But it is only by forgetting ourselves that we find ourselves; only by losing our life that we find it. "God's steward" must be ready to sink every personal interest in the interests of the great Employer. He has nothing of his own. He deals with his Master's goods, and must deal with them in his Master's way. He who labours in this spirit will one day be rewarded by the Divine voice of welcome: "Well done, good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will set thee over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." FOOTNOTES: [72] It is worth while here to repeat the caution that the Apostle's language by no means implies that the "elder" or "bishop" _must_ be a married man with children. But it implies that he will generally be such; and in appointing him, the character of his family must be carefully considered. CHAPTER XX. _CHRISTIANITY AND UNCHRISTIAN LITERATURE._ "One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons. This testimony is true. For which cause reprove them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith."--TITUS i. 12, 13. The hexameter verse which St. Paul here cites from the Cretan poet Epimenides is one of three quotations from profane literature which are made by St. Paul. Of the other two, one occurs in 1 Cor. xv. 33, "Evil communications corrupt good manners"; and the other in the Apostle's speech on the Areopagus at Athens, as recorded in the Acts (xvii. 28): "For we are also his offspring." They cannot be relied upon as sufficient to prove that St. Paul was well read in classical literature, any more than the quoting of a hackneyed line from Shakespeare, from Byron, and from Tennyson, would prove that an English writer was well acquainted with English literature. It may have been the case that St. Paul knew a great deal of Greek classical literature, but these three quotations, from Epimenides, from some Greek tragedian, and from Cleanthes or Aratus, do not at all prove the point. In all three cases the source of the quotation is not certain. In the one before us the Apostle no doubt tells us that he is quoting a Cretan "prophet," and therefore quotes the line as coming from Epimenides. But a man may know that "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" is Shakespeare, without having read a single play. And we are quite uncertain whether St. Paul had even seen the poem of Epimenides on Oracles in which the line which he here quotes occurs. The iambic which he quotes in the letter to the Corinthians, although originally in some Greek play (perhaps of Euripides or Menander), had passed into a proverb, and proves even less than the line from Epimenides that St. Paul knew the work in which it occurred. The half-line which is given in his speech at Athens, stating the Divine parentage of mankind, may have come from a variety of sources: but it is not improbable that the Apostle had read