If this have any truth in it, let it appear: have I done this by any of those whom I have sent to you? [d] in the deep] To what passage of St. Paul's story this of his being a day and a night ἐν τῷ βυθῷ, in the deep, doth belong, cannot be shewed out of scripture. It is not altogether improbable what Beda l. Quæst. qu. 3. tit. 8. saith out of Theodorus Tarsensis, that in Cyzicum (which is in the Propontis, a famous city) there is a prison, which for the depth of it under ground is called βυθός, or "the bottom of the sea," a most noisome filthy prison, as in Athens there was one called βάραθρον, hell, at Syracuse λατομία, the mineral, and many the like in other places: see Suidas in the word βάραθρον. Into this, as a most infamous prison, St. Paul might well be cast, passing from Troas to that city, though St. Luke, who reports not things particularly, save when he himself was present, make no mention of it. And indeed whatsoever else may be meant by the word βυθός, St. Luke seems not to have made mention of this passage, there being no reason to apply that of Acts xxvii. to it, the Epistle being written before that time, in the compass of the Macedonian progress, Acts xx. 1; and if it might be conceived to be written after it, that would more reasonably be defined to be one of his three shipwrecks foregoing here. Theophylact speaks of some that interpreted it of a well, called βυθός, profundity, because of the great depth of it, wherein, after his danger at Lystra, he hid himself. If any man be sick or ill-affected in spirit, I am in sympathy with him, in care how to relieve and get him up again; if any be fallen into sin, or fallen back from discipleship, I am constantly inflamed with a holy zeal to get him out of it. And these my sufferings are the only things which I shall think fit to boast of now I am by my calumniators constrained to do so.