ained 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,[76] 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 unto you, that if ye receive circumcision,
Christ will profit you nothing" (Galatians v. 2). He calls the legal
observances "beggarly rudiments," and