ch all racial
differences disappear; "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek."
This controversy once settled--and a few years sufficed to settle
it--the new religion was free to spread in all directions. It spread
rapidly; the gospel was very simple and imposed no burdensome
conditions, and it soon proved itself to be capable of striking root
in any country. The Apostle Paul was the first great theologian of
the Church; but his doctrine, as will happen in such a case, does not
in all points spring out of the nature of the religion itself. The
Pauline theology is an attempt to reconcile the facts of Christianity
and especially that great stumbling-block to the Jews, the death of
the Messiah, with the requirements of Jewish thought. Instead of
seeing in the death of Christ, as the older apostles at first did, a
perplexing enigma, St. Paul saw in it the principal manifestation of
the compassion of the Saviour, and the great purpose for which he had
come into the world. He concentrated attention on Christ's death and
made the cross rather than the doctrine of the Messiah the burden of
his teaching. To understand Paul we must distinguish between his
religion and his theology. His religious position is essentially the
same as that of Jesus himself; with him, too, the new religion is
that of father and child, and of the consequences which inevitably
flow from such a union. But the movement of thought which began at
the moment of the crucifixion, the concentration of Christian faith
and love on the person of the Saviour, was now complete. The figure
of the Crucified with its powerful tragic attraction, and with its
deep lessons of conquest by self-surrender, of life by dying,
remained from St. Paul onwards, in the centre of the faith.

The world of the early centuries was in great need of a religion, and
Christianity supplied the place which was vacant. Brought in contact,
in the great ocean of the Roman Empire where all currents met, with
religions and philosophies of every kind, it proved best suited to
the task of supplying an inspiration for life, uniting together
different classes of men and schools of thought. But in the wide
arena of the Empire it received as well as gave, and in its
encounters with strange rites and doctrines it also put on many a
strange aspect. It became the heir of the thoughts and aspirations of
a hundred empires; all the pious sentiments that flowed together from
every quarter of the world helpe