“And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of principle he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate that there was no truth in the reports which were circulated concerning him, it may well be that he tried to show that they were not wholly true. It was evidently assumed by those who accused him of ‘teaching all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs,’ that he hated the Jewish law and that he was doing all that lay in his power to destroy it; that he believed and that he taught everywhere that its observance was under any and all circumstances a positive sin. But this assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not hostile to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had no binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with all his might the idea that its observance had any value as a means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to the believer’s righteousness or growth in grace; but he held no such view of the law as made its observance necessarily sinful, and rendered it impossible for him ever to observe it himself in any respect. And it was not at all unnatural that he should desire to convince the Christians of Jerusalem of the fact; especially when he had come thither with the express purpose of conciliating them and winning their favour for himself and for his Gentile converts. He would have been very foolish under these circumstances to allow such a false impression touching his attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted.”[1] [1] “The Apostolic Age,” p. 341. This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course, but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious arrangements, sacrificing some