The life and work of St. Paul

154 THK LIFK AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
"
for," he added, with & touch of genuine Judaic
"
pride, I never ate anything
profane or unclean." And the Voice spake a second time: "What God
cleansed, 'profane' not thou;" or, in the less energetic periphrasis of our
Version, " What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." This was
done thrice, and then the vision vanished. The sheet was suddenly drawn up
into heaven. The trance was over. Peter was alone with his own thoughts ;
all was hushed j
there came no murmur more from the blazing heaven; at his
feet rolled silently the blazing sea.
What did it mean P St. Peter's hunger was absorbed in the perplexity of
interpreting the strange symbols by which he felt at once that the Holy
Spirit was guiding him to truth to truth on which he must act, however
momentous were the issues, however painful the immediate results. Was that
great linen sheet in its whiteness the image of a world washed white, 1 and
were its four corners a sign that they who dwelt therein were to be gathered
from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south ; and
were all the animals and creeping things, clean and unclean, the image of all
the races which inhabit it P And if so, was the permission nay, the command
to eat of the unclean no less than of the clean an indication that the
Levitical Law was now "ready to vanish away;" 3 and that with it must
vanish away, no less inevitably, that horror of any communion with Gentile
races which rested mainly upon its provisions P What else could be meant by
a command which directly contradicted the command of Moses P 8 Was it
really meant that all things were to become new ? that even these unclean
things were to be regarded as let down from heaven P and that in this new
world, this pure world, Gentiles were no longer to be called " dogs," but Jew
and Gentile were to meet on a footing of perfect equality, cleansed alike by
the blood of Christ P
Nor is the connexion between the symbol and the thing signified quite so
distant and arbitrary as has been generally supposed. The distinction
between clean and unclean meats was one of tho insuperable barriers between
the Gentile and the Jew a barrier which prevented all intercourse between
them, because it rendered it impossible for them to meet at the same table or
in social life. In the society of a Gentile, a Jew was liable at any moment to
those ceremonial defilements which involved all kinds of seclusion and incon-
venience ; and not only so, but it was mainly by partaking of unclean food
that the Gentiles became themselves so unclean in the eyes of the Jews. It
is hardly possible to put into words the intensity of horror and revolt with
which the Jew regarded swine. 4
They were to him the very ideal and quintessence
of all that must be looked upon with an energetic concentration of
disgust. He would not even mention a pig by name, but spoke of it as
dabhar acheer, or " the other thing." When, in the days of Hyrcanus, a pig
1 * So CEcumenius. Heb. viii. 13.
* Lev. ri. 7 ; Deut. adv. 8.
* Isa. Ixv. 4 ; Ixvi. 3 ; 2 Mace. vL 18, 19 ; Jos. e. Ap. ii. 14. The abhorrence wa
shared by many Eastern nations (Hdt. ii. 47 ; Pliny, If. N, viii. 52 ; Koran). This was
partly due to its filthy habits (2 Pet. ii. 22),