[BO llORM PAULINiE. 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE SECOND EPISTLE TO TIMOTHIJ 



1 It was the uniform tradition of the primitive church, 

 that St. Paul visited Rome twice, and tAvice there suffered 

 imprisonment ; and that he was put to death at Rome at 

 the conclusion of his second imprisonment. This opinion 

 concerning St. Paul's two journeys to Rome is confirmed hy 

 a great variety of hints and allusions in the epistle hefore us, 

 compared with v/hat fell from the apostle's pen in other let- 

 ters purporting to have been written from Rome. That our 

 present epistle was written while St. Paul was a priso?ter, 

 is distinctly intimated by the eighth verse of the first chap- 

 ter : " Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our 

 Lord, nor of me his prisoner." And while he was a prisoner 

 at Rome, by the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of the 

 same chapter : "The Lord give mercy unto the house of 

 Onesiphorus ; for he oft refreshed me, and was not ashamed 

 of my chain : but, when he was in Rome, he sought me out 

 very diligently, and found me." Since it appears from the 

 former quotation that St. Paul wrote this epistle in confine- 

 ment, it will hardly admit of doubt that the word chai?t, in 

 the latter quotation, refers to that confinem-ent — the chain 

 by which he was then bound, the custody in which he was 

 the?i kept. And if the word " chain " designate the author's 

 confinement at the time of writing the epistle, the next words 

 determine it to have been written from Rome : " He was net 

 ashamed of my chain : but, when he was in Rome, he sought 

 me out very diligently." Now that it was not written dur- 

 ing the apostle's first imprisonment at Rome, or during the 

 lame imprisonment in which the epistles to the Ephesian* 

 the Colossians, the Philippians, and Philemon were written, 

 may be gathered, with considerable evidence, from a compar- 

 ison of these several epistles with the present. 



1 In the former epistles, the author confidently looked 



