+I. Legalism is no advance on heathenism.+--"When ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods" (ver. 8). Paganism was an elaborate system of formalism. The instinct of worship led men to sacrifice to imaginary deities--gods which were no gods. Ignorant of the true God, they multiplied deities of their own. The Galatian pagans created a strange Pantheon. There were the old weird Celtic deities before whom our British forefathers trembled. On this ancestral faith had been superimposed the frantic rites of the Phrygian mother Cebele, with her mutilated priests, and the more genial and humanistic cultus of the Greek Olympian gods. The oppressive rites of legalism were little better than the heathen ritual. Religion degenerated into a meaningless formality. Dickens describes how in Genoa he once witnessed a great feast on the hill behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright with red and gold and blue and silver--so many minutes of dancing and of praying in regular turns of each. +II. Legalism to converted heathen, is a disastrous relapse.+--"After ye have known God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements? . . . Ye observe days and months and times and years" (vers. 9, 10). The heathen in their blindness and ignorance might be excused, and ritualism, even to the Jews before the coming of the Messiah, might be well enough; but for Christians, who had received ampler knowledge and been illumined by the Holy Spirit, to return to the weak and beggarly elements, was irrational, monstrous! Having tasted the sweets of liberty, what folly to submit again to slavery! having reached spiritual manhood, how childish to degenerate! Legalism destroys the life of religion and leaves only a mass of petrified forms. In his _Stones of Venice,_ Ruskin says: "There is no religion in any work of Titian's; there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or sympathies either in himself or those for whom he painted. His larger sacred themes are merely for the exhibition of pictorial rhetoric--composition and colour. His minor works are generally made subordinate to the purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the Frari church is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who surround her. Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice had expired."