Him who is the Fountain and Quarry of all doctrine, there is divergence
from the primitive form of the Gospel.

I know, of course, that doctrines--which are only formal and orderly
statements of principles involved in the facts--must flow from the
proclamation of the person, Christ. I am not such a fool as to run
amuck against theology, as some people in this day do. But what I wish
to insist upon is that the first form of Christianity is not a theory,
but a history, and that the revelation of God is the biography of a man.
We must begin with the person, Christ, and preach Him. Would that all
our preachers and all professing Christians, in their own personal
religious life, had grasped this--that, since Christianity is not first
a philosophy but a history, and its centre not an ordered sequence of
doctrines but a living person, the act that makes a man possessor of
Christianity is not the intellectual process of assimilating certain
truths, and accepting them, but the moral process of clinging, with
trust and love, to the person, Jesus.

But, further, if any of you consult the original, you will see that the
order of the sentence is such as to throw a great weight of emphasis on
that last word 'crucified.' It is not merely a person that is portrayed
on the placard, but it is that person _upon the Cross_. Ah! brethren,
Paul himself puts his finger, in the words of my text, on what, in his
conception, was the throbbing heart of all his message, the vital point
from which all its power, and all the gleam of its benediction, poured
out upon humanity--'Christ crucified.' If the placard is a picture of
Christ in other attitudes and in other aspects, without the picture of
Him crucified, it is an imperfect representation of the Gospel that Paul
preached and that Christ was.

II. Now, think, secondly, of the fascinators that draw away the eyes.

Paul's question is not one of ignorance, but it is a rhetorical way of
rebuking, and of expressing wonder. He knew, and the Galatians knew,
well enough who it was that had bewitched them. The whole letter is a
polemic worked in fire, and not in frost, as some argumentation is,
against a very well-marked class of teachers--viz. those emissaries of
Judaism who had crept into the Church, and took it as their special
function to dog Paul's steps amongst the heathen communities that he had
gathered together through faith in Christ, and used every means to upset
his work.

I cannot but