it in his speech on the occasion of his
being made a prisoner at Jerusalem: and he had quite recently explained
it 'in brief compass' in the letter to the Colossians which was
intended to have, in part at least, the same readers as his present
epistle[3]. This special revelation then and accompanying commission
justifies him in particular, and more than any of {123} the other
apostles, in pressing upon his converts the doctrine which forms the
special topic of this epistle.

But to think of his special office as apostle of a catholic society, is
to think also of its extraordinary difficulty.

[Sidenote: _The difficulty of catholicity_]

When we set ourselves in our own later age to rehabilitate the sense of
church membership, we feel at once the strength of the forces against
us; we realize how much the feeling of blood-kinship in the family
counts for, or the wider kinship of national life, or the common
interests of our professions or our classes, compared to the feeble
sense of fellowship which comes from a church membership which is so
largely conventional. Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we
have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt
the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in
which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of
unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it
embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their
own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the
barriers of Jewish isolation. A society in which men should be neither
Jews nor {124} Gentiles, Greeks nor barbarians, bond nor free, but all
should be welded into one manhood by the pressure of a common and
constraining bond of brotherhood--a society in which even the savage
and brutal Scythian should have equal fellowship with Greeks and
Jews[4]--represented what had never yet been accomplished, and what the
most sanguine might reasonably have thought impossible. The history of
the Church, though not yet much more than thirty years old, had served
already to emphasize the difficulty of the undertaking. We read the
record of the first Jerusalem Church with its communism of love and
sympathy, and it seems the perfect realization of the Christian spirit
of brotherhood. So it was, but under comparatively easy conditions.
For all that community were Jews with common traditions, sympathies,
habits, ways of