The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PETER AWD ST. PAUL AT ANTIOCH. 255
admit of mutual accommodation. Each was like himself. St. Barnabas may
have suffered himself too strongly to be influenced by partiality for a relative ;
St. Paul by the memory of personal indignation. Barnabas may have erred
on the side of leniency ; Paul on the side of sternness. St. Paul's was so far
the worst fault, yet the very fault may have risen from his loftier ideal. 1
There was a " severe earnestness " about him, a sort of intense whole-hearted-
ness, which could make no allowance whatever for one who, at the very point
at which dangers began to thicken, deserted a great and sacred work. Mark
had put his hand to the plough, and had looked back ; and, conscious of the
serious hindrance which would arise from a second defection, conscious of the
lofty qualities which were essential to any one who was honoured with such
Divine responsibilities, St. Paul might fairly have argued that a cause must
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not be risked out of tenderness for a person. Barnabas, on the other hand,
might have urged that it was most unlikely that one who was now willing to
face the work again should again voluntarily abandon it, and he might fairly
have asked whether one failure was to stamp a lifetime. Both persisted, and
both suffered. Paul went his "way, and many a time, in the stormy and
agitated days which followed, must he have sorely missed, amid the provoking
of all men and the strife of tongues, the repose and generosity which breathed
through the life and character of the Son of Exhortation. Barnabas went his
way, and, dissevered from the grandeur and vehemence of Paul, passed into
comparative obscurity, in which, so far from sharing the immortal gratitude
which embalms the memory of his colleague, his name is never heard again,
except in the isolated allusions of the letters of his friend.
For their friendship was not broken. Barnabas did not become a Judaiser,
or in any way discountenance the work of Paul. The Epistle which passed
by his name is spurious, 3 but its tendency is anti-Judaic, which would not
have been the case if, after the dispute at Antioch, he had permanently sided
with the anti-Pauline faction. In the Acts of the Apostles he is not again
mentioned. Whether he confined his mission-work to his native island,
whither he almost immediately sailed with Mark, or whether, as seems to be
implied by the allusion in the Epistle to the Corinthians, he extended it more
widely, he certainly continued to work on the same principles as before, taking
with him no female companion, and accepting nothing from the Churches to