which
discredits the servant's words as if the Master was not committed to
them. "If they have kept My saying, they will keep yours also."

In a passage like the present therefore we feel the two elements or
aspects, the human and the divine, each real and powerful, and both
working in perfect harmony. The human is there, not in the least as a
necessary element of error; rather as an element of delicate and
beautiful truth, the truth of justest thought and feeling. The divine
is there, as the message from Christ Himself through His servant;
sacred, authoritative, binding on belief, giving solid ground for the
soul's repose. We study here St Paul's watchful and unselfish
remembrance of the Philippians, in the case of Timothy and his mission,
and still more in that of Epaphroditus. We recognize of course the
actings of a noble human heart, and we are right to do so. But we find
more than this; we see JESUS CHRIST informing us, in the concrete
example of His servant, exactly how it behoves us, as His servants, to
feel and act under our responsibilities. St Paul's thought and action
is "written for our learning." True, the "learning" comes not as a
mere code, or lecture. It takes the form of a living experience,
recorded, in the course of correspondence, by the man who is going
through it. But the man is a vehicle of revelation. He writes about
himself; but his Master is behind him, and is taking care that his
whole thought shall be the well-adjusted conveyance of a thought
greater than his own.

As we come to the incidental details of the passage, we find the same
double aspect of Scripture everywhere. St Paul speaks about people who
are "seeking their own interests, and not the interests of Jesus
Christ" (ver. 21). He says this quite naturally, and with a reference
quite local and in detail. But on the other side the words are an
oracle; they convey the message of the Master of His people; they
implicitly claim _on His part_ that we shall seek not our own
interests, but His. Again, quite in passing, the Apostle speaks of
this or that "hope" or "trust" as being formed "in the Lord." He does
so with no conscious dogmatic purpose, surely; it is because it comes
as naturally to him to do it as for an ordinary correspondent to say
that he hopes to do this or that "if all goes well." But in the
epistolary _Scripture_ these brief phrases have another side; they are
authority and oracle; they convey the mind of