that happens desire leads to concentrated effort,
the good of which men have been granted the vision in their minds and
souls will be attained. Otherwise interest in it will pass away, and the
hope of securing it, at least for a long time, will be lost.

Before we attempt to consider any of the problems presented by the
actual state of Christendom in connexion with the subject now before us,
let us go back in thought to the position of believers in Jesus Christ
of the first generation, when His own brief earthly life had ended. They
form a fellowship bound together by faith in their common Lord, by the
confident hopes with which that faith has inspired them, and the new
view of life and its duties which they have acquired. Soon indeed
instances occur in which the bonds between different members of the body
become strained, owing especially to differences of origin and character
in the elements of which it was composed. We have an example at a very
early point in the narrative of the book of _Acts_ in the
dissatisfaction felt by believers from among Hellenistic Jews, who were
visiting, or had again taken up their abode at, Jerusalem, because a
fair share of the alms was not assigned to their poor by the Palestinian
believers, who had the advantage of being more permanently established
in the city, and were probably the majority. But the chiefs among the
brethren, the Apostles, take wise measures to remove the grievance and
prevent a breach.

A few years later a far more serious difference arises. Jewish believers
in Jesus had continued to observe the Mosaic Law. When converts from
among the Gentiles began to come in the question presented itself, "Is
observance of that Law to be required of them?" Only on condition that
it was would many among the Jewish believers associate with them. In
their eyes still all men who did not conform to the chief precepts of
this Law were unclean. It is possible that there were Jews of liberal
tendencies, men who had long lived among Gentiles, to whom this
difficulty may have seemed capable of settlement by some compromise. But
in the case of most Jews, not merely in Palestine, but probably also in
the Jewish settlements scattered through the Graeco-Roman world,
religious scruples, ingrained through the instruction they had received
and the habits they had formed from child-hood, were deeply offended by
the very notion of joining in common meals with Gentiles, unless they
had fulfilled t