heir converts and him; to ignore him altogether as the central
representative of the Church at Rome; to arrange for assemblies, to
administer Baptisms, to practise the Breaking of Bread, wholly apart
from the order and cohesion which he would sanction, and which he had
the fullest right to enjoin. All this was a great evil, a sin,
carrying consequences which might affect the Christian cause far and
wide. Is it not true that no deliberate schism has ever taken place in
the Church where there has not been grievous sin in the matter--on one
side, or, on the other, or on both?

Yet how does the Apostle meet this distressing problem? With all the
large tolerance and self-forgetting patience which come to the wise man
who walks close to God in Christ. No great leader, surely, ever prized
more the benefits of order and cohesion than did St Paul. And where a
fundamental error was in view, as for example that about Justification
in Galatia, no one could meet it more energetically, and with a
stronger sense of authority, than he did. But he "discerned things
that differ." And when, as here, he saw around him men, however
misguided, who were aiding in the "announcement" of the Name and
salvation of Christ, he thought more of the evangelization than of the
breach of coherence, which yet most surely he deplored. He speaks with
perfect candour of the unsound spiritual state of the separatists,
their envy, strife, and partizanship. But he has no anathema for their
methods. He is apparently quite unconscious of the thought that
because he is the one Apostle in Rome grace can be conveyed only
through him; that his authority and commission are necessary to
authenticate teaching and to make ordinances effectual. He would far
rather have order, and he knows that he is its lawful centre. But "the
announcement of Christ" is a thing even more momentous than order. He
cannot stay to speak of that great but inferior benefit, while he
"rejoices, aye, and is going to rejoice," in the diffusion of the Name
and salvation of the Lord.

It is an instructive lesson. Would that in all the after ages the
Church had more watchfully followed this noble precedent! The result
would have been, so I venture to hold, a far truer and stronger
cohesion, in the long run, than we see, alas, around us now.

What was the secret of this happy harmony of the love of order and the
capacity for tolerance in the mind of St Paul? It was a secret as deep