecuting spirit. He "kicked against the pricks" now, and resisted the promptings of pity and sympathy, perhaps also the latent half-conviction

* The Authorised Version gives "Grecians," i.e., Hellenistic Jews, but the balance of MSS. authority is clearly in favour of "Greeks" (= Gentiles). The sense, indeed, absolutely requires it.

† I have elsewhere (see the Study on SIMON OF CYRENE in this volume) given my reasons for believing that that disciple may have been one of them. Andronicus and Junia (or Junias) may also be thought of. And this may be the explanation of St. Paul's words about them as "of note among the Apostles."

that he was fighting against God, as he had resisted the "leadings" of the divine will, manifested in the conversion of Barnabas and the warnings of Gamaliel. Nothing less than the revelation to his own soul of that Jesus whom he was persecuting, could lead him to the knowledge of the truth. But when once led, the remembrance of that face, which had seemed "as it had been the face of an angel," must have been ever present with him, humbling him to the dust in self-abasement, making him feel as the "chief" of sinners, "not meet to be called an Apostle;" and yet, for that very reason, doing the work of an Apostle more abundantly than all others, and that, too, in the very spirit in which Stephen would have done it. Every accusation brought against the proto-martyr was afterwards brought against him. Every truth which Stephen had preached came from his lips, developed and completed. Echoes, even, of the martyr's very words and phrases meet us again and again in the Epistles of St. Paul. If it be true that we owe the Apostle to the prayers of the martyr, it is also true that the martyr lived again in the Apostle. Men might almost have said of him, "It is Stephen risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do show forth themselves in him." If it be the law of her growth, that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” it was in the highest degree true here that the blood of the proto-martyr was as the "good seed," destined to bring forth a hundredfold in the harvest of the Church Universal.

* The examination of these parallelisms would be interesting, but I have not here time to go into detail. Comp., as the most striking instances, Acts vii. 48, with St. Paul's words at Athens (Acts xvii. 24); and Acts vii. 53, with Gal. iii. 19.

M

III.

MANAEN.

ANAEN, who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch."* This is the one solitary record which the history of the Apostolic Church gives us of this man, and any attempt to go further must be in great measure conjectural. And yet it is hardly possible for one who reads with any thought, not to find a strange half-melancholy interest in this juxtaposition of the names of two men whose characters and lives must have been so strikingly contrasted. At the very time when the one foster-brother is mentioned by St. Luke, as prominent among the prophets and teachers of Antioch who ministered to the Lord, and sent out Paul and Barnabas to their first great mission among the heathen, the other was living in a dishonoured exile at Lyons, in the Roman province of Gaul,† in company with the temptress whose influence over him had been so fatal, with a dark past to look back upon, and, so far as we know, a hopeless future. Taken by itself, this fact alone suggests the

*Acts xiii. 1.

+ Joseph. Ant. xviii. 8, 2. In the same writer's "History of the Jewish War," ii. 9, 6, Spain is given as the place of his exile; and this makes it probable that he ended his days in the more distant province.

thought which the daily experience of life but too often brings before us, that the lives of men may begin in the closest companionship, under as nearly as possible the same conditions, and yet that the end of one shall be peace, and holiness, and an inheritance incorruptible, and that of the other shame, and sorrow, and confusion. There is a self-determining power in the will which may over-ride all outward influences for good or evil, which may receive or resist even the grace of God. "The one is taken, and the other left;" this is often all that we can know or say. We see the diverging issues of life or death; the judgments of God which award them are often to us as a "" great deep," and we cannot trace

the intermediate stages.

But in this case, the study of the history of the time, and more particularly of the Gospel of St. Luke, suggests many pregnant hints, and helps us, I believe, by combinations and coincidences, not without interest in themselves, and tending, as all such coincidences do, to a stronger and more settled faith, to fill up the outline. We shall be able, if I mistake not, with as much probability as circumstantial evidence admits of, to obtain a fairly distinct picture of the life of the foster-brother of the tetrarch.

1. Most commentators have noticed the fact, that the name Manaen was connected with an earlier stage of the history of the Herodian dynasty. When Herod the Great was yet a boy, and his father, Antipater the Idumean, pushing himself into power under Hyrcanus, the last prince of the Asmonæan, or Maccabee line of priestly rulers, there lived an Essene who bore that name.* Rigorous, ascetic, given to

* The narrative is given by Josephus, Antiq. xv. 10, 5.