11 And he goes on, and adjoins, lest perchance any should imagine that he only therefore received not, because they had not given: “But I have not written these things that they may be so done unto me: good is it for me rather to die than that any make void my glory.” What glory, unless that which he wished to have with God, while in Christ suffering with the weak? As he is presently about to say most openly; “For if I shall have preached the Gospel, there is not to me any glory: for necessity is laid upon me;” that is, of sustaining this life.
“For woe will be to me,” he says, “if I preach not the Gospel:” that is, to my own will shall I forbear to preach the Gospel, because I shall be tormented with hunger, and shall not have whereof to live. For he goes on, and says; “For if willingly I do this, I have a reward.” By his doing it willingly, he means, if he do it uncompelled by any necessity of supporting this present life; and for this he has reward, to wit, with God, of glory everlasting. “But if unwilling,” says he, “a dispensation is entrusted unto me:” that is, if being unwilling, I am by necessity of passing through this present life, compelled to preach the Gospel, “a dispensation is entrusted unto me;” to wit, that by my dispensation as a steward, because Christ, because the truth, is that which I preach, howsoever because of occasion, howsoever seeking my own, howsoever by necessity of earthly emolument compelled so to do, other men do profit, but I have not that glorious and everlasting reward with God.
“What then,” says he, “shall be my reward?” He says it as asking a question: therefore the pronunciation must be suspended, until he give the answer. Which the more easily to understand, let, as it were, us put the question to him, “What, then, will be your reward, O Apostle, when that earthly reward due to good evangelists, not for its sake evangelizing, but yet taking it as the consequence and offered to them by the Lord's appointment, you accept not? What shall be your reward then?”
See what he replies: “That, preaching the Gospel, I may make the Gospel of Christ without charge;” that is, that the Gospel may not be to believers expensive, lest they account that for this end is the Gospel to be preached to them, that its preachers should seem as it were to sell it. And yet he comes back again and again, that he may show what, by warrant of the Lord, he has a right unto, yet does not: “that I abuse not,” says he, “my power in the Gospel.”
Source: On the Work of Monks (New Advent)