well known, 1 Cor. viii. 1 ff., x. 25 ff., Rom. xiv. 2 ff., and the reference here cannot be mistaken; and when in the Epistle to the church of Thyatira, after denouncing the teaching "to eat things offered unto idols," the Apocalyptist goes on to encourage those who have not this teaching, "who knew not the depths of Satan, [------],(1) as they say" the expression of Paul himself is taken to denounce his doctrine; for the Apostle, defending himself against the attacks of those parties "of Cephas" and "of Christ" in Corinth, writes: "But God revealed (them) to us through his Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the depths of God" [------]--"the depths of Satan" rather, retorts the judaistic author of the Apocalypse. [------] does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament Again, in the address to the churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia, when the writer denounces those "who say that they are Jews, and are not, but a synagogue of Satan,"(2) whom has he in view but those Christians whom Paul had taught to consider circumcision unnecessary and the law abrogated? We find Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians, so often quoted, obliged to defend himself against these judaising parties upon this very point: "Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they Abraham's seed? so am I."(3) It is manifest that his adversaries had vaunted their own Jewish origin as a title of superiority over the Apostle of the Gentiles. We {316} have, however, further evidence of the same attack upon Paul regarding this point. Epiphanius points out that the Ebionites denied that Paul was a Jew, and asserted that he was born of a Gentile father and mother, but that, having gone up to Jerusalem, he became a proselyte and submitted to circumcision in the hope of marrying a daughter of the high priest. But afterwards, according to them, enraged at not securing the maiden for his wife, Paul wrote against circumcision and the Sabbath and the law.(1) The Apostle Paul, whose constant labour it was to destroy the particularism of the Jew, and raise the Gentile to full, free, and equal participation with him in the benefits of the New Covenant, could not but incur the bitter displeasure of the Apocalyptist, for whom the Gentiles were, as such, the type of all that was common and unclean. In the utterances of the seer of Patmos we seem to hear the expression of all that judaistic hatred and opposition which pursued the Apostle who laid the axe to the root of Mosaism and, in his efforts to free Christianity from trammels which, more than any other, retarded its triumphant development, aroused against himself all the virulence of Jewish illiberality and prejudice. The results at which we have arrived might be singularly confirmed by an examination of the writings of the first two centuries, and by observing the attitude {317}