The life and work of St. Paul

424 SEK IIFB AND WORK OF Si. PAtJL.
since it is his custom to associate one or more and sometimes the whole body
01 Ms fellow-travellers with himself in the superscriptions of his letters, as well
as to send greetings from them may we not regard it as certain that those
letters were read aloud to the little knot of friends, and formed fruitful topics
of long and earnest discussion ? Did even St. Paul anticipate that those few
rolls of papyrus would be regarded to the latest ages of the world as a price-
less treasure?
But what was the state of things which the Apostle found when he
stepped out of the house of Gains into the house of Justus? It waa St.
Luke's object to show the fundamental unity which existed among Christians,
and not to dwell upon the temporary differences which unhappily divided
them. Ho does not, indeed, conceal the existence of discordant elements, but
which these
his wish seems to have been to indicate the essential harmony
discords might disturb, but not destroy. He has not, therefore, told us a
single detail of St. Paul's encounter with the false Apostles, the deceitful
workers who had huckstered and adulterated the Word of God, or with that
one insolent and overbearing emissary, who with his stately presence, trained
utterance, and immense pretensions, backed with credentials from Jerusalem
and possibly with the prestige of a direct knowledge of Christ, had denied
St. Paul's Apostleship, and omitted no opportunity of blackening his
character. Did this man face St. Panl ? Did his followers abide by the
defiance which they had expressed towards him ? Was there a crisis in which
it was decisively tested on which side the true power lay ? Did he after all
come with a rod, or in the spirit of meekness ? waa the proof of his Apostleship
given by the exercise of discipline, and the utterance of excommunications
which struck terror into flagrant apostates, or did the returning allegiance
of the erring flock, and the increase of holiness among them, render it un-
necessary to resort to stringent measures ? To all these questions we can
return no certain answer. We may imagine the hush of awful expectation
with which the little community gathered in the room of Justus would
receive the first entrance and the first utterances of one whose love they
had so terribly tried, and against whose person they had levelled such un-
worthy sarcasms. Personal questions would, however, weigh least with him.
They knew well that it was not for party opposition but for moral contumacy
that his thunders would be reserved. Since many of them were heinous
offenders, since many had not even repented after serious warnings, how must
they have shuddered with dread, how must their guilty consciences have
made cowards of them all, when at last, after more than three years, they
etood face to face with one who could hand them too over to Satan v/ithall the
fearful consequences which that sentence entailed! Over all these scenes
the veil of oblivion has fallen. The one pen that might have recorded them
has written nothing, nor do we hear a single rumour from any other source.
on the relations of the Gospel to the Law. An instructive comparison of Gal. iii. 6
29 with Bom, ir., &c., will be found in Lightfoot's Galatiwu, pp. 11 16.