expanded the vast theme indefinitely; he has only given them its
essentials. Then he makes his one personal reference, abruptly, as if
speaking about well-known circumstances; Timotheus (ver. 23) has been
released from prison, and is on his way to join the Writer, and the two
may hope to visit the Hebrews together again. Then follows the greeting
to the pastors through the Church; and then a message of love sent by
"those from Italy," that is to say, as the familiar idiom suggests,
brethren resident in Italy who send their greeting from it; an allusion
over which endless conjectures may gather but which must always remain
uncertain. The last word is the blessing of grace. "Grace"--the holy
effect upon the Church, and upon the saint, of "God for us" and "God in
us"--"be with you all."

* * * * *

We have thus followed this final passage to its end, but making, as the
reader will have seen, one great omission. The twentieth and
twenty-first verses stand by themselves, with such an elevation of their
own, with such a tranquil majesty of diction, with such a pregnant depth
of import, that I could not but reserve my brief comment on them to the
very last in these attempts to carry "Messages from the Epistle to the
Hebrews."

"Now the God of peace, who hath brought again from the dead the Shepherd
of the sheep, that great Shepherd, with blood of covenant eternal, even
our Lord Jesus--may He perfect you in all good unto the doing of His
will, doing in you that which is acceptable before Him, by means of
Jesus Christ; to whom be the glory to the ages of the ages. Amen."

Here is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the benedictory
prayers of the Bible. At every turn it sets before us truths of the
first order, woven into one wonderful texture. It presents to us our God
as "the God of peace," the God who has welcomed us to reconciliation and
is now and for ever reconciled; at peace with us and we with Him. It
sets full in view the supreme fact upon which that certainty reposes,
the Resurrection of His Christ, recorded here and only here in the long
Epistle, as the act and deed by which the Father sealed before the
universe His acceptance of the Son for us. It connects that Resurrection
with its mighty antecedent, the atoning Death, in words pregnant with
the truths characteristic of the Epistle; the Lord, the great Shepherd,
was "brought again from the dead" (the phrase is reminiscent o