In the sixty-eighth year of the first century there was an old man in a prison in Rome -- a little circular cell about twenty feet in diameter -- who was writing to a young man far across the Aegean and Adriatic Seas in Ephesus. and the subject of his letter was how to keep strong in the midst of a collapsing civilization. That is the theme of the second letter of Paul to his son in the faith, Timothy. And that seems an appropriate subject for this twentieth-century hour, doesn't it?