The life and work of St. Paul

132 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
ible St. Paul knew indeed how to ;
yield, but then the very points which he
was least inclined to yield were those which most commanded the sympathy of
James. What we know of Peter is exactly in accordance with the kind readiness
with which he received the suspected and friendless Hellenist. What we
know of James would have led us a priori to assume that his relations with
Paul would never get beyond the formal character which they wear in the Acts
of the Apostles, and still more in the Epistle to the Galatians. But let it not
be assumed that because there was little apparent sympathy and co- operation
between St. Paul and St. James, and because they dwell on apparently opposite
aspects of the truth, we should for one moment be justified in disparaging
either the one or the other. The divergences which seem to arise from the
analysis of truth by individual minds are merged in the catholicity of a wider
synthesis. When St. Paul teaches that we are "justified by faith," he is
teaching a truth infinitely precious ; and St. James is also teaching a precious
truth when, with a different shade of meaning in both words, he says that
" by works a man is justified." l The truths which these two great Apostles
were commissioned to teach were complementary and supplementary, but not
contradictory of each other. Of both aspects of truth we are the inheritors.
If it be true that they did not cordially sympathise with each other in their
were not the first
life-time, the loss was theirs ; but, even in that case, they
instances in the Church of God nor will they be the last in which two good
men, through the narrowness of one or the vehemence of the other, have been
too much beset by the spirit of human infirmity to be able, in all perfectness,
to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
The man who saved the new convert from this humiliating isolation an
isolation which must at that moment have been doubly painful was the wise
and generous Joseph. He has already been mentioned in the Acts as a Levite
of Cyprus who, in spite of the prejudices of his rank, had been among the
earliest to join the new community, and to sanction its happy communism by
the sale of his own possessions. The dignity and sweetness of his character,
no less than the sacrifices which he had made, gave him a deservedly high
position among the persecuted brethren and ; the power with which he
preached the faith had won for him the surname of Barnabas, or " the son of
exhortation." 2 His intimate relations with Paul in after-days, his journey all
the way to Tarsus from Autioch to invite his assistance, and the unity of their
purposes until the sad quarrel finally separated them, would alone render it
probable that they had known each other at that earlier period of life during
which, for the most part, the closest intimacies are formed. Tradition asserts
that Joseph had been a scholar of Gamaliel, and the same feeling which led
him to join a school of which one peculiarity was its permission of Greek
1 James U. 24. It IB hardly a paradox to say that St. James meant by "faith"
omething analogous to what St. Paul meant by works.
2 nia: 13,
"
son of prophecy." That he had been one of the Seventy is probably a
mere guess. (Euseb. H. E. L 12; Clem. Alex. Strom,
"
ii. 176.) napaA>j