The life and work of St. Paul

426 THE LIFE AKD WORK OF ST. PAUL.
seed, weeping, and then securely to thrust their blunt and greedy sickles into
the ripening grain to dog the footsteps of the bold, self-sacrificing missionary
with easy, well-to-do men-pleasers, who, with no personal risk, stole in his
absence into the folds which he had constructed, in order to worry with privy
paws his defenceless sheep to trouble with their petty formalisms and
artificial orthodoxies the crystal water of Christian simplicity and Christian
happiness to endanger thus the whole future of Christianity by trying to
turn it from the freedom of a universal Gospel into the bondage of a Judaic
law to construct a hedge which, except at the cost of a cutting in the flesh,
should exclude the noblest of the Gentiles while it admitted the vilest of the
Jews all this, to the clear vision of St. Paul, seemed bad enough. But thus
to thrust themselves among the little communities of his Galatian converts
to take advantage of their warm affections and weak intellects to play on the
vacillating frivolity of purpose which made them such easy victims, especially
to those who offered them an external cult far more easy than spiritual
religion, and bearing a fascinating resemblance to their old ceremonial
paganism this to St. Paul seemed intolerably base.
Vexed at this Galatian fickleness, and stung with righteous indignation at
those who had taken advantage of it, he seized his pen to express in the most
unmistakable language his opinion of the falsity and worthlessness of the
limits into which these Christian Pharisees wished to compress the principles
of Christianity the worn-out and burst condition of the old bottles in which
they strove to store the rich, fresh, fermenting wine. It was no time to
pause for nice inquiries into motives, or careful balancing of elements, or
vague compromise, or polished deference to real or assumed authority. It
was true that this class of men came from Jerusalem, and that they belonged
to the very Church of Jerusalem for whose poorer members he was making
such large exertions. It was true that, in one flagrant instance at any rate,
they had, or professed to have, the authority of James. Could it be that
James, in the bigotry of lifelong habit, had so wholly failed to add under-
standing and knowledge to his scrupulous holiness, that he was lending the
sanction of his name to a work which St. Paul saw to be utterly ruinous to
the wider hopes of Christianity ? If so, it could not be helped. James was
but a man a holy man indeed, and a man inspired with the knowledge of
great and ennobling truths but no more faultless or infallible than Peter or
than Paul himself. If Peter, more than once, had memorably wavered, James
also might waver ; and if so, James in this instance was indubitably in the
wrong. But St. Paul, at least, never says so ; nor does he use a word of dis-
respect to " the Lord's brother." The Church of Jerusalem had, > m
a
previous occasion, expressly repudiated others who professed to speak in llieir
name; nor is there any proof that they had ever sanctioned this sort of
counter-mission of espionage, which was subversive of all progress, of all
liberty, and even of all morals. For, whoever may have been these Judaic
teachers, vanity, party spirit, sensuality, had followed in their wake. They
must be tested by their fruits, and those fruits were bitter and poisonous.