The life and work of St. Paul

THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. 439
respect from a slave, though he is lord of all, but is under tutors and stewards till
the term fized by his father. So we, too, when we were infants, were enslaved
under elements of material teaching but when the fulness of time came God sent
;
1 born
forth His Son born of a woman, that we may receive the adoption of sons ;
under Law, that He may ransom those under Law. But because ye are sons, God
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, our Father ! So thou
art no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, an heir also by God's means. Well,
in past time not knowing God ye were slaves to those who by nature are not gods,
but now after recognising God nay, rather being recognised by God how can yo
turn back 2
again to the weak and beggarly rudiments, to which again from the
beginning ye want to be slaves ? Ye are anxiously keeping days and months and
seasons and years. I fear for you that I have perhaps totted for you in vain." *
In this clause the boldness of thought and utterance is even more striking.
He not only urges the superiority of the Christian covenant, but speaks of the
Jewish as mere legal infancy and actual serfdom ; nay, more, he speaks of the
ceremonial observances of the Levitical Law as "weak and beggarly rudi-
"
ments ; and, worse than all, he incidentally compares them to the ritualisms
of heathendom, implying that there is no essential difference between observing
the full moon in the synagogue and observing it in the Temple of Men;
between living in leafy booths in autumn, or striking up the wail for Altis in
spring ; nay, even between circumcision and the yet ghastlier
mutilations of
the priests of Cybele.* Eighteen hundred years have passed since this brief
letter was written, and it has BO permeated all the veins of Christian thought
that in these days we accept its principles as a matter of course ; yet it needs
no very violent effort of the imagination to conceive how savage would be the
wrath which would be kindled in the minds of the Jews aye, and even of the
with scorn of the little
Jewish Christians by words which not only spoke
distinctive observances which were to them as the very breath of their
nostrils, but wounded to the quick their natural pride, by placing their
cherished formalities, and even the antique and highly-valued badge of their
nationality, on a level with the pagan customs which they had ever regarded
with hatred and contempt. Yet it was with no desire to waken infuriated
prejudice that St. Paul thus wrote. The ritualisms of heathen worship, so
far as they enshrined or kept alive any spark of genuine devotion, were not
objectionable had a useful function ; in this respect they stood on a levoJ
with those of Judaism. The infinite superiority of the Judaic ritual arose
from its being the shadow of good things to come. It had fulfilled its task,
1 Iv. 4, 5. Notice the chiasmus of the original which would not suit the English
idiom. Notice, too, the importance of the passage as showing that men did not begin to
be eons of God, when they were declared sons of God, just as the Roman act of emancipation
did not cause sons to be sons, but merely put them in possession of their rights
(Maurice, Unity, p. 504).
J
iv. 3,