Among the Christians who did
most to spread the gospel in the Gentile world was the apostle Paul,
whose conversion was the greatest event in the history of the early
Church. In his hands Christianity became a new religion, fitted to meet
the needs of all the world, and freed entirely of the local and national
meaning which had hitherto attached to it. According to the early
disciples Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, and had significance only in
relation to the expected Messianic kingdom. To establish that kingdom
was his one great aim. For the Gentiles he had no message except as they
might become members of the family of Israel, assuming the
responsibilities and enjoying the privileges of proselytes. But Paul saw
in Jesus much more than the Jewish Messiah. He saw in Christ the divine
Spirit, who had come down from heaven to transform the lives of men, all
of whom are sinners. Thus Jesus had the same significance for one man as
for another, and Christianity was meant as much for Gentiles as for
Jews. The kingdom of which the early disciples were talking was
interpreted by Paul as righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost
(Rom. xiv. 17), a new principle of living, not a Jewish state. But Paul
taught also, on the basis of a religious experience and of a distinct
theory of redemption (see McGiffert's _Apostolic Age_, ch. iii.), that
the Christian is freed from the obligation to observe the Jewish law. He
thus did away with the fundamental distinction between Jews and
Gentiles. The transformed spiritual life of the believer expresses
itself not in the observance of the Jewish law, but in love, purity and
peace. This precipitated a very serious conflict, of which we learn
something from the Epistle to the Galatians and the Book of Acts (xv.
and xxii.). Other fundamental principles of Paul's failed of
comprehension and acceptance, but the belief finally prevailed that the
observance of Jewish law and custom was unnecessary, and that in the
Christian Church there is no distinction between the circumcised and the
uncircumcised. Those Jewish Christians who refused to go with the rest
of the Church in this matter lived their separate life, and were
regarded as an heretical sect known as the Ebionites.

It was Christianity in its universal form which won its great victories,
and finally became permanently established in the Roman world. The
appeal which it made to that world was many-sided. It was a time of
moral reformation,