NOTES ON THE INTERNATIONAL LESSON.
At the earliest opportunity which offered, St. Paul, and such other prisoners as were waiting the result of an appeal, were dispatched to Italy under the charge of Julius, a centurion of an Augustan cohort. Since Festus had arrived in Palestine towards the end of June, it must now have been late in August, and the time was rapidly drawing on in which ancient navigation was closed for the year. Every day made the weather more uncertain and the voyage more perilous, and since time was pressing, Julius, to whom the commission was intrusted, embarked his prisoners on board a coasting merchantman of the Mysian town of Adramyttium. St. Paul was spared one at least of the circumstances which would have weighed most heavily on his spirits—he was not alone. Luke and Aristarchus accompanied him, and, whether such had been their original intention or not, both were at any rate driven by stress of circumstances to remain with him during a great part of his Roman imprisonment. They, no doubt, were passengers, not prisoners, and they must either have paid their own expenses, or have been provided with money for that purpose by Christians, who knew how necessary was some attendance for one so stricken with personal infirmities as their illustrious apostle. The voyage began happily and prosperously, the leading westerly wind was so far favorable that the day after they started they had accomplished the sixty-seven miles which lay between them and the harbor of Sidon. There they touched, and Julius was so indulgently disposed towards Paul that he gave him leave to land and see his friends, who formed the little Christian community of that place. The expression used by St. Luke that Julius allowed him to go to his friends and "be cared for," seems to imply that even during that one day's voyage he had suffered either from sea-sickness or from general infirmity. The day at Sidon was the one happy interlude which was to prepare him for many anxious, miserable, and storm-tossed weeks. For from that day forward the entire voyage became a succession of delays and accidents, which, after two months of storm and danger, culminated in hopeless shipwreck. They had not long passed Cape Matala, of Crete, when a tempestuous typhoon—such as often in those latitudes succeeds a brief spell of the south wind—burst down from the Cretan Ida, and smote with terrible fury on the hapless vessel. The ancient name of this "Levanter," as it is now called, was probably Euroaquilo, a name which exactly describes its direction, since we see from St. Luke's subsequent remarks that it must have been an east-north-easter, which, indeed, continued to blow during the remainder of their voyage. From the first moment that this fatal blast rushed down from the hills and seized the wheat-ship in its grasp the condition of the vessel was practically hopeless. It was utterly impossible for her—it would have been impossible for the finest made vessel—to "look the wind in the face." The suddenness and fury of the blow left the sailors not one moment to furl the mainsail, or to do anything but leave the ship to be driven madly forward before the gale, until, after a fearful run of twenty-three miles, they neared the little island of Clauda, and ran in under its lee. The ships of the ancients had one main-mast and one mainsail; any other masts or rigging were comparatively small and insignificant. Hence the strain upon the vessel from the leverage of the mast was terrific, and it was impossible that the Alexandrian ship, however stoutly built, should have scudded with her huge sail set in the grasp of a typhoon, without her timbers starting. It is evident that she had already sprung a serious leak. The captain therefore gave orders at once to hoist the boat on board, and so secure it from being staved in. Then the sailors proceeded to adopt the rough and clumsy method in use among the ancients to keep a vessel together. This consisted in undergirding, or, to use the modern and technical term for a practice which is now but rarely resorted to, in "frapping" it, by passing stout hawsers several times under the prow, and tying them as tightly as possible round the middle of the vessel. They had thus met the two most pressing dangers, but a third remained. There was no place into which they could run for shelter, nor could they long avail themselves of the partial protection which they derived from the weather-shore of the little island, and they knew too well that the wind was driving them straight towards the Goodwin Sands of the Mediterranean—the dreaded bay of the Greater Syrtis. There was only one way to save themselves, which was by rounding the prow of the vessel on the starboard tack as near to the wind as possible, to send down the topsail and cordage, lower the ponderous yard to such a height as would leave enough of the huge mainsail to steady the vessel, set the artemo, or storm-sail, and so—having made all as snug as their circumstances permitted—let her drift on, broadside to leeward, at the mercy of wind and wave. This they did, and so ended the miserable day, which had begun with such soft breezes and presumptuous hopes. All night long the storm blew, and, in spite of the undergirding, the vessel183still leaked. Next day, therefore, they kept throwing over from time to time everything that could possibly be spared to lighten the ship; but even this was insufficient. The next night brought no relief; the vessel still leaked and leaked; and all labor at the pumps was in vain. The fate which most commonly befell ancient vessels—that of foundering at sea—was obviously imminent. A gloomy apathy began to settle more and more upon those helpless three hundred souls. There were no means of cooking; no fire could be lighted; the caboose and utensils must long ago have been washed overboard; the provisions had probably been spoiled and sodden by the waves that broke over the ship; indeed, with death staring them in the face, no one cared to eat. They were famishing wretches in a fast-sinking ship, drifting, with hopes that diminished day by day, to what they regarded as an awful and a certain death. But in that desperate crisis one man retained his calmness and courage. It was Paul the prisoner, probably in physical health the weakest, and the greatest sufferer of them all. But it is in such moments that the courage of the noblest souls shines with the purest luster, and the soul of Paul was inwardly enlightened. As he prayed in all the peacefulness of a blameless conscience, it was revealed to him that God would fulfill the promised destiny, which was to lead him to Rome, and that, with the preservation of his own life, God would also grant to him the lives of those unhappy sufferers, for whom, all unworthy as some of them soon proved to be, his human heart yearned with pity. While the rest were abandoning themselves to despair, Paul stood forth on the deck, and after gently reproaching them with having rejected the advice which would have saved them from all that buffeting and loss, he bade them cheer up, for though the ship should be lost, and they should be wrecked on some island, not one of them should lose his life. For they knew that he was a prisoner who had appealed to Cæsar; and that night an angel of the God, whose child and servant he was, had stood by him, and not only assured him that he should stand before Cæsar, but also that God had, as a sign of his grace, granted him the lives of all on board. He bade them, therefore, to cheer up, and to share his own conviction that the vision should come true.—Farrar's Life of Paul.