him for the idea of going
to the Gentiles. Peter, who had become a pious Essene and considered it
unlawful to go to the house or into the company of a Gentile; James, who
dreaded the idea of eating of the bread of the Gentile, and made a
hypocrite in this point of Peter at Antioch--and they were the heads of
the Church--could not forgive Paul's innovation in going to the
Gentiles. Paul was sensible enough to silence them by begging money for
them, and to appoint the Sunday for collections to be made for the
saints of Jerusalem. But it was too much for them that Paul went to the
Gentiles.

In the third place, he changed their whole religion into a new sort of
mythology. He made of Jesus a Son of God, of which they had no
knowledge. He preached vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection, the end
of the old covenant and the beginning of a new, the end of all flesh,
the last judgment--all of which was foreign to them; not one word of all
that had their Master told them, and they knew only what he did tell
them. They naturally looked upon him as an unscrupulous innovator. They
had not experience and forethought enough to understand that Paul's
success among the heathens depended on that means. They were pious men
who prayed much, believed seriously, and had no knowledge of the world
as it was.

In the fourth place, they could not possibly give their consent to
Paul's abrogation of the whole law, knowing, as they did, how their
Master respected every tittle, every iota of the law; that he had come
to fulfil the law, and to reestablish the theocracy; how could they
possibly think of the idea of abolishing Sabbath and holidays,
circumcision and ablutions, all and everything, to be guided by the
phantom of hope, love, and faith, against which James argues in his
epistle with all the energy of his soul? Those inexperienced saints did
not know that the Pharisean doctors held similar theories, and that Paul
could not possibly hope to meet with any success among the Gentiles if
he had come to them with the laws of the Jews. They were Roman citizens,
who contemned the laws of the barbarians. Had Paul come with the word
Judaism on his lips, he would have surely failed. Had he come to enforce
a foreign law, he would have been laughed at as a madman. They did not
know that Paul cared not for an hundred and one laws, as long as the
essence and substance could be saved and preserved; that he held that
laws are local, the spirit is univers