Christianity may be said to have attained self-consciousness as a new religion in the great argument directed by Paul along the lines of his own gospel against Peter and the older apostles. Its victory as a universal religion of 'grace' over the limitations of Judaism was due to the common doctrine of 'the Spirit.' This was the one point of agreement, the one hope of ultimate concord among the contending parties. All were agreed that endowment with 'the Spirit' marks the Christian. It was in truth the great inheritance from Jesus shared by all in common. And Peter and James admitted that to deny that uncircumcized Gentiles had received the Spirit was to "contend against God." After Paul's death ecclesiastical development took mostly the road of the synagogue. The sense of the presence and authority of 'the Spirit' grew weaker, the authority of the letter stronger. From the outset even the Pauline churches, in ritual, order, observance, had followed instinctively this pattern. All continued, as a matter of course, to use the synagogue's sacred writings. Paul himself, spite of his protest against "the letter," could make no headway against his opponents, save by argument from 'Scripture.' He had found in it anticipations and predictions of his own Christian faith; but by an exegesis often only little less forced and fantastic than that of the rabbinic schools in which he had been trained. This was a necessity of the times. The reasoning, fallacious as it seems to-day, had appealed to and strengthened Paul's own faith, and was probably effective with others, even if the faith really rested on other grounds than the reasoning by which it was defended. The results of this biblicism were not all salutary. The claims of written authority were loosened rather than broken. Paul himself had found room enough within these defences for the religion of the Spirit; but a generation was coming with less of the sense of present inspiration. Dependence on past authority would be increased in this new generation in direct proportion to its sense of the superior 'inspiration' of the generation which had gone before. Paul is unhampered by even "the scriptures of the prophets" because in his view these take all their authority and meaning from "the Lord, the Spirit." Hence "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Only the remembered "word of the Lord" has authority for Paul beyond his own, even when he thinks that he also has the Spirit. With that exception past revelation is for Paul subordinate to present. But Paul's immediate disciple, the author of Hebrews, is already on a lower plane. This writer looks back to a threefold source of authority: God had spoken in former ages "by the prophets" and to the present "by a Son," but he looks also to an apostolic authority higher than his own: The word "was confirmed unto us by them that heard, God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders, and by manifold powers, and by gifts