d even heard him gladly, as
Herod had listened to the Baptist.

170. Paul was not kept in close confinement; he had at least the range
of the barracks in which he was detained. There we can imagine him
pacing the ramparts on the edge of the Mediterranean, and gazing
wistfully across the blue waters in the direction of Macedonia, Achaia
and Ephesus, where his spiritual children were pining for him or
perhaps encountering dangers in which they sorely needed his presence.

It was a mysterious providence which thus arrested his energies and
condemned the ardent worker to inactivity. Yet we can see now the
reason for it. Paul was needing rest. After twenty years of incessant
evangelization he required leisure to garner the harvest of experience.
During all that time he had been preaching that view of the gospel
which at the beginning of his Christian career he had thought out,
under the influence of the revealing Spirit, in the solitudes of
Arabia. But he had now reached a stage when, with leisure to think, he
might penetrate into more recondite regions of the truth as it is in
Jesus. And it was so important that he should have this leisure that,
in order to secure it. God even permitted him to be shut up in prison.

171. Paul's Later Gospel.--During these two years he wrote nothing; it
was a time of internal mental activity and silent progress. But, when
he began to write again, the results of it were at once discernible.
The Epistles written after this imprisonment have a mellower tone and
set forth a profounder view of doctrine than his earlier writings.
There is no contradiction, indeed, or inconsistency between his earlier
and later views: in Ephesians and Colossians he builds on the broad
foundations laid in Romans and Galatians. But the superstructure is
loftier and more imposing. He dwells less on the work of Christ and
more on His person; less on the justification of the sinner and more on
the sanctification of the saint.

In the gospel revealed to him in Arabia he had set Christ forth as
dominating mundane history, and shown His first coming to be the point
toward which the destinies of Jews and Gentiles had been tending. In
the gospel revealed to him at Caesarea the point of view is
extra-mundane: Christ is represented as the reason for the creation of
all things, and as the Lord of angels and of worlds, to whose second
coming the vast procession of the universe is moving forward--of whom,
and