is the mother church of Christendom. There the name "Christian" had its origin. There the work of converting the Gentiles was begun. The Greek churches of Cyprus and Asia Minor are regarded as dependencies of Antioch. Even those of the Greek peninsula are linked as well as may be to Antioch and Jerusalem, with suppression of the story of the schism. Antioch, not the Pauline Greek churches, is the benefactress of "the poor saints in Jerusalem," and at the instance of Antioch, by appeal to "the apostles and elders," the "decrees" are obtained which permanently settle the troublesome question of the obligation of maintaining ceremonial cleanness which still rests upon "the Jews which are among the Gentiles." As we have seen, the settlement is as far from that of Mark and the Pauline churches on the one side, as from the thoroughgoing legalism of Jerusalem on the other. As late as the Pastoral Epistles abstinence from "meats which God created to be received with thanksgiving by them that believe and know the truth" is to the Pauline churches a "doctrine of devils and seducing spirits" taught "through the hypocrisy of men that speak lies." Distinctions of meats belong to Jewish superstition, because "every creature of God is good and nothing is to be rejected, if it be received with thanksgiving" (1st Tim. iv. 1-5). Mark, as we have seen, takes precisely this standpoint. He is equally radical in condemning distinctions of meats as essentially "vain worship," and a "commandment of men" (Mark vii. 1-23). In truth if we distinguish one of Luke's _sources_ from Luke himself we shall find exactly this doctrine taught to Peter himself by special divine revelation in Acts x. 10-16; xi. 3-10. Only, as we have already seen (p. 59, note), this is not the application made by the Book of Acts, as it now stands, of the material. To 'Luke' nothing could be more repugnant than the idea of an apostle forsaking the religion of his fathers, of which circumcision and "the customs" are an essential part. His cancellation, in the story of Peter's revelation and the Apostle's subsequent defence of it before the church in Jerusalem, of one of its essential factors, viz. the right to _eat_ with Gentiles, regardless of man-made distinctions of meats ("what _God_ hath cleansed make not _thou_ common") is quite as significant as his restriction of even Paul's activity to Greek-speaking _Jews_, until "the Spirit" has expressly directed the church in Antioch, immediately after the persecution of Agrippa I, to proceed with the propaganda. Both alterations of the earlier form of the story are in line with a multitude of minor indications, and furnish us, in combination with them, the real keynote of the narrative. In Luke-Acts more clearly than in any of the gospels the writer assumes the distinctive function of the _historian_. He, too, would relate, like Mark, the origin of the Christian faith, and that "from the very first." He even deduces the