ws first (iii. 26), but "all that are afar off" may share in it (ii.
39; iii. 25). This is exactly the doctrine expressed by St. Paul in
Rom. i. 16. And the conversion of Gentiles of different classes, as
recorded in Acts, testifies that the apostles acted up to the doctrine.
They did not doubt that the Gentiles had a right to the gospel. The
point which did agitate them was, how much of the Jewish ceremonial
ought the Gentiles to be required to observe. When the Gentile
converts became numerous the question became acute, being sharpened by
the demand of certain Jewish Christians that all converts should be
circumcised.

St. Peter and St. James set their faces against this demand, and it was
determined on their advice that the Gentiles should only be required to
abstain from "meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things
strangled, and from fornication" (xv. 29). The rule was primarily
meant for Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia. It prohibits complicity in
idolatry, and in the immorality with which Syrian idolatry had been
historically associated. And it prohibits the eating of blood and
things strangled, a practice which might cause friction in the presence
of Jewish communities. Nothing is said about circumcision or the
sabbath. It is impossible to reconcile Acts xv. with the {111} theory
that the original apostles were merely Jewish Unitarians who detested
St. Paul. And the Rationalists who have propagated this theory gain no
help either from Galatians or from Acts xxi. For St. Paul, in writing
to the Galatians, asserts the two central facts which we find in Acts
xv., viz. (i.) that his policy of an open gospel was opposed by a party
which appealed to the original apostles, (ii.) that the original
apostles gave him the hand of fellowship and repudiated the Judaizers.
In Acts xxi. 24 we find St. Paul himself performing a Jewish ceremonial
act at the request of St. James. The request was made in order to
counteract the falsehood that he had been trying to make the Hebrew
converts desert the old Jewish customs. It cannot be interpreted as a
proof of the supposed blind Judaism of St. James. For St. Paul
_voluntarily_ performed a similar act at Cenchreae, and we have no
ground for believing that he always claimed for himself that entire
freedom from Jewish usages which he always claimed for his Gentile
converts. His own words contradict such a notion emphatically (1 Cor.
ix. 20).

The truth is that it