thoughts and feelings were 'in the Lord Jesus.' So should our
purposes be. Our hopes should be derived from union with Him. They
should not be the play of our own fancy or imagination. They should be
held in submission to him, and ever with the limitation, 'Not as I will,
but as Thou wilt.' We should be trusting to Him to fulfil them. If thus
we hope, our hopes may lead us nearer to Jesus instead of tempting us
away from Him by delusive brightnesses. There is a religious use of hope
not only when it is directed to heavenly certainties, and 'enters within
the veil,' but even when occupied about earthly things. Spenser twice
paints for us the figure of Hope, one has always something of dread in
her blue eyes, the other, and the other only, leans on the anchor, and
'maketh not ashamed'; and her name is 'Hope in the Lord.'

II. The prisoner solitary among self-seeking men.

With wonderful self-surrender the Apostle thinks of his lack of
like-minded companions as being a reason for depriving himself of the
only like-minded one who was left with him. He felt that Timothy's
sympathetic soul would truly care for the Philippians' condition, and
would minister to it lovingly. He could rely that Timothy would have no
selfish by-ends to serve, but would seek the things of Jesus Christ. We
know too little of the circumstances of Paul's imprisonment to know how
he came to be thus lonely. In the other Epistles of the Captivity we
have mention of a considerable group of friends, many of whom would
certainly have been included in a list of the 'like-minded.' We hear,
for example, of Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, John Mark, Epaphras,
and Luke. What had become of them all we do not know. They were
evidently away on Christian service, somewhere or other, or some of them
perhaps had not yet arrived. At all events for some reason Paul was for
the time left alone but for Timothy. Not that there were no Christian
men in Rome, but of those who could have been sent on such an errand
there were none in whom love to Christ and care for His cause and flock
were strong enough to mark them as fit for it.

So then we have to take account of Paul's loneliness in addition to his
other sorrows, and we may well mark how calmly and uncomplainingly he
bears it. We are perpetually hearing complaints of isolation and the
difficulty of finding sympathy, or 'people who understand me.' That is
often the complaint of a morbid nature, or of one which has neve