looking at things. They could behave as brethren, in
the glow of their fresh enthusiasm at finding that the long-expected
kingdom of Christ was now an actual fact, and its triumph to be
immediately expected, without any real bridging of the gulfs which yawn
between different sorts of men. That these gulfs still remained to be
bridged soon appeared. It became manifest that {125} Gentiles,
'sinners of the Gentiles,' had to be received into Christian
brotherhood upon equal terms, and without their accepting the Jewish
law and customs. The Council at Jerusalem attempted a compromise by
requiring of the Gentile converts certain accommodations to Jewish
manners. But the compromise did not avail to overcome the difficulty.
St. Paul found the centre of opposition to the equal admission of the
Gentiles in that very Church of Jerusalem which had been previously
foremost in the race of love. In fact, the true difficulty of the law
of brotherhood only then appeared when the obligation to fuse
inveterate national distinctions began to be enforced. Then indeed
flesh and blood rebelled. Without going any further than this single
piece of Christian experience, there is every reason why St. John
should warn Christians that the old commandment, 'ye shall love one
another,' is constantly, with every change of circumstance, becoming 'a
new commandment,' involving new difficulties, and challenging afresh
the efforts of the human will[5]. The same difficulty, only in a less
acute form, is in St. Paul's mind, and makes him measure and weigh his
words, when he writes to Philemon {126} to beg him to receive his
former runaway slave, 'no longer as a slave, but as a brother
beloved[6].'

And we cannot but pause and ask, in view of all the moral discipline
for men of various kinds which St. Paul sees to be involved in the
simple obligation to belong to one Christian body[7],--what would have
been his feelings if he had heard of the doctrine which cuts at the
root of all this discipline by declaring that religion is only
concerned with the relation of the soul to God, and that Christians may
combine as they please in as many religious bodies as suits their
varying tastes?

This difficulty in the very idea of a catholic brotherhood of men
explains the extraordinary earnestness with which St. Paul proceeds to
emphasize that indeed this, and nothing less than this, is the divine
mystery (or 'secret'), which, held back from all eternity in t