missionary bishops, and forerunners, we trust, of a long modern succession of Catholic missionary bishops in every quarter of the world.

There is a fine example here of ecclesiastical order and honourable discipline. Not as lords over God's heritage had Paul and Barnabas gone forth, but as duly ordained and duly commissioned; and now, as faithful servants, having come back, they gather the Church together, that is, the chief authorities of the Church, and render an account of their long and arduous stewardship.

And as their attentive hearers sat with silent, thoughtful attention, would they not watch and observe the features and aspect of that wonderful man whom Jesus had arrested in his headlong course of persecution, to make him His chief Apostle to the Gentiles? How had time and anxiety and the care of all the Churches, and moral and bodily anguish, and facing death almost perpetually, and the endless conflict of a daring soul with irreconcilable enemies, marked his countenance with deep lines of care and trouble, and dimmed the fire of those expressive eyes! But though harassed and careworn and sadly battered and perhaps disfigured, that noble spirit that bent before the will of God alone sustained him still. Tender yet stern, and even fierce at times; full of affection and craving for sympathy, yet nobly daring and refusing not to give his life for Him that died that he might have life, he told the Church the wonderful story of God's deliverance of the Jew and the Gentile from their burdens, and "how He had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles."

It was in every essential respect a happy reunion, and there at Antioch Paul and Barnabas abode long time with the disciples.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FIRST CHURCH COUNCIL.

ACTS xv. 1-35; GAL. ii. 1-10.

A.D. 49-51-Claudius, Emperor-Titus Quadratus, President of Syria-Herod Agrippa II., Procurator of Judæa-Annas, High Priest.

"GOD, who, as at this time, didst teach the hearts of Thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of Thy Holy Spirit : GRANT US, BY THE SAME SPIRIT, TO HAVE A RIGHT JUDGMENT IN ALL THINGS, and evermore to rejoice in His holy comfort, through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen."-Collect for WhitSunday.

THE

HE fifteenth chapter of the Acts and the second chapter of Galatians require to be read in conjunction with each other and with the greatest care. A theological condition of men's minds is there disclosed, full of all elements of division and strife. There were already parties in the Church; and there were already heated debates, violent suspicions, ambitious desires to overrule and subjugate by means of the truth, the office of which is to make us free. But we shall also see wisdom and judgment and sound policy controlling, by the grace of God, these mutually repellent elements, and bringing them, at least for a time, into harmony, and the agreement of a common principle of action.

If the simple principles of the Gospel of Jesus, with the plain ritual and light discipline of His immediate followers, had been adopted as the rule of the infant Church, no

difficulties would have arisen. But if Jesus taught religion, others followed who taught religions. That which Jesus laid before us for our delighted acceptance, certain followers overlaid with foreign importations which so altered its character as to render it scarcely recognizable; doctrines and observances utterly foreign from its primary character, though easily traced to and connected with the laws and traditions of the past. These are our present subject to deal with.

The dissensions in the Church were such as were very likely indeed to take place. For 1500 years the Law of Moses had ruled the Jewish life under all its most revered and cherished aspects. It entered into all the relations of life; no man was held in respect who did not observe its institutions with scrupulous adherence. While to too many modern Christians it seems almost a necessity to apologize for being practically consistent with their own principles, and a man is none the less admitted into social and public life for being full of doubt or worse, by a portion at least of those who confer public estimation, no Jew could maintain his position for a day who disavowed the Mosaic Law, and all the traditions which like excrescences had grown up around it. Most dearly of all was the fond belief cherished that the Chosen People were for ever to remain the favoured of God, living in the world and using it, but apart from it, claiming moral and religious supremacy in the world; and though politically vanquished, laying down laws for their conquerors. Somehow, as is usual with devotees in every age, unwelcome truths were diligently kept out of sight; and it was never admitted that "the Law had but a shadow of good things to come" (Heb. x. 1); that the time had come, or soon would come, when there would be "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ would be all and in all" (Col. iii. 11); and that the ceremonies in

stituted by Moses were but "a figure for the time then present," which stood only in "carnal ordinances imposed on them until the time of reformation" (Heb. ix. 9, 10). The words stood then in the prophecy of Jeremiah, but they took no heed of them, that "the days would come that the Lord would make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that He made with their fathers" (Jer. xxxi. 31), and that this covenant should be "an everlasting covenant" (Jer. xxxii. 40; Ezek. xxxvii. 26); and more emphatically still in Micah iv., how all people should flow to the mountain of the house of the Lord, and many nations should come to the house of the God of Jacob, and be taught His ways, and walk in His paths.

Add to this that there was as yet no general persuasion that the religion of Jesus was altogether to supplant the Jewish. Christ Himself had not dwelt expressly on this point. He had said "He was not sent to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel;" that "it was not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs" (Matt. xv. 26). There was still a prevalent opinion that the new dispensation would leave the Jews their national and religious supremacy at the head of the world; and that the Gentile nations would occupy the same position with respect to it that many now did as proselytes of the gate, and of righteousness. The fanatical zeal with which certain small bodies in the Reformed Church of our day press their exclusive claims will give us a clearer as well as perhaps a more characteristic estimate of the diversity of views which divided the early Church. With such short memories for that which was disagreeable to their national prejudice, with what feelings of anger must the Jewish Christians have received tidings of large importations of the Gentile element into the Christian Church? They must have foreboded with pain that the Jews' religion had become an

universal and undiscriminating religion. The teaching of Jesus Himself had provoked the bitter hostility, the most heated animosity on the part of the Jews. What would become of "holy days, and new moons, and Sabbaths" under so spiritual a rule as this? If men are to be complete in Him, buried with Him in baptism, where shall we be? And now that multitudes of the Jews had believed, and many Pharisees, they found it impossible to cast out the old leaven within them. They found it very well for children of Abraham to accept the Messiah; but they were not prepared to sit in the kingdom of heaven with Edom and Philistia and the sons of Heth. They gave a grudging entrance to Araunah the Jebusite and Uriah the Hittite, to Ruth the Moabite and to Rahab. Perhaps Melchizedek himself may have been a source of embarrassment. But when Peter had been heard to declare how he had learnt that "of a truth God was no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feared Him and worked righteousness was accepted of Him" (Acts x. 34, 35), and had admitted a large company of Roman Gentiles of each class of society into fellowship with the Jews; when the Jews of Jerusalem received news from the Syrian Antioch that immense companies of Greeks were admitted into the Church; that Paul and Barnabas had come back from central Asia Minor, having baptized large communities of Gentiles indiscriminately with Jews of the Dispersion, then they thought it high time to speak out. What was to become of the multitude of the faithful sons of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob everywhere abroad, if they were to be lost and absorbed in the wide-spread heathenism of the Gentile world? In Alexandria, in every region of populous Asia Minor, in Cyprus,-in a word, from Mesopotamia to Rome, the prolific Jews, almost like the Chinese in our own day, were overflowing their borders, spreading themselves out, and actually forming a large part of the