t meat killed in the Jewish manner, with the blood thoroughly drained
out. This in itself would probably exclude them from {140} the Gentile
shambles, where also much of the meat which was for sale would have
been offered to idols[7]. By the observance of such a concession,
then, Jew and Gentile were to live and eat together in peace.

The actual enactment of the Jerusalem conference had a limited
application to the Gentile Christians of Antioch and Syria and
Cilicia[8]. But the principle was a vital and universal one: to hold
firm the catholic or 'indifferentist' principle, but to make
concessions for love's sake and to facilitate mutual fellowship. And
this same principle St. Paul soon had reason to apply again at Corinth.
There the problem was not--How could Jew and Gentile live and eat
together? but How far could Gentiles, who had become Christians,
associate with Gentiles who were still adherents of the old religion,
and eat their meats? St. Paul, in answering this question for the
Corinthians, strongly asserts the indifferentist principle--that meat
of all kinds is God's gift and good, and that it can have contracted no
moral pollution through any idolatrous ceremony to which it has been
subjected. No questions, therefore, are to be asked as to its
antecedents. In this physical sense meats which had been {141} offered
to idols might be freely eaten. But when such eating could do harm,
when, for instance, one man points out to another that a particular
portion of food has been part of a sacrifice, and it is plain he will
be scandalized by the eating of it, then the other must abstain[9],
restricting his own lawful liberty for charity and Christian
brotherhood's sake.

Now St. Paul had heard of a new form of the old difficulty at Rome[10].
There was a Jewish asceticism--similar to what is found frequently
among orientals, and was practised in Europe among the
Pythagoreans--which required men to abstain from animal food altogether
and from wine. Such was probably the rule of the Essenes in
Palestine[11], as of the Therapeutae in Egypt, and such was, according
to a very early authority, the rule of St. James, the Lord's brother.
Such a practice, then, had found favour among a minority of Christians
at Rome. And {142} St. Paul in the passage we are now to study, in
principle plainly approves of the indifferentist practice of the
majority. He knows, and _is persuaded in the Lord Jesus_, that nothing
is uncl