his
countrymen at that age--hearing God's word without doing it, resting in
an empty faith that does not influence the life, inordinate love of
worldly possessions and a self-confident spirit in the pursuit of them,
wanton revelling in worldly pleasures, partiality towards the rich and
contempt of the poor, defrauding the poor of their wages, ambition to
assume the office of teaching, censoriousness, a lawless and slanderous
tongue, bitter envying and strife, mutual grudging and murmuring, wars
and fightings; all these with an unbelieving and complaining spirit
towards God. But these are not merely Jewish vices. They are deeply
rooted in man's fallen nature, and many a nominal Christian community of
our day may see its own image by looking into the mirror of this
epistle.

The alleged disagreement between Paul and James is unfounded. Paul's
object is to show that the ground of men's justification is faith in
Christ, and not the merit of their good works. The object of James is to
show that faith without good works, like the body without the spirit, is
dead. Paul argues against dead works; James against dead faith. Here we
have no contradiction, but only two different views of truth that are in
entire harmony with each other, and both of which are essential to true
godliness.

II. EPISTLES OF PETER.

7. The First Epistle of Peter was unanimously received by the primitive
church as the genuine work of the man whose name it bears. Polycarp, in
his epistle to the Philippians, made numerous citations from it. It was
also referred to by Papias, according to the testimony of Eusebius.
Hist. Eccl. 3. 39. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen,
etc. all quote it expressly. It is found in the Syriac Peshito version
which contains but three of the catholic epistles. It is wanting in the
Muratorian canon, but to this circumstance much weight cannot be
attached when we consider how dark and confused is the passage referring
to the catholic epistles.

8. _The readers_ addressed in the epistle are "the elect sojourners of
the dispersion, of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," all
provinces of Asia Minor. The words "sojourners"--or "strangers" as
rendered in our English version--and "dispersion" are both the
appropriate terms for the Jews living in dispersion. That the apostle,
in an introduction of this kind, should have used the word "sojourners"
in a simply figurative sense, to describe Christians a