logical mind than Peter's. Paul at this time began
his apostolic work at Antioch, and soon afterward went forth with
Barnabas upon his first great missionary expedition into the Gentile
world; and, wherever they went, he admitted heathens into the Christian
Church without circumcision.

Paul in thus acting did not copy Peter. He had received his gospel
directly from heaven. In the solitudes of Arabia, in the years
immediately after his conversion, he had thought this subject out and
come to far more radical conclusions about it than had yet entered the
minds of any of the rest of the apostles. To him far more than to any
of them the law had been a yoke of bondage; he saw that it was only a
stern preparation for Christianity, not a part of it; indeed, there was
in his mind a deep gulf of contrast between the misery and curse of the
one state and the joy and freedom of the other. To his mind to impose
the yoke of the law on the Gentiles would have been to destroy the very
genius of Christianity; it would have been the imposition of conditions
of salvation totally different from that which he knew to be the one
condition of it in the gospel.

These were the deep reasons which settled this question in this great
mind. Besides, as a man who knew the world and whose heart was set on
winning the Gentile nations to Christ, he felt far more strongly than
did the Jews of Jerusalem, with their provincial horizon, how fatal
such conditions as they meant to impose would be to the success of
Christianity outside Judaea. The proud Romans, the highminded Greeks,
would never have consented to be circumcised and to cramp their life
within the narrow limits of Jewish tradition; a religion hampered with
such conditions could never have become the universal religion.

152. But, when Paul and Barnabas came back from their first missionary
tour to Antioch, they found that a still more decisive settlement of
this question was required; for Christians of the strictly Jewish sort
were coming down from Jerusalem to Antioch and telling the Gentile
converts that, unless they were circumcised, they could not be saved.
In this way they were filling them with alarm, lest they might be
omitting something on which the welfare of their souls depended, and
they were confusing their minds as to the simplicity of the gospel. To
quiet these disturbed consciences it was resolved by the church at
Antioch to appeal to the leading apostles at Jerus