Let me have your cooperation in prayer, so that many a soul may render thanks to him on my behalf for the boon which many have been the means of him bestowing on myself.

For if I pain you, then who is to give me pleasure? None but the very people I am paining!

For I wrote you in sore distress and misery of heart, with many a tear ??not to pain you but to convince you of my love, my special love for you.

If a certain individual has been causing pain, he has been causing pain not so much to me as to all of you ??at anyrate (for I am not going to overstate the case) to a section of you.

If you forgive the man, I forgive him too; anything I had to forgive him has been forgiven in the presence of Christ for your sakes,

you make it obvious that you are a letter of Christ which I have been employed to inscribe, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart.

Yes, and by more than his arrival, by the comfort which you had been to him; for he gave me such a report of how you longed for me, how sorry you were, and how eagerly you took my part, that it added to my delight.

In fact, if I did pain you by that letter, I do not regret it. I did regret it when I discovered that my letter had pained you even for the time being,

but I am glad now ??not glad that you were pained but glad that your pain induced you to repent. For you were pained as God meant you to be pained, and so you got no harm from what I did;

the pain God is allowed to guide ends in a saving repentance never to be regretted, whereas the world's pain ends in death.

See what this pain divine has done for you, how serious it has made you, how keen to clear yourselves, how indignant, how alarmed, how eager for me, how determined, how relentless! You have shown in every way that you were honest in the business.

I told him of my pride in you, and I have not been disappointed. No, just as all I have had to say to you has been true, so all I said about you to Titus, all my pride in you, has also proved true.

besides, he has been appointed by the churches to travel with me on the business of administering this fund to the glory of the Lord. His appointment has my full consent,

I know how willing you are, I am proud of it, I have boasted of you to the Macedonians: "Achaia," I tell them, "was all ready last year." And your zeal has been a stimulus to the majority of them.

At the same time I am sending these brothers just in case my pride in you should prove an empty boast in this particular instance; I want you to be "all ready," as I have been telling them that you would be,

in case any Macedonians accompany me and find you are not ready ??which would make me (not to speak of yourselves) ashamed of having been so sure.

Ministers of Christ? yes perhaps, but not as much as I am (I am mad to talk like this!), with all my labours, with all my lashes, with all my time in prison ??a record longer far than theirs. I have been often at the point of death;

three times I have been beaten by the Romans, once pelted with stones, three times shipwrecked, adrift at sea for a whole night and day;

I have been often on my travels, I have been in danger from rivers and robbers, in danger from Jews and Gentiles, through dangers of town and of desert, through dangers on the sea, through dangers among false brothers ??27 through labour and hardship, through many a sleepless night, through hunger and thirst, starving many a time, cold and ill-clad, and all the rest of it.