circumcision, which we can readily detect by the pains and labors they have taken to free him from it. But the stain will not wash out. The story told in the Acts about the way in which Peter was disenthralled from his narrow Jewish notions, is wholly inconsistent with the subsequent history of the church at Jerusalem. After the Lord had taken so much pains to prove to the disciples that a new dispensation had commenced, and the wall between the Jews and Gentiles was broken down, there was no reason why they should not all dispense with the practice of circumcision. But they never did. The fifteen first Bishops of Jerusalem, commencing with James and including Judas, were all circumcised Jews. (Eus., Ex. 77., B., iv. ch. v. Sulpicius Severus, vol. 11-31.) With the twelve disciples, jealousy of Paul, who fought this Jewish practice to the last, seemed to be the most active feeling of their natures, and we seldom hear of them unless they were dogging his footsteps, and stirring up the Jews against him. It was through their intrigues that the doors of the synagogue were slammed in his face wherever he went. The doctrine of ordination, through which that deposit of divine riches which Irenæus says Christ left with the Apostles is made to flow in an uninterrupted current through all time, is conspicuously presented in the Acts. When Paul and Barnabas were at Antioch, and about to start for the West, on a mission to preach to the Gentiles, the Lord said, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." (Acts xiii. 2, 3.) Nothing could impose so great a humiliation as this upon Paul. The Lord again interferes and assigns him to a special duty, and to make this humiliation complete, he is ordered to receive his commission at the hands of the Apostles. Who laid their hands on Barnabas and Paul, is not stated, nor is it of any importance, as the object of the statement is to make it apparent that the latter, the great light of the Gentiles, submitted to the rite of ordination by the imposition of hands, administered by some one of the Apostles. Will any one believe this story to be true? If he does, he does not understand the character of Paul. There is nothing he would resent with so much feeling, as he would such an admission on his part that he was less than an Apostle. When it was claimed he was not, his soul took fire, and in his address to the Galatians, in the first chapter, he delivers himself in this defiant strain: "_Paul, an Apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead_.) But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me." (Gal. i.