But if the unity of the Church, as St. Paul expounds it, is before all else a unity of life, it is as well a unity in the truth. It is a unity based on belief in a divine revelation, given in the person of Christ--based on the common confession that Jesus crucified and risen is Christ and Lord[14]. To say that 'Jesus is the Lord' {157} involves further--what is implied in this passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians--the confession of the threefold name--the 'one God and Father,' the 'one Lord' Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the 'one Spirit' which is His gift; and there can be no real question that St. Paul's language constantly involves that the Son and Spirit are with the Father really personal, and really divine, included, so to speak, in the one only eternal Godhead. A creed then is at the basis of the Christian life--a creed which finds its best expression and safeguard in the formulated doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. There is no reason to think that St. Paul, if the situation of the later Church could have been made plain to him, would have shrunk from these dogmatic safeguards of the Church's central faith. But if we grant--what cannot really with any show of reason be denied--that the Church is a visible organization based on a certain revealed truth, which must be accepted by its members, and which admits of being formulated in order to be preserved; still this truth may be advanced and defended mainly by one of two methods--that of external regulative authority, or that of appeal to principles, discussion, controversy, {158} exhortation. And it can hardly be denied that St. Paul prefers the latter. Sharp appeals to authority are indeed to be found in St. Paul[15], but they are very rare. For example, in none of his epistles against the Judaizers is the authority of the apostolic decision, as to what might and what might not be required of the Gentile Christians 'in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia[16],' brought into requisition; though that decision 'settled the question.' He prefers to prove that 'circumcision is nothing.' This may be in part accounted for by St. Paul's refusal to admit that his own apostolic authority needed the support of the twelve, and by the limited area to which the decision was addressed; but there is another reason as well. For he plainly, as all his epistles show, prefers to appeal not to authority at all but to the spiritual reason; to expound principles, to argue, to awaken the heart, conscience, and mind of Christians. It must be admitted that there is very little in St. Paul's epistles about differences of doctrinal views among Christians as distinct from differences in practices. Yet there is enough--as in the vigorous passage about the 'regarding of one {159} day above another[17]'--to justify the belief that he would not have viewed with any disapproval the existence in the Church of tolerated differences of opinion where they did not touch the basis of the Church's life.