t'6 RORJE PAULlNili. 



whicli preaching was communicated not by them to him, 

 but by himself to them ; that he had maintained the liberty 

 of the Gentile church by opposing-, upon one occasion, an 

 apostle to the face, when the timidity of his behavior seemed 

 to endanger it ; that from the first, that all along, that to 

 that hour he had constantly resisted the claims of Judaism : 

 and that the persecutions which he daily underwent, at the 

 hands or by the instigation of the Jews, and of which he 

 bore in his person the marks and scars, might have been 

 avoided by him, if he had consented to employ his labors in 

 bringing, through the medium of Christianity, converts ovei 

 to the Jewish institution, for then " would the offence of the 

 cross have ceased." Now an impostor who had forged the 

 epistle for the purpose of producing St. Paul's authority in 

 the dispute, which, as has been observed, is the only cred 

 ible motive that can be assigned for the forgery, might hav( 

 made the apostle deliver his opinion upon the subject in 

 strong and decisive terms, or might have put his name to a 

 train of reasoning and argumentation upon that side of the 

 question which the impostor was intended to recommend. 

 I can allow the possibility of such a scheme as that ; but for 

 a writer, with this purpose in view, to feign a series of trans- 

 actions supposed to have passed among the Christiai"!.- of 

 Galatia, and then to counterfeit expressions of anger and 

 resentment excited by these transactions ; to make the apos- 

 tle travel back into his own history, and into a recital of 

 various passages of his life, some indeed directly, but others 

 obliquely, and others even obscurely bearing upon the pomt 

 in question ; in a word, to substitute narrative for argument, 

 expostulation and complaint for dogmatic positions and con- 

 troversial reasoning, in a writing properly controversial, and 

 of which the aim and design was to support one side of a 

 much agitated question — is a method so intricate, and so 

 unlike the methods pursued by all other impostors, as tc 

 require very flagrant proofs of imposition to induce us to be 

 lieve it to be one. 



