――Simon Peter now, in the accomplishment of that divinely appointed task, became the ROCK, on which the church of Christ was, through the course of ages, reared; and in this act, the first stone of its broad Gentile foundation was laid. _On duty about him._――This phrase is the just translation of the technical term προσκαρτερουντων, (_proskarterounton_,) according to Price, Kuinoel, Bloomfield, &c. Of all the honors with which his apostolic career was marked, there is none which equals this,――the revolutionizing of the whole gospel plan as before understood and advanced by its devotees,――the enlargement of its scope beyond the widest range of any merely Jewish charity,――and the disenthralment of its subjects from the antique formality and cumbrous ritual of the Jewish worship. And of all the events which the apostolic history records, there is none which, in its far-reaching and long-lasting effects, can match the opening of Christ’s kingdom to the Gentiles. What would have been the rate of its advancement under the management of those, who, like the apostles hitherto, looked on it as a mere improvement and spiritualization of the old Mosaic form, to which it was, in their view, only an appendage, and not a substitute? Think of what chances there were of its extension under such views to those far western lands where, ages ago, it reached with its benign influences the old Teutonic hordes from whom we draw our race;――or of what possibility there was of ever bringing under the intolerable yoke of Jewish forms, the hundreds of millions who now, out of so many lands and kindreds and tongues, bear the light yoke, and own the simpler faith of Jesus, confessing him Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Yet hitherto, so far from seeing these things in their true light, all the followers of Christ had, notwithstanding his broad and open commission to them, steadily persisted in the notion, that the observance of the regulations laid down by Moses for proselytes to his faith, was equally essential for a full conversion to the faith of Christ. And now too, it required a new and distinctly repeated summons from above, to bring even the great chief of the apostles to the just sense of the freedom of the gospel, and to the practical belief that God was no respecter of persons. But the whole progress of the event, with all its miraculous attestations, left so little doubt of the nature of the change, that Peter, after the manifestation of a holy spirit in the hearts and voices of the Gentile converts, triumphantly appealed to the Jewish brethren who had accompanied him from Joppa, and asked them, “Can any one forbid the water for the baptizing of these, who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we?” Taking the unanimous suffrage of their silence to his challenge, as a full consent, he gave directions that the believing Romans should be baptized in the name of the Lord, as Jesus in his parting charge had constituted that ordinance