antly burn, all persons who came under the
categories II., III. IV., V. And the wolf would play the same havoc now,
if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed
by the secular arm.

Further, there is not a Protestant body except the Unitarian, which
would not declare Justin himself a heretic, on account of his doctrine
of the inferior godship of the Logos; while I am very much afraid that,
in strict logic, Dr. Wace would be under the necessity, so painful to
him, of calling him an "infidel," on the same and on other grounds.

Now let us turn to our other authority. If there is any result of
critical investigations of the sources of Christianity which is
certain,[49] it is that Paul of Tarsus wrote the Epistle to the
Galatians somewhere between the years 55 and 60 A.D., that is to say,
roughly, twenty, or five-and-twenty years after the crucifixion. If this
is so, the Epistle to the Galatians is one of the oldest, if not the
very oldest, of extant documentary evidences of the state of the
primitive Church. And, be it observed, if it is Paul's writing, it
unquestionably furnishes us with the evidence of a participator in the
transactions narrated. With the exception of two or three of the other
Pauline Epistles, there is not one solitary book in the New Testament of
the authorship and authority of which we have such good evidence.

And what is the state of things we find disclosed? A bitter quarrel, in
his account of which Paul by no means minces matters, or hesitates to
hurl defiant sarcasms against those who were "reputed to be pillars":
James, "the brother of the Lord," Peter, the rock on whom Jesus is said
to have built his Church, and John, "the beloved disciple." And no
deference toward "the rock" withholds Paul from charging Peter to his
face with "dissimulation."

The subject of the hot dispute was simply this. Were Gentile converts
bound to obey the Law or not? Paul answered in the negative; and, acting
upon his opinion, he had created at Antioch (and elsewhere) a
specifically "Christian" community, the sole qualifications for
admission into which were the confession of the belief that Jesus was
the Messiah, and baptism upon that confession. In the epistle in
question, Paul puts this--his "gospel," as he calls it--in its most
extreme form. Not only does he deny the necessity of conformity with the
Law, but he declares such conformity to have a negative value, "Behold,
I, Paul, say