“And when the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the multitude and laid hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel, help: This is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against the people, and the law, and this place; and moreover he brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled this holy place. For they had before seen with him in the city Trophimus the Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple. And all the city was moved, and the people ran together; and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of the temple: and straightway the doors were shut.” And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious experiment. Paul never tried another like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the story which forbids the idea that it was compromise but it suffices at any rate to raise the whole question of the wisdom of compromise as a principle of action. It is the one incident in Paul’s life where he might be thought even for a moment to have embarked on that course. Wherever else we see him, he is a man of firm and unflinching principles, who made no concealment of what he believed, and did not try to adjust his convictions and practices to other convictions and practices that were at variance with them. In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul says, “To whom we gave place ... no, not for an hour.” And then he tells of the time when Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to his face because he had been a trimmer and compromiser; for Peter, acting on the generous impulse of his own heart as to what was right, had indeed bravely eaten with the converted Gentiles, but when some men came down from Jerusalem who were close to James, he withdrew himself from the Gentiles, fearing, no doubt, that it might injure him in Jerusalem. Paul does not say anything in any letter about this particular incident in Jerusalem, in which, for the one time in his life, he was overpersuaded by his friends and put in a position where he was very much misunderstood, and where he appeared to be compromising the great principles in which he earnestly believed. We know what the far-reaching consequences were. A great deal of trouble was brought into his life by this act. It was out of it that all those succeeding events came which took him at last to Rome to be tried before Cæsar. Some may say that these results were good. Undoubtedly God led Paul’s course on, but we may believe that God might have had even greater things for him to do if only he had in this incident pursued his customary course.