rmness, of personal purity and honor, were to the
infant Church. It shows that it is not behind but in front that we
have to look for the golden age of Christianity. It shows how perilous
it is to assume that the prevalence of any ecclesiastical usage at that
time must constitute a rule for all times. Everything of this kind was
evidently at the experimental stage. Indeed, in the latest writings of
Paul we find the picture of a very different state of things, in which
the worship and discipline of the Church were far more fixed and
orderly. It is not for a pattern of the machinery of a church we ought
to go back to this early time, but for a spectacle of fresh and
transforming spiritual power. This is what will always attract to the
Apostolic Age the longing eyes of Christians; the power of the Spirit
was energizing in every member, the tides of fresh emotion swelled in
every breast, and all felt that the dayspring of a new revelation had
visited them; life, love, light were diffusing themselves everywhere.
Even the vices of the young Church were the irregularities of abundant
life, for the lack of which the lifeless order of many a subsequent
generation has been a poor compensation.

CHAPTER IX

HIS GREAT CONTROVERSY

Paragraphs 145-162.

146-148. THE QUESTION AT ISSUE.
149-153. THE SETTLEMENT OF IT. 149, 150. By
Peter; 151. By Paul; 152, 153. By the Council of
Jerusalem. 154-156. Attempt to unsettle it. 157,
158. Paul crushes the Judaizers. 159-162. A
subordinate Branch of the Question: the Relation of
Christian Jews to the Law.

145. The version of the apostle's life supplied in his own letters is
largely occupied with a controversy which cost him much pain and took
up much of his time for many years, but of which Luke says little. At
the date when Luke wrote, it was a dead controversy, and it belonged to
a different plane from that along which his story moves. But at the
time when it was raging, it tried Paul far more than tiresome journeys
or angry seas. It was at its hottest about the close of his third
journey, and the Epistles already mentioned as having been written then
may be said to have been evoked by it. The Epistle to the Galatians
especially was a thunderbolt hurled against his opponents in this
controversy; and its burning sentences show how profoundly he was moved
by the subject.

146. The Questio