And first, as to their date. We cannot place the death of the Apostle Paul later than the year of our Lord 68. It may have been the year before; but as he is said by Jerome and Eusebius to have suffered under Nero, and Galba succeeded Nero in A.D. 68, it cannot have been afterwards. Again, we are safe in saying that, on the supposition of the latter date, these four Epistles had been written ten years before the Apostle Paul died; that is to say, they were all written before the end of A.D. 58. Festus probably succeeded Felix in the year of our Lord 60. But Paul had been two years a prisoner at Cæsarea, when Festus came into the province;[113] and these letters were written while he was still at liberty. We have, then, in St. Paul's Epistles, by which we mean always and exclusively these particular Epistles, undoubted genuine productions of about five-and-twenty years, or not much more, after the death of Jesus Christ. Making all due allowance for possible variation in the requisite dates, we are warranted in saying that the interval between the Crucifixion and the sending of these letters to their several destinations, did not exceed by more than two or three years the quarter of a century. It was certainly less than thirty years. The best way of appreciating such an interval as this is to take a corresponding period in our own lives. We have most of us a very clear recollection, probably, of events which happened in the year 1844 or 1845. The war in the Punjaub, and the Irish famine, which happened shortly afterwards, in 1846, and the great European events of 1848, some two years later, are fresh and vivid in the memory of every person who has arrived at middle age. To others yet more advanced, an interval of five-and-twenty or thirty years can effect but little in effacing events or circumstances which at the time produced a deep and powerful impression. They remember them as yesterday. So it must have been with many who were living at Corinth when the first Epistle to the Church there was written, and who read it on its arrival. But from this Epistle we know[114] that more than 250 persons who had seen the risen Jesus at one time were still alive and able to give their testimony to that effect. These persons, therefore, must have had as vivid a recollection of the circumstance referred to, as we ourselves have of the battles on the Sutlej. The Queen's coronation is to us an event farther in the background of the past than the vision of the crucified Jesus was to the 250 brethren who still survived.