tification uncontaminated by any mixture of of superstitious veneration for idols, no longer balancing between the fear of God and the fear of idols. Expel from your hearts every superstitious impurity.

Make room for us, receive us with a whole and not a divided heart. Not one of you can

For we have lived

be ill affected towards us. only to do you good, to build you up an uncorrupt community, and we have never had any sinister or selfish end to serve. To which of you have we discovered any other spirit, then the spirit of practical benevolence, purity, and disinterestedness?

If we use the language of severity and re- .. monstrance, it is not in the temper of a judge, who would condemn and chastise, but of a friend, who would reform and bless. For I repeat, ye are in our hearts; we are prepared to live and die with you, knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus, will raise up us also, and produce us at the last day together with you.

Great is my confidence in you, great my.. exultation on your account, you have given me ample encouragement. The measure of joy you have given me abundantly exceeds that of all my troubles. For when I arrived in .... Macedonia I was exceedingly distressed, my

spirits were depressed with a thousand anxieties, without was conflict, within was apprehension. But God, the resource and consolation of the .. humble, revived me and encouraged me on the arrival of Titus.

I allude not merely to his personal presence, .. my encouragement was to observe the spiritual excitement and confidence which your conduct had produced upon his mind, to hear him report the proofs ye had given him of strong attachment to me, of grief under my apprehended displeasure, of zeal to carry my wishes into effect, I was so much gratified by his report, that the anxiety in which he found me was turned into joy.

For if my letter grieved you, I do not re- .. pent, though I confess, that, after sending it I did begin to doubt, whether perhaps I had not been too severe, and I see plainly that it did grieve you, though seasonably.

I now rejoice, not that you have been grieved, .. but that reform has been the fruit of that grief. For your grief has been such as God sanctions, salutary and beneficial in its effects, so that my severity has done no harm.

I repent not, for such grief under rebuke as God approves works reform, whose fruit is salvation, a fruit to the production of which, we can never repent having contributed; while

the grief under rebuke usual in the world works an undue and unprofitable irritation of the selfish passions, the fruit of which is death. Your grief in the present instance has been. such as God approves, for behold what earnestness it wrought! How it girded up your loins! Nay but what redemption of character is there in all that Titus has reported to me of you! What indignation have you evinced against that offender, what fear of the consequences! What strong attachment to me! What vindicative zeal! All combining to give ample testimony, that you are free and uncontaminated, as a community in the affair I alluded to.

Truly, indeed, though my severity was.. levelled against the perpetrator of that iniquity; yet my purpose was more than personal. The perpetrator, and the sufferer, the incestuous son, and the injured parent were with me secondary objects; I wrote not to you as the apostle of individuals, but of your whole community. The letter was a written manifestation before God, of my earnestness and activity, addressed to you and on your account as a community, and I rejoice accordingly, to hear how clear as a community you now stand in that affair. Therefore the report of you, which .. Titus brought to me in my distress was cordially acceptable to my depressed spirits.

But on another account my joy was exceedingly encreased, viz. on account of the joy with which Titus was affected, for the zeal that animates him evidently burns stronger and brighter for what he has witnessed among you ; and if I have boasted to him a little of you, .. you have not given me cause to blush: but as all I have said to you of him was true, so my boasting of you to him is now borne out by the testimony of his own personal knowledge. He.. is accordingly affected by the remembrance of the spirit of obedience evinced by all of you, the respect, and veneration, with which you received him.

I rejoice therefore, that in every thing I have heard from Titus my confidence in you, is well supported.

You know that when I first visited Mace- .. donia, it was on being specially commanded by the spirit to leave Asia, and carry the glad tidings of salvation into that couutry. Therefore, though that salvation, those tidings of great joy, which we are God's ministers to promulgate throughout the world, are a gift to all mankind; yet with reference to the churches of Macedonia whither we were especially sent, and where I now witness such extraordinary effects of our ministry, as can be attributable only to the especial favor of God, the term

I call

gift has a particular appropriateness. your attention to the grace of God thus especially communicated to them, and thus especially blessed in its practical influence upou their hearts, as to a matter signally worthy of your most serious observance. Learn then, that,.. much as they are pressed down by affliction, the abundant joy and gratitude of this people for those glad tidings has overflowed, as it were, the bounds of their deep poverty,* so that they have gone beyond their narrow means, forgetting their own destitution in the wants of others, and coining their very hearts to relieve the holy.

I bear them witness, that coming forward .. voluntarily according to, and even beyond their power, and entreating of us with the utmost .. urgency the favor that they may participate, the grace or office of administering to the holy, entreating that we would receive them; they.. have given themselves to the Lord and to us, not partially and reservedly, as we apprehended, but, as if they thought, what they were do

I have here dared to vary from the received text without any manuscript authority, but the variation is so slight and natural, and appears to me to give so much perspicuity, to a very obscure passage, that I could not resist the temptation; it is only the substitution of τη κατα βαθος πτωχεια for ή κατα βαθεις πτωχεια, and the substitution of Bados for Bade; is warranted by manuscript and other authority.