do not suppose that I need spend any time in showing to you
how the extant records bear out, absolutely, this contention of the
Apostle's. I need only remind you how the opposition that was waged
against him--and it was a very vigorous and a very bitter
opposition--from a section of the Church, had no bearing at all upon
the question of what he taught, but only upon the question of to whom
it was to be taught. The only objection that the so-called Judaising
party in the early Church had against Paul and his preaching, was not
the Gospel that he declared, but his assertion that the Gentile
nations might enter into the Church through faith in Jesus Christ,
without passing through the gate of circumcision. Depend upon it, if
there had been any, even the most microscopic, divergence on his part
from the general, broad stream of Christian teaching, the sleepless,
keen-eyed, unscrupulous enemies that dogged him all his days would
have pounced upon it eagerly, and would never have ceased talking
about it. But not one of them ever said a word of the sort, but
allowed his teaching to pass, because it was the teaching of every
one of the apostles.

If I had time, or if it were necessary, it would be easy to point you
to the records that we have left of the Apostolic teaching, in order
to confirm this unbroken unanimity. I do not need to spend time on
that. Proof-texts are not worth so much as the fact that these
doctrines are interwoven into the whole structure of the New
Testament as a whole--just as they are into Paul's letters. But I may
gather one or two sayings, in which the substance of each writer's
teaching has been concentrated by himself. For instance, Peter speaks
about being 'redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb
without blemish and without spot,' and declares that 'He Himself bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.' John comes in with his
doxology: 'Unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins in His
own blood'; and it is his pen that records how in the heavens there
echoed 'glory and honour and thanks and blessing, for ever and ever,
to the Lamb that was slain, and has redeemed us unto God by His
blood.' The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, steeped as he is in
ceremonial and sacrificial ideas, and having for his one purpose to
work out the thought that Jesus Christ is all that the ancient
ritual, sacerdotal and sacrificial system shadows and foretells, sums
up his teaching in the stat