Yet he was as guiltless of any wish to relax the restraints of morality as was, in later days, his great counterpart Luther. Each rose up against a narrow formalism, and proclaimed the liberty of the Christian from obligation to barren ceremonial; but there were those in the first, as there were those in the sixteenth century, with more zeal than self‐ control, who found “Justification by Faith only” a very comfortable doctrine, quite capable of accommodating itself to a sensual or careless life. St. Paul may have seen, and probably did see, that Christianity would never make way if one part of the community was to be fettered by legal restrictions, and the other part was to be free. According to the purpose apparent in the minds of James and Peter, the Jewish converts were to remain Jews, building up Christian faith on the foundation of legal prescriptions, whilst the Gentile converts were to start from a different point. There could be no unity in the Church under this system—all must go under the Law, or all must fling it off. The Church, starting from her cradle with such an element of weakness in her constitution, must die prematurely. He was right in his view. But it is by no means certain that St. Peter and St. James were as obstinately opposed to the gradual relaxation of legal restrictions, and the final extinction or transformation of the ceremonial Law, as he supposed. In the heat and noise of controversy, he no doubt used unguarded language, said more than he thought, and his converts were not slow to take him _au pied de la lettre_. The tone of Paul’s letters shows conclusively that not for one moment would he relax moral obligation. With the unsuspiciousness of a guileless spirit, he never suspected that his words, taken and acted upon as a practical system, were capable of becoming the charter of antinomianism. Yet it was so. No sooner had he begun to denounce the Law, than he was understood to mean the whole Law, not merely its ceremonial part. When he began to expatiate on the freedom of Grace, he was understood to imply that human effort was overridden. When he proclaimed Justification by Faith only, it was held that he swept away for ever obligation to keep the Commandments. The results were precisely the same in the sixteenth century, when Luther re‐affirmed Paulinism, with all his warmth and want of caution. At first he proclaimed his doctrines boldly, without thought of their practical application. When he saw the results, he was staggered, and hasted to provide checks, and qualify his former words: