The three principles which we have emphasised as contributing most to the characteristic features of primitive Christianity could also, if necessary, have been brought to bear within the framework of Judaism and in connexion with the synagogue. There, too, Jesus could have been acknowledged as the Lord, the new experience united with the ancestral religion, and the society of brothers developed in the form of a Jewish conventicle. In Palestine, as a matter of fact, this was the form which the earliest communities took. But the new principles displayed great vigour and pointed far beyond Judaism: Jesus Christ the Lord is not only Israel’s Lord, but the Lord of history, the Lord of all men. The new experience of a direct union with God makes the old worship with its priests and mediations unnecessary. The society of brothers towers over all other associations and deprives them of any value. The inner development which the new tendency virtually comprised began at once. Paul was not the first to start it; before and side by side with him there were obscure and nameless Christians in the dispersion who took up Gentiles into the new society. They did away with the particularistic and statutory regulations of the law by declaring that they were to be understood in a purely spiritual sense and to be interpreted as symbols. There was a branch of the Jewish world outside Palestine where this declaration had long taken actual effect—it is true, on other grounds— and where the Jewish religion was being freed from its limitations by a process of philosophical interpretation which was bringing it to the level of a spiritual religion for the whole world. This development may be regarded in the light of a preliminary stage in the history of Christianity and was in many respects really so. It was the stage on which those nameless Christians entered. It was the path upon which a deliverance from historical Judaism and its outworn religious ordinances was capable of gradual attainment. But one thing is certain; it was not the goal of the movement. So long as the words “the former religion is done away with” remained unspoken, there was always a fear that in the next generation the old precepts would be brought forward again in their literal meaning. How often and often in the history of religion has there been a tendency to do away with some traditional form of doctrine or ritual which has ceased to satisfy inwardly, but to do away with it by giving it a new interpretation. The endeavour seems to be succeeding; the temper and the knowledge prevailing at the moment are favourable to it—when, lo and behold! the old meaning suddenly comes back again. The actual words of the ritual, of the liturgy, of the official doctrine, prove stronger than anything else. If a new religious idea cannot manage to make a radical breach with the past at the critical point—the rest may remain as it is—and procure itself a new “body,” it cannot last; it disappears again. There is no tougher or more 1 conservative fabric than a properly constituted! religion; it can only yield to a higher phase by ¦ being abolished. No permanent effect, then, could be expected in the apostolic age from the twisting and turning of the law so as to make room for the ‘ new faith side by side with it, or so as to approximate the old religion to that faith. Someone had to stand up and say “The old is done away with”; he r had to brand any further pursuit of it as a sin; he f had to show that all things were become new. The man who did that was the apostle Paul, and it is in having done it that his greatness in the history of the world consists.
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