Thus the blessed Lord is before us here again, filling our sphere of thought and contemplation. It is here just as it is in the Epistle to the Colossians. There, as here, errors and confusions in the Church are in view--a subtle theosophy and also a retrograde ceremonialism, probably both amalgamating into one dangerous total. And St. Paul's method of defence for his converts there--what is it? Above all, it is the presentation of Jesus Christ, in the glories of His Person and His Work. He places HIM in the very front of thought, first as the Head, Founder, and Corner-stone of the Universe; then as the Head, Redeemer, and Life of the Church. With HIM so seen he meets the dreamy thinker and the ceremonial devotee; Christ is the ultimate and only repose, alike for thought and for the soul. In this Epistle as in that we have the same phenomenon, deeply suggestive and seasonable for our life to-day. In both cases, not only for individuals but for the Church, there was mental and spiritual trouble. Alike in Phrygian Colossae and wherever the "Hebrews" lived there was an invasion of church difficulties and confusion. A certain affinity in detail links the two cases together. Colossian Christians and Hebrew Christians, under widely different circumstances, and no doubt in very different tones, persuasive in one case, threatening in the other, were pressed to _retrograde_ from the sublime simplicity and fulness of the truth. Their danger was what I may venture to call a certain medievalism. Not Mosaism, not Prophetism, but Judaism, the successor and distortion of the ancient revelations, invited or commanded their adhesion, or, in the case of the "Hebrews," their return, as to the one true faith and fold. There were great differences in detail. At Colossae it does not seem that the "medievalists" professed to deny Christianity; rather they professed to teach the Judaistic version of it as the authentic type. Among the "Hebrews" anti-Christianity was using every effort to allure or to alarm the disciples back to open Rabbinism, "doing despite to the Son of God." But both streams of tendency went in the same general direction so far that they put into the utmost prominence aspects of religion full of a traditional ceremonialism, and of the idea of human meritorious achievement rather than of a spiritual reliance for the salvation of the soul.