vior. First, there were the Jews who denied any and
every claim of Christ to be the Messiah; of this party
were the rioters who drove Paul out of city after city and
sought to kill him in the temple. Second, there were the
Jewish Christians who "asserted that their faith was
Judaism with a new prophet; that the law of Moses and Mosaic
ceremonial practices were binding on Christians as well as
on unbelieving Jews; that Gentile believers must first
become proselytes to Judaism before they could become
Christians; and lastly that circumcision was the only
gateway to baptism." With the first class of Jews it was not
so difficult to deal, for they were out and out antagonists,
but the Jewish Christians, (who still clung to the Jewish
law) were constantly making trouble not only amongst the
Christian Jews, who had fully come out from under the
law of Moses and expressed their faith in Christ, but also
among the Christian Gentiles who had come out of the
heathen religions. The masterly arguments of Paul,
presented in Galatians and Romans, deal chiefly with the
doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone. In
Gal. 5:1-4 he calls the return to Jewish belief and
practice, "falling from grace."

+The Heathen Faith.+--The people of the Roman
empire were idolaters. Temples for the worship of idols
occupied prominent positions in every city. Some of
them were very beautiful, from an architectural point of
view. But the objects of worship, frequently, were of the
basest sort. This worship caused a notorious laxness of
view in regard to the relations between the sexes. This
state of things is not overstated by Paul in his epistle to
the Romans (1:18-23). It was this condition of idolatrous
worship which led to the decision of the Jerusalem
Council in regard to the Gentile converts (Acts 15:29).
The Christianity which Paul taught called for a pure and
upright life and a subjugation of human passion. We see
the effects of former idolatrous lives manifesting
themselves in the evils which Paul sought to correct in his
letters to the Corinthians. It was no small conflict in
which the Great Apostle to the Gentiles engaged when he
sought to cleanse, through Christ, the base idolatrous
hearts of the men of his times.

+The New Faith in Christ.+--Paul stands for spiritual
freedom in Christ and loyalty to Him as Divine Lord
without the necessity of observing the minute regulations
of the Jewish ritual. He insis