DISSERTATION n ·TBE CmCUMBTABCEB WHICH AT TmS Tnm LED ST. PAUL DISTmOTLY Al!ID PUBLICLY TO ANNOUNCE TO THE CHURCH BIB PBoPEBLY APosTOLIO CoMMISBION. The religion of (Jhrist essentuilly 'IVTl,trammelled by out'!#Md forms of manifestation. Among the most distinctively evangelical elements of the gospel may be ranked the two following, forming, in fact, its great preparation and qualification 'for becoining the • universal religion of mankind :- 1. That faith in ·christ, apart from any definite ceremonial performances, unless so far as the two simple ordinances: of baptism and the Lord's Supper may be so regarded, constitutes the alone condition of justification and sonship with God. • 2. That the "worship of God in spirit," apart from any definite rigid form of out- ward ceremony or observance, is everywhere his true and acceptable service, however v.uying may be the outward form in which from time to time it is clothed. • The narrowing of (Jhrist', religion by insistance '11,p()'TI, certainforms. But the spirit of ceremonial formalism, which is the natural outcome of the unregenerated bee.rt when it comes into contact with the subject of religion, proves itself in all ages unable to satisfy itself with principles so purely spiritual as these; their bare spirituality makes them intolerable. The "na~.ral man" eats himself accordingly to qualify them. to his taste by superadding, in fact substituting, the injunction upon the conscience of t10me species or other of fixed outward forms or ordinances, in attention to which his soul can take refuge from the haunting idea of the need of a spiritual religiousness for which it bas no inclination, while he has, however, the comfort of knowing,himself not neglectful of religion altogether. The forms or ordinances selected will soon come to be regarded, not as mere seemly external concomitants of worship or of the religious life- in which view, if appropriate in their character and used with a prudent appreciation DISSERTATION IL xlvii
of their truo value, forms and ordinances, though of merely human devising, may be bcith' necessary a.nd edHying-but as essential, and as in themselves efficacious, for m11.king, the worship or the life acceptable or more acceptable to God. In consequence, In the eyes of those who embrace them, such fellow-Christiitns as go along with them in their observance are to be welcomed' as indeed brethren; while they who do not, however truly believers in Christ, and though even confessed to be believers in him, are iieve1theless regarded as out of the pale of their brotherly recognition and sympathy. 'l'he Divine injunction, "What God bath cleansed call not thou unclean," falls upon their ears unheeded. The Word of God must be made void to make room for the keeping of the commandmerlts of men. , • 'l'he'selection •of tb:e' particular forms and ordinances to be insisted npon is evermore shifting and varil\ble. Being as it is, the child of mere carnal self-wi11, "will-worship" (lB,ll.08pYJt1'1«ta.), 11s' St. Paul brands it with being, it takes now and here one shape, then l\nd •there a. different one. We gather out of the Epistles of the New Testament that, as early as in the a.postolic age, it was continually changing its aspect. The ru:trtowing of Cli:i'ist's religion by Judaizing /0-1-ms. One branch of this corruption of the faith, ·the one which we are now ·more particularly concerned with, engendered by the habits of thought which were deeply ingrained in the minds of the Jewish people, assumed the Judaizing or Levitical type. In its earliest while at the same time its most thorough-going manifestations, coeval, in fact, with the very first coming into being of the Gentile Church, it laid down the principle that circumcision and the keeping of the Law of Moses were essential con- ditions of salvation-essential even in the case of Gentile believers. No believer was to be recognized as a brother who did not order himself according to this rule. It is obvious ho'w hurtful, not to say fatal, the operation of this dogma, if established in the Church, must have proved. It would have darkened the believer's sense of his adoption ; it would have set upon the neck of the Gentile Church a galling yoke of outward ceremony; it would have clogged or even arrested the progress of the gospel among· mankind. .Accordingly, Paul, in concert with Barnabas, offered it the most strenuous resistanc~; and at Jerusalem itself, being backed by the weighty support of Cephas and ofJar'nes; they succeeded in inflicting upon this extreme embodiment of ceremonial formalism the check of a public and authoritative rebuke. ' Hard for Jewish believers to unlearn theil' Jewish particularism. The tendeccy, however, which originated it was too congenial to the soil of Jewish sentiment for its roots and fiores not to live on underground, ever ready to sprout forth afresh. True, when the question was pnt plainly and point-blank to the Jewish believer's Christian consciousness, it rcould not refuse to acknowledge it to be true that faith in Christ did avail of itself to.deliver a' man, whether Jew or Gentile, from all spiritual pollutedness, and to present him clean and unrebukable both before God and before man. But the leaven of Christ's Word could not instantaneously permeate and transmute the inmost spirit of even his sincerest disciples through and through; the truth needed time, with apostles themselves it needed time, before it could modify into full conformity with itself habits of thinking and feeling which they had received from their forefathers_, and had hitherto cherished as the precious heirloom of their rnce. And if there was much that even the best-instructed and more spiritually minded among them found it hard both to learn and to unlearn, ~hat was to be expected from those Jewish oonverts- arid no dbubt there ~ere' many such-whose conversion was only half sincere, or who bad joined tl:io' brethren from some kind of superficial or half-worldly impulse, which left the inner core of their convictions and sensibilities untouched? 'l'hese might not dare to openly gainsay the teaching of the "apostles a.nd elders;" but how should they in xlviii 'l'HE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS.