is national rite and adopt the life prescribed in the Jewish
law and tradition; in short, their conception of Messiah's reign was a
world of Jews.

148. Such undoubtedly was the tenor of popular sentiment in Palestine
when Christ came; and multitudes of those who accepted Jesus as the
Messiah and entered the Christian Church had this set of conceptions as
their intellectual horizon. They had become Christians, but they had
not ceased to be Jews; they still attended the temple worship; they
prayed at the stated hours, they fasted on the stated days, they
dressed in the style of the Jewish ritual; they would have thought
themselves defiled by eating with uncircumcised Gentiles; and they had
no thought but that, if Gentiles became Christians, they would be
circumcised and adopt the style and customs of the Jewish nation.

149. The Settlement.--The question was settled by the direct
intervention of God in the case of Cornelius, the centurion of
Caesarea. When the messengers of Cornelius were on their way to the
Apostle Peter at Joppa, God showed that leader among the apostles, by
the vision of the sheet full of clean and unclean beasts, that the
Christian Church was to contain circumcised and uncircumcised alike.
In obedience to this heavenly sign Peter accompanied the centurion's
messengers to Caesarea and saw such evidences that the household of
Cornelius had already, without circumcision, received the distinctively
Christian endowments of faith and the Holy Ghost, that he could not
hesitate to baptize them as being Christians already. When he returned
to Jerusalem, his proceedings created wonder and indignation among the
Christians of the strictly Jewish persuasion; but he defended himself
by recounting the vision of the sheet and by an appeal to the clear
fact that these uncircumcised Gentiles were proved by their possession
of faith and of the Holy Ghost to have been already Christians.

150. This incident ought to have settled the question once for all;
but the pride of race and the prejudices of a lifetime are not easily
subdued. Although the Christians of Jerusalem reconciled themselves to
Peter's conduct in this single case, they neglected to extract from it
the universal principle which it implied; and even Peter himself, as we
shall subsequently see, did not fully comprehend what was involved in
his own conduct.

151. Meanwhile, however, the question had been settled in a far
stronger and more