pause for a moment upon this original reference of my text,
because it is very relevant to the present condition of things amongst
us. These men whom Paul is fighting as if he were in a sawpit with them,
in this letter, what was their teaching? This: they did not deny that
Jesus was the Christ; they did not deny that faith knit a man to Him,
but what they said was that the observance of the external rites of
Judaism was necessary in order to entrance into the Church and to
salvation. They did not in their own estimation detract from Christ, but
they added to Him. And Paul says that to add is to detract, to say that
anything is necessary except faith in Jesus Christ's finished work is to
deny that that finished work, and faith in it, are the means of
salvation; and the whole evangelical system crumbles into nothingness if
once you admit that.

Now, is there anybody to-day who is saying the same things, with
variations consequent upon change of external conditions? Are there no
people within the limits of the Christian Church who are reiterating the
old Jewish notion that external ceremonies--baptism and the Lord's
Supper--are necessary to salvation and to connection with the Christian
Church? And is it not true now, as it was then, that though they do not
avowedly detract, they so represent these external rites as to detract,
from the sole necessity of faith in the perfected work of Jesus Christ?
The centre is shifted from personal union with a personal Saviour by a
personal faith to participation in external ordinances. And I venture to
think that the lava stream which, in this Epistle to the Galatians, Paul
pours on the Judaisers of his day needs but a little deflection to pour
its hot current over, and to consume, the sacramentarian theories of
this day. 'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' Is it not like
some malignant sorcery, that after the Evangelical revival of the last
century and the earlier part of this, there should spring up again this
old, old error, and darken the simplicity of the Gospel teaching, that
Christ's work, apprehended by faith, without anything else, is the
means, and the only means, of salvation?

But I need not spend time upon that original application. Let us rather
come more closely to our own individual lives and their weaknesses. It
is a strange thing, so strange that if one did not know it by one's own
self, one would be scarcely disposed to believe it possible, that a man
wh