The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of which the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The other party, led by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous heretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of Paul. It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters are more familiar. We see him,--deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive; intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly passion,--lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling, stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world of troubled conflict. We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament; ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly confident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest wedding of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths. Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness and difficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of a celestial aid,--he calls it "the love of Christ,"--which somehow brings habitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, and gives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition.