128 



THEODORE ROBERTS, ESQ., ON 



suicide in despair of liis country; or Socrates, the best of non- 

 Christian teachers, refusing to escape by bribery from his death 

 sentence, with the slave Blandina in a.d. 177, enduring prolonged 

 and terrible tortures until death released her, and amidst her 

 greatest agonies merely protesting, " I am a Christian and no 

 wickedness is done among us." 



III. 



\Ve now withdraw^ within the Christian circle and find oar 

 third decisive Scene in the well-known controversy between Paul 

 and Peter at Antioch, related by the former in his Epistle to the 

 Galatians, the most characteristic of all his writings. The great 

 Apostle of the Gentiles, like Athanasius in a later day, found him- 

 self alone against the rest. The coming of the strict Jews from 

 James at Jerusalem had led Peter to forsake those very Gentiles 

 to whom he had opened the door of salvation at Caesarea and to 

 set up a narrower circle than true Christion fellowship, and Paul 

 sorrowfully records that even the faithful Barnabas was swept 

 away by the rising tide of Jewish exclusivism. 



He at once recognized what was at stake, nothing less than the 

 whole conception of Christianity as a world religion, afterwards 

 so wonderfully expounded by him in his Epistle to the Ephesians 

 (so called). So he took the daring step, so inexplicable to those 

 who assert the Primacy of Peter and the infallibility of the Roman 

 bishops, among whom they vainly place the Apostle, of publicly 

 arraigning that Apostle before the whole Antiochian church for his 

 patent denial of true Christian liberty. 



But we must not regard the Apostle Paul as a statesman acting 

 with a view to the future, but rather as a simple believer whose 

 conscience compelled him to adhere at all cost to his divinely 

 gi\en concept of the Gospel. It required no small courage for 

 him to oppose men like Peter and Barnabas, long his seniors in 

 the faith, with the whole Church apparently behind them; but 

 what he did then at Antioch bore fruit in the decree of the first 

 Christian Council, that at Jerusalem, held (I believe) shortly after 

 this scene, at which the Gentile believers were put on a platform 

 of perfect equality with their Jewish brethren. He himself speaks 

 of refusing to give place to his opponents, even for an hour, in 

 order that the truth of the Gospel might continue with the Gentile 

 believers, which shows what he felt was in question in the dispute. 



IV. 



We now pass from the sure ground of holy writ to the equally 

 interesting history of the Christian church in later ages. In our 

 next decisive Scene we find Christianity so established in the world 

 that participation in its rites is regarded as a privilege by the 

 greatest of monarchs. 



