Hence, in contesting the Jewish claim to religious superiority on the ground of circumcision and the Abrahamic covenant, St Paul developed in the epistle to the Galatians a religious philosophy of history; he arrived at a view of the function of the law in the education of mankind which disposed not only of the question at issue, but of all such questions. He established for ever the principle of salvation by faith and of spiritual sonship to God. What that former argument effects for the history of revelation, is done here for the gospel in its relations to society and universal life. The principle of Christ’s headship is carried to its largest results. The centre of the Church becomes the centre of the universe. God’s plan of the ages is disclosed, ranging through eternity and embracing every form of being, and “gathering into one all things in the Christ.” In Galatians and Romans the thought of salvation by Christ breaks through Jewish limits and spreads itself over the field of history; in Colossians and Ephesians the idea of life in Christ overleaps the barriers of time and human existence, and brings “things in heaven and things in earth and things beneath the earth” under its sway. The second, historical note of original Paulinism we recognize in the writer’s _attitude towards Judaism_. We should be prepared to stake the genuineness of the epistle on this consideration alone. The position and point of view of the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles are unique in history. It is difficult to conceive how any one but Paul himself, at any other juncture, could have represented the relation of Jew and Gentile to each other as it is put before us here. The writer is a Jew, a man nourished on the hope of Israel (i. 12), who had looked at his fellow-men across “the middle wall of partition” (ii. 14). In his view, the covenant and the Christ belong, in the first instance and as by birthright, to the men of Israel. They are “the near,” who live hard by the city and house of God. The blessedness of the Gentile readers consists in the revelation that they are “fellow-heirs and of the same body and joint-partakers with us of the promise in Christ Jesus” (iii. 6). What is this but to say, as the apostle had done before, that the branches “of the naturally wild olive tree” were “against nature grafted into the good olive tree” and allowed to “partake of its root and fatness,” along with “the natural branches,” the children of the stock of Abraham who claimed it for “their own”; that “the men of faith are sons of Abraham” and “Abraham’s blessing has come on the Gentiles through faith”?[3]