dignity of his person_."[20] Again, another writer of the fourth century tells us this: "Therefore he inveighs against Peter alone, in order that the rest might learn in the person of him who is the first."[21] It was, then, Peter's primacy, and the necessity of agreeing with him thence arising, which led Paul to resist him publicly, and, disregarding the conduct of the rest, to direct an admonition to him alone. "So great," S. Jerome tells us, on these two passages, "was Peter's authority, that Paul in his epistle wrote, 'Then after three years I went to Jerusalem to see Peter, and I tarried with him fifteen days.' And again in what follows, 'After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me. And I went up according to revelation, and conferred with them the Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles,' _showing that he had no security in preaching the Gospel, unless it were confirmed by the sentence of Peter and those who were with him_."[22] But this passage,[23] concerning the reprehension of S. Peter by S. Paul, has afforded so signal an instance "of the unlearned and unstable wresting Scripture to their own proper destruction,"[24] that we must dwell a little longer upon it. First, the Gnostics and the Marcionites quoted it to accuse the Apostles of ignorance, and to favour their own claim to a progressive light. In Peter, they would have it, there was still a taint of Judaism. Next Porphyry, who "raged against Christ like a mad dog,"[25] tried by this passage to weaken the authority of the Apostles, and to convict Paul of ambition and rashness, who censured the first of the Apostles and the leader of the band, not privately, but openly before all, as S. Chrysostome and S. Jerome tell us. Julian the apostate succeeded these, and tried, by means of Paul's contention with Peter, to bring discredit on the religion itself. For who, he asked, could value a religion whose chief teachers were guilty of hypocrisy, ignorance, and ambition? And in complete accordance with the spirit of these, all, who, since the sixteenth century, have attempted to impugn S. Peter's prerogatives, have rested their chief effort on the exaggeration and distortion of this reprehension. "This," says Baronius, "is the stone of stumbling, and rock of offence, on which a great number have dashed themselves. For those, who without any diligent consideration have superficially interpreted a difficult statement, have gone so far in their folly as either to accuse Paul of rashness for having inveighed against Peter not merely with freedom, but wantonness, or to calumniate Peter as a hypocrite, for acting with dissimulation; or to condemn both, for not agreeing in the same rule of faith."[26]