hastening hard to its predestined climax, the triumph of God. The Christian convert must be God’s soldier to the end: “there is no discharge in that war.” The two dominant ideas of the Epistle are the duty and the reward of endurance under peirasmos—certain and not distant victory. The inspiration of the words and the example of Jesus here is clear (see Luke 6:22f.). Pleasure is not synonymous with joy, and Christian joy is a kind of activity, as in Aristotle’s notion of happiness—a word that falls