ere ignorant and ribald blasphemies
would have to be met in the power of the peace of God. Sometimes a
really wistful heart would at once betray its presence under the Roman
cuirass. Perhaps the man would attack the Apostle with ridicule, or
with enquiries, after some long day of religious debate, such as that
recorded in Acts xxviii., and the silent night would see St Paul
labouring on to win this soul also.

"These ears were dull to Grecian speech;
This heart more dull to aught but sin;
Yet the great Spirit bade thee reach,
Wake, change, exalt, the soul within:
I've heard; I know; thy Lord, ev'n He,
JESUS, hath look'd from heaven on me.

* * * * *

"A Christian, yes--for ever now
A Christian: so our Leader keep
My faltering heart: to Him I bow,
His, whether now I wake or sleep:
In peace, in battle. His:--the day
Breaks in the east: oh, once more pray!" [8]

The passage before us is interesting again because of the light it
throws on the very early rise of a separatist movement in the Roman
mission-church, and on the principles on which St Paul met it.
Extremely painful and perplexing the phenomenon was, though by no means
new in its nature to St Paul, as we well know. It was a trouble
altogether from within, not from without. The men who "preached Christ
of envy and strife" bore evidently the Christian name as openly as
their sincerer brethren. They were baptized members of the community
of the Gospel. And their evangelization was such that St Paul was able
to say, "Christ is preached"; though this does not mean, assuredly,
that there were no doubtful elements mingled in the preaching. Now for
them, as for all the Roman Christians, he had every reason to regard
himself as the Lord's appointed centre of labour and of order. There
he was, the divinely commissioned Apostle of Christ, at once the
Teacher and the Leader of the Gentile Churches; only a few short years
before he had written to these very people, in his inspired and
commissioned character, the greatest of the Epistles. Yet now behold a
separation, a schism. That such the movement was we cannot doubt.
These "brethren," he tells us, carried on their missionary efforts in a
way precisely intended to "raise up trouble" for him in his prison.
The least that they would do with that object would be not only to
teach much that he would disapprove of, but to intercept intercourse
between t