When we set ourselves in our own later age to rehabilitate the sense of church membership, we feel at once the strength of the forces against us; we realize how much the feeling of blood-kinship in the family counts for, or the wider kinship of national life, or the common interests of our professions or our classes, compared to the feeble sense of fellowship which comes from a church membership which is so largely conventional. Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the barriers of Jewish isolation. A society in which men should be neither Jews nor {124} Gentiles, Greeks nor barbarians, bond nor free, but all should be welded into one manhood by the pressure of a common and constraining bond of brotherhood--a society in which even the savage and brutal Scythian should have equal fellowship with Greeks and Jews[4]--represented what had never yet been accomplished, and what the most sanguine might reasonably have thought impossible. The history of the Church, though not yet much more than thirty years old, had served already to emphasize the difficulty of the undertaking. We read the record of the first Jerusalem Church with its communism of love and sympathy, and it seems the perfect realization of the Christian spirit of brotherhood. So it was, but under comparatively easy conditions. For all that community were Jews with common traditions, sympathies, habits, ways of looking at things. They could behave as brethren, in the glow of their fresh enthusiasm at finding that the long-expected kingdom of Christ was now an actual fact, and its triumph to be immediately expected, without any real bridging of the gulfs which yawn between different sorts of men. That these gulfs still remained to be bridged soon appeared. It became manifest that {125} Gentiles, 'sinners of the Gentiles,' had to be received into Christian brotherhood upon equal terms, and without their accepting the Jewish law and customs. The Council at Jerusalem attempted a compromise by requiring of the Gentile converts certain accommodations to Jewish manners. But the compromise did not avail to overcome the difficulty. St. Paul found the centre of opposition to the equal admission of the Gentiles in that very Church of Jerusalem which had been previously foremost in the race of love. In fact, the true difficulty of the law of brotherhood only then appeared when the obligation to fuse inveterate national distinctions began to be enforced. Then indeed flesh and blood rebelled. Without going any further than this single