168 nORM PALTHNJJ. 



The epistle to the Thessalonians speaks ot" tlie apostle's con 

 duct in that city upon, "his first entrance in unto them,'" 

 which the history informs us was in the course of his first 

 visit to the peninsula of Greece 



As St. Paul tells the Philippians, that "no church com- 

 municated with him, as concerning giving- and receiving, 

 but they only," he could not, consistently with the truth of 

 this declaration, have received any thing from the neighbor- 

 ing church of Thessaloniea. What thus appears by general 

 implication in an epistle to another church, when he writes 

 to the Thessalonians themselves, is noticed expressly and 

 particularly : " Neither did we eat any man's bread for 

 naught ; but wrought night and day, that we might not be 

 chargeable to any of you." 



The texts here cited further also exhibit a mark of con- 

 formity with what St. Paul is made to say of himself in the 

 Acts of the Apostles, The apostle not only reminds the 

 Thessalonians that he had not been chargeable to any of 

 them, but he states likewise the motive which dictated thii: 

 reserve : "Not because v/e have not power, but to make our- 

 selves an ensample unto you to follow us." Chap. 3 : 9. 

 This conduct, and what is much more precise, the end 

 which he had in view by it, was the very same as that 

 which the history attributes to St. Paul in a discourse which 

 it represents him to have addressed to the elders of the 

 church of Ephesus : "Yea, ye yourselves know, that these 

 hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that 

 were v/ith me. I have shoiccd you all things, how that so 

 laboring ye ought to siqjj^ort the iceakr Acts 20 : 34. The 

 sentiment in the epistle and in the speech is in both parts 

 of it so much alike, and yet the words which convey it show 

 so little of imitation or even of resemblance, that the agree- 

 ment cannot well be explained without supposing the speech 

 and the letter to have really proceeded from the same person. 



III. Our reader remembers the passage in the first 

 epistle to the Thessalonians, in which St. Paul spoke of the 



