d without pity and horror a description
of their being insulted, tortured, and killed. And the same is true
of Jesus. But it requires the most strenuous effort of conscience to
refrain from crying "Serve him right" when we read of the stoning of
Stephen; and nobody has ever cared twopence about the martyrdom of
Peter: many better men have died worse deaths: for example, honest Hugh
Latimer, who was burned by us, was worth fifty Stephens and a dozen
Peters. One feels at last that when Jesus called Peter from his boat,
he spoiled an honest fisherman, and made nothing better out of the wreck
than a salvation monger.

THE CONTROVERSIES ON BAPTISM AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar doctrines of
Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was to make it much easier to
convert Gentiles than Jews; and it was by following the line of least
resistance that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had
their own rite of initiation: the rite of circumcision; and they were
fiercely jealous for it, because it marked them as the chosen people
of God, and set them apart from the Gentiles, who were simply the
uncircumcized. When Paul, finding that baptism made way faster among the
Gentiles than among the Jews, as it enabled them to plead that they too
were sanctified by a rite of later and higher authority than the Mosaic
rite, he was compelled to admit that circumcision did not matter;
and this, to the Jews, was an intolerable blasphemy. To Gentiles like
ourselves, a good deal of the Epistle to the Romans is now tedious to
unreadableness because it consists of a hopeless attempt by Paul to
evade the conclusion that if a man were baptized it did not matter a
rap whether he was circumcized or not. Paul claims circumcision as an
excellent thing in its way for a Jew; but if it has no efficacy towards
salvation, and if salvation is the one thing needful--and Paul was
committed to both propositions--his pleas in mitigation only made the
Jews more determined to stone him.

Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, it was hampered
by a dispute as to whether salvation was to be attained by a surgical
operation or by a sprinkling of water: mere rites on which Jesus would
not have wasted twenty words. Later on, when the new sect conquered the
Gentile west, where the dispute had no practical application, the other
ceremony--that of eating the god--produced a still more disa