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the body; whereas, by a proper faith in Jesus, the heart was purified and refined, 9. It was farther a burden, which the Jews themselves had ever felt an oppressive yoke. His address concludes in the following manner: "We believe that we are to be saved by the favour of our Lord Jesus Christ: in the same way must they also be saved." Which is to this effect: "Circumcision is not the mean by which we Jews obtain salvation. It cannot therefore be the medium of saving the Gentiles. Being useless in the Jewish converts, who are already circumcised, how can it be of any use to the heathen converts to be circumcised ?"

This argument was conclusive, and the assembly then adopted the following resolution, which they sent to the believers at Antioch and in other places. "For as much as we have heard, that some who went out from us have troubled you with doctrines, and unsettled your minds by enjoining circumcision, and the keeping of the law; to whom we gave no such commission we have all agreed to send chosen men unto you with our beloved brethren Barnabas and Paul; men who delivered up their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we have sent Judas and Silas with them, who also will tell you the same that we have written. For it seemeth good to the Holy Spirit and to us, to lay upon you no other burden than those necessary things, to abstain from eating sacrifices to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye wholly keep yourselves, ye will do well." xv. 24-80.

The persons who came down from Jerusalem to Antioch, to oppose the Apostles, appear to have been teachers of the anti-christian system; and the paragraph before us contains some intimations by which we can discover their character and views. The authors undoubtedly maintained the perpetual obligations of the Levitical code. They came in among the brethren merely to spy their liberty, and to bring them, if possible, again into bondage; nor did they insist on the necessity of circumcision on the part of the Gentile believers, from honest, yet mistaken zeal for the law, but from a secret conviction that the obligation, if maintained, would prove in the end effectual means to restrain the Gospel.

The same men, like their brethren, among the Gnostics, appear not to have the virtue and sincerity to suffer persecution for the faith. To this trait in their character, Paul and Barnabas afforded a striking contrast; and hence the meaning of the Apostles, when speaking of the two latter" Men who have delivered their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." As though they had said, "Barnabas and Paul have evinced their attachment to the Christian name, by submitting to grievous sufferings and imminent dangers. They therefore have the fairest claims to your confidence and obedience, and not those men who have neither the honesty directly to avow, nor the magnanimity to suffer, for the cause which they affect to espouse."

From the above address, it may farther be inferred, that the false teachers who came to Antioch, pretended to have received from the Apos

tles at Jerusalem, a commission to enforce on the Gentile converts the necessity of being cir cumcised. To their pretension in this respect the following clause bears an obvious allusion: "To whom we gave no such commission." This circumstance shews, that they were rank impostors. But though they had not been sent by the Apostles, they appear to have been sent by the Pharisees. For when Paul and Barnabas had arrived in Jerusalem, and laid the matter before the council, some of them stood up and defended their cause; urging the necessity of circumcision and other ritual observances. "And cer

tain believers of the sect of the Pharisees rose up and said, "It was proper to circumcise the Gentiles, and to command them to keep the law of Moses."

Since the end of the Gospel was to produce repentance and reformation in those who embraced it, the council did not enjoin on the Gentile believers any articles of faith beyond the great facts upon which the truth of it rests; that is to say, beyond the divine mission, the death and resurrection, of its founder; and which are not mentioned, because necessarily believed by all those who embraced Christianity. They do not say that, It seemeth good to the Holy Spirit and to us, to lay upon you no other burden than to believe the divinity, the miraculous birth and atonement of Christ, and ye will do well; but to abstain from Pagan idolatry and its immoral effects, and ye will do well."

I shall conclude this chapter with a few remarks on the interesting and pathetic account

which Luke has given of Paul's last address to the Christians at Antioch, Acts xx. 22-38.

1. The Apostle clearly asserts, that after his departure impostors would come, and by their baleful heresy infest the church at Antioch. They were doubtless in the number of those Pharisaical teachers, who came from Jerusalem to oppose the Apostles, and to enforce the rite of circumcision; and the description which he gives of them as wolves, wishing to devour the flock, renders it clear that they were the men against whom our Lord cautioned his disciples, in Matthew vii. and John x, where the same figures are used in describing them.

2. These deceivers rejected the man Jesus, and denied his title to be Lord over them. But the Apostle bears his testimony to the man Jesus, as the Lord who claimed his obedience and that of all others who professed his religion,

ver. 24.

S. Paul farther describes the doctrine which he preached as being a Gospel of the grace of God, that is, a doctrine which God revealed through Christ, containing the glad tidings of salvation to mankind, and not a fable of human invention, having no other object in view than the interest of those who preached it; a doctrine that held out the gift of eternal life on the sole condition of repentance and reformation, without the necessity of complying with burdensome rites, as was maintained by the deceivers.

4. The Apostle preached the kingdom of God, that is, he inculcated, in opposition to the impostors, that God governs the world; that he will vindicate his moral attributes by the future

distribution of rewards and punishments, and that the kingdom which he is to establish on the earth by means of Christ, is not carnal or temporal, as the Pharisaical teachers supposed, but consists in the universal prevalence of truth, virtue, and happiness.

5. One motive which the impostors had for pretending to believe in the Gospel, was the unbounded generosity of the early Christians, They made great gain of their boasted superior wisdom; and Peter and Paul expressly declare, that they were actuated solely by covetousness or interested motives. To the covetous and rapacious disposition of those men, and to their custom of living on those fruits of unrighteousness, which they obtained of their abused followers, the great Apostle of the Gentiles thus gloriously opposes his own behaviour: "I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel: yea, you yourselves know, that these hands have ministered to my necessities: and to them that were with me. I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring, you ought to support the weak and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said" It is more blessed to give than to receive."

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6. The early fathers, who maintain the divinity and miraculous birth of Christ are obliged to acknowledge that these doctrines were not taught at first by our Lord or his disciples*. In

The opinion held by the early fathers, and thence derived by the modern orthodox, is, that John wrote his Gos pel to attest the divinity of Christ, which had been omitted

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