Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/370

348 P A S--P A S the best proof of its success as a painting of bucolic life is that it is still a favourite, after a hundred and fifty years, among lowland reapers and milkmaids. With the Gentle Shepherd the chronicle of pastoral in England practically closes. This is at least the last per formance which can be described as a developed eclogue of the school of Tasso and Guarini. It is in Switzerland that we find the next important revival of pastoral pro perly so-called. The taste of the 18th century was very agreeably tickled by the religious idyls of Salomon Gessner, who died in 1787. His Daphnis und Phil/is and Der Tod Abel s were read and imitated throughout Europe. In German literature they left but little mark, but in France they were cleverly copied by Arnaud Berquin. A much more important pastoral writer is Jean Pierre Clovis de Florian, who began by imitating the Galatea of Cervantes, and continued with an original bucolic romance entitled Estelle. His eclogues had a great popularity, but it was said that they would be perfect if only there were sometimes wolves in the sheepfolds- The tone of Florian, as a matter of fact, is tame to fatuity. Neither in France nor in Germany did the shepherds and shepherdesses enjoy any considerable vogue. It has always been noticeable that pastoral is a form of literature which disappears before a breath of ridicule. Neither Gessner nor his follower Abbt were able to survive the laughter of Herder. Since Florian and Gessner there has been no reappearance of bucolic literature properly so-called. The whole spirit of romanticism was fatal to pastoral. Voss in his Luise and Goethe in Hermann und Dorothea replaced it by poetic scenes from homely and simple life. Half a century later something like pastoral reappeared in a totally new form, in the fashion for Dorfgeschichten. About 1830 the Danish poet S. S. Blicher, whose work con nects the grim studies of our own Crabbe with the milder modern strain of pastoral, began to publish his studies of out-door romance among the poor in Jutland. Immermann followed in Germany with his novel Der Oberhof in 1839. Auerbach, who has given to the 19th-century idyl its peculiar character, began to publish his Schwarzwcttder Dorffffschichten in 1843. Meanwhile George Sand was writing Jeanne in 1844, which was followed by La Mare au Diable and Francois le Ckampi, and in England dough produced in 1848 his remarkable long-vacation pastoral Tfte Bothie of Tober^na- Vuolich. It seems almost certain that these writers followed a simultaneous but independent impulse in this curious return to bucolic life, in which, however, in every case, the old tiresome conventionality and affectation of lady-like airs and graces were entirely dropped. This school of writers was presently enriched in Norway by Bjornson, whose Synnove tiolbakken was the first of an exquisite series of pastoral romances. But perhaps the best of all modern pastoral romances is Fritz Reuter s Ut mine Stromtid, written in the Mecklenburg dialect of German. In England the Dorsetshire poems of Mr Barnes and the Dorsetshire novels of Mr Hardy belong to the same class, which has finally been augmented by the ap pearance of Mr Munby s remarkable idyl of Dorothy. It will be noticed of course that all these recent productions have so much in common with the literature which is pro duced around them that they almost evade separate classifi cation. It is conceivable that some poet, in following the antiquarian tendency of the age, may enshrine his fancy once more in the five acts of a pure pastoral drama of the school of Tasso and Fletcher, but any great vitality in pastoral is hardly to be looked for in the future. (E. w. c.) PASTORAL EPISTLES, the name given to three epistles of the New Testament which bear the name of St Paul, and of which two are addressed to Timothy and one to Titus. The reason of their being grouped together is that they are marked off from the other Pauline epistles by certain common characteristics of language and subject- matter ; and the reason of their special name is that they consist almost exclusively of admonitions for the pastoral administration of Christian communities. None of the Pauline epistles have given greater ground for discussion, partly on account of the nature of their contents, partly on account of their philological peculiarities, and partly on account of their historical difficulties. 1. Contents. The Pastoral Epistles are chiefly distin guished from the other Pauline epistles by the prominence which they give to doctrine. From an objective point of view Christian teaching is "the word" (2 Tim. iv. 2), or " the word of God " (2 Tim. ii. 9), or " the doctrine of God our Saviour" (Tit. ii. 10), or "the truth" (1 Tim. iii. 15, 2 Tim. ii. 18; iv. 4; Tit. i. 14), or "the faith" (1 Tim. iv. 1). From the point of view of the individual it is "the knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. ii. 25; iii. 7); and Chris tians are those who " believe and know the truth " (1 Tim. iv. 3). It had existed long enough to have become perverted, and hence a stress is laid upon "sound " doctrine 1 (1 Tim. i. 10 ; 2 Tim. iv. 3 ; Tit. i. 9 ; ii. 1 ; in the plural, "sound words," 1 Tim. vi. 3 ; 2 Tim. i. 13). It had also tended to become dissociated from right conduct ; hence a stress is laid upon a " pure con science " (1 Tim. i. 19; iii. 8), and the end which it endeavours to attain is "love out of a pure heart, and out of a good conscience, and out of unfeigned faith " (1 Tim. i. 5). Consequently the "things that befit the sound doctrine " are moral attributes and duties (Tit. ii. 1 sq.), and the things that are "contrary to the sound doctrine " (1 Tim. i. 10) are moral vices. This combina tion of sound doctrine and right conduct is " piety " (do-e /Seia, 1 Tim. ii. 2; iii. 16; iv. 7, 8; vi. 5, 6, 11 ; 2 Tim. iii. 4) or "godliness " (tfeocre /^eia, 1 Tim. ii. 10); and sound doctrine is, in other words, "the doctrine," or "the truth, that is in harmony with piety" (1 Tim. vi. 3; Tit. i. 1). This doctrine or truth is regarded as a sacred deposit in the hands of the church or community (1 Tim. vi. 20; 2 Tim. i. 14), and is therefore a "common faith" (Tit. i. 4), of which the church is the "pillar and stay" (1 Tim. iii. 15). Its substance appears to be given in 1 Tim. iii. 16, which has been regarded, not without reason, as a rudimentary form of creed, and possibly part of a liturgical hymn. But the church is no longer identical with "them that are being saved" or "the elect"; it is compared to "a great house" which contains vessels " some unto honour, and some unto dishonour " (2 Tim. ii. 20). It is in other words no longer an ideal commu nity, the "Israel of God" (Gal. vi. 16), but a visible society. And, being such, its organization had come to be of more importance than before. But the nature of the organization to which these epistles point is an unsolved problem. The solution of that problem is attended by the preliminary question, which in the absence of collateral evidence cannot be definitely answered, of the relation in which Timothy and Titus are conceived to stand to the other or ordinary officers. According to a tradition mentioned by Eusebius, but for which he gives no definite authority, Timothy was " bishop " of Ephesus and Titus of Crete ; according to others their position was rather that of the later " metropolitans "; and some modern writers, accepting one or other of these views, take it as part of the proof that the epistles belong to a period of the 2d century in which the monarchical idea of the episcopate was struggling to assert itself. On the 1 Most commentators have omitted to note that the word rendered "sound" is a common expression of some of the later Greek philo sophers, denoting simply "true," e.g., Epictet., Dissert., i. 11, 28; ii. 15, 2.