of a strong feeling and conviction
bred of his own experiences. The true means of justification, he has
come to perceive, is faith, that is, {11} the simple acceptance of the
divine favour freely offered, and this is something that belongs to no
special race, but to all men as such. For all men everywhere, to whom
the light comes, can know that they are sinners in the sight of God,
and can accept simply from the hand of the divine bounty the unmerited
boon of forgiveness and acceptance in Christ. Thus, if faith and faith
alone is that whereby men are justified or commended to God, then at
once the catholic basis of the reconstituted Church is secured. All
men can belong to it who can feel their need and hear the Gospel and
take God at His word. This is the great principle vindicated in the
compressed and fiery arguments of the Epistle to the Galatians, and
then subsequently developed in the calmer and orderly procedure of the
Epistle to the Romans.

But in the next group of epistles, written out of that captivity at
Rome the record of which closes the Acts of the Apostles, the same
doctrine of the catholicity of the Church is developed from a different
point of view. Now it is the thought of the person of Christ which has
come to occupy the foreground. All along St. Paul had believed that
Christ was the Son of God, the divine mediator of creation, who in
these {12} latter days had for our sakes humbled Himself to be made
man[7]. But this thought of Christ's person is elaborated and brought
into prominence in the third group of epistles[8], especially in the
Epistle to the Colossians. A tendency derived from Jewish sources was
manifesting itself among some of the Asiatic Christians to exalt
angelic beings, conceived probably as representing divine attributes
and powers, into objects of religious worship[9]. There is a certain
spurious humility which has in many ages, and not least in the
Christian Church, led men to shrink from direct approach to the high
and holy God and to resort to lower mediators, as more suitable to
their defiled condition and weakness. This sort of spurious humility
was already detected by St. Paul, in company with other Judaizing and
falsely ascetic tendencies, as a peril of the Asiatic churches, and
especially of the Colossians.

But he will make no terms with it. Christ he teaches is the only and
the universal mediator, the one and only reconciler of all things to
the Father. And