him to lay brief
and vigorous emphasis upon the universal range of Christian obligation
(8-10), and the motive which is to make Christians zealous in rising to
its fulfilment (11-14). Now[1] he comes back to the difficulties which
arise among Christians--the difficulties in actually living together as
members of the same community--difficulties on those small points of
religious observance which seem so unimportant {138} in the abstract,
and which, in the actual experience of intercourse, prove to be so
terribly important, and so easily give rise to a 'crisis in the
Church.' How were the reasonably-minded majority[2], who thought that
all kinds of food were morally indifferent, to behave towards the
scrupulous who would only eat vegetables? How were those Christians,
who recognized no distinction between one day and another, to behave
towards people who still held the mind of the writer of Ecclesiasticus,
that 'some days God had exalted and hallowed, and some he had made
ordinary days[3]'?

The problem of 'lawful meats' had often been before the early
Christians. It could not but have been so, seeing that those among
them, who had passed under Jewish influences had been brought under a
system in which the distinction between clean and unclean meats had
been rigorously observed. True, our Lord had 'made all meats
clean[4],' as He had opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
And the vision which reassured St. Peter on the {139} latter point, and
forbade him 'to call any man common or unclean[5],' was expressed in a
form which implied that the same principle would apply to food. But
this fundamental catholic principle, in its sharp opposition to Jewish
particularism, was not accepted without a struggle at every point. How
hotly, for a time, the struggle raged, we dimly perceive in the
narrative of the Acts, and especially in St. Paul's Epistle to the
Galatians[6]. But at the Jerusalem conference the fundamental catholic
principle was unmistakably reaffirmed. Gentiles were to be admitted to
brotherhood without circumcision or the keeping of the law. Henceforth
then the reactionaries had no ground to stand on. The law of clean and
unclean meats had gone with the rest of the Jewish laws. But while the
Gentiles won a complete victory on the main principle, they were
required by the apostolic council to make concessions to Jewish habits
in eating, such as could not affect the main principle. They were to
ea