42
Sketches from the Life of Paul
church. This decision was then to be universally accepted by the
various churches throughout the country.
The apostles, in making their way to Jerusalem, called upon the
[64]
brethren of the cities through which they passed, and encouraged them
by relating their experience in the work of God, and the conversion
of the Gentiles to the faith. Upon arriving at Jerusalem, the delegates
from Antioch related before the assembly of the churches the success
that had attended the ministry with them, and the confusion that had
resulted from the fact that certain converted Pharisees declared that
the Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses
in order to be saved.
The Jews were not generally prepared to move as fast as the provi-
dence of God opened the way. It was evident to them from the result
of the apostles’ labors among the Gentiles, that the converts among the
latter people would far exceed the Jewish converts; and that if the re-
strictions and ceremonies of the Jewish law were not made obligatory
upon their accepting the faith of Christ, the national peculiarities of
the Jews, which kept them distinct from all other people, would finally
disappear from among those who embraced the gospel truths.
The Jews had prided themselves upon their divinely appointed
services; and they concluded that as God once specified the Hebrew
manner of worship, it was impossible that he should ever authorize
a change in any of its specifications. They decided that Christianity
must connect itself with the Jewish laws and ceremonies. They were
slow to discern to the end of that which had been abolished by the
death of Christ, and to perceive that all their sacrificial offerings had
but prefigured the death of the Son of God, in which type had met its
antitype rendering valueless the divinely appointed ceremonies and
[65]
sacrifices of the Jewish religion.
Paul had prided himself upon his Pharisaical strictness; but after
the revelation of Christ to him on the road to Damascus, the mission of
the Saviour, and his own work in the conversion of the Gentiles, were
plain to his mind; and he fully comprehended the difference between
a living faith and a dead formalism. Paul still claimed to be one of
the children of Abraham, and kept the ten commandments in letter
and in spirit as faithfully as he had ever done before his conversion
to Christianity. But he knew that the typical ceremonies must soon
altogether cease, since that which they had shadowed forth had come