These doctrines and rites alike-may seem to us so closely identified with Christ that we can hardly separate them. And to meddle with them may seem to be meddling with the very essence of religion. There may be much that is good and right in such an attitude of mind. Neither here nor anywhere does St Paul, any more than his Master, say anything against an intelligent devotion to religious forms; a Sabbath-keeping which is reasonable, however punctilious-or a ritualism which is without superstition, however elaborate. These things have their appropriate sphere in religion—if only we remember that they are not of its essence. They do not, any of them, make religion. They may greatly help it; and some may be more helpful to us than others, and therefore better for us, more prized by us, than others. But none of them so belong to religion that unless we have them we cannot be religious, or unless other people have them they cannot be religious. So soon as we begin to discriminate religion by any such formalities, we are in danger of sinking from the true evangelical position. To take up the words of the apostle once more, we are in danger of removing "from him that called us unto the grace of Christ unto another gospel."

We come under his merited rebuke, "Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain."

With a view of bringing out the lesson more clearly, let us take by way of illustration the case, immediately suggested by the text, of keeping Sunday. We have seen already that the apostle could not mean to disdain such an observance. He himself kept Sunday. There is reason to think he kept the Jewish Sabbath besides. He did the latter because he had been bred a Jew-and Jewish rites had had a strong hold of his religious life; and it is not easy, and can seldom be a good thing, for a man to separate violently between his former and later religious life, to break off sacred associations and try to dwell in an entirely new atmosphere of feeling and thought. So in part St Paul remained a Jew. But he had learned of Christ to regard all he did as a Jew in a right spirit. He knew that he had "received the Spirit," not "by the works of the law," but "by the hearing of faith ;" and having begun in the Spirit, he knew that he could not be made perfect in the flesh. St Paul's Sabbath-keeping, therefore, was to him, as a Christian, no longer an essential part of

religion. He did not suppose that keeping the Sabbath, any more than the Christian Sunday, made him righteous or acceptable before God-which the Jews did, and he himself had formerly done. He had the true righteousness "which is of God by faith of Christ;" and what was to him, therefore, the keeping of a day?

And is not St Paul's way in this matter a good guide to us? Let us be assured of our higher ground, let us take care that we are one with God in Christ-that the love of God and of our brother is in our hearts-and then our Sabbath-keeping will take care of itself. We may keep the day more strictly, or we may keep it less strictly, but we will keep it to the Lord. The higher Spirit in us will suffuse itself through our whole life. And whatsoever we do in word or in deed, we shall do it in the name of Christ, "giving thanks to God and the Father by Him."* But let us come down from this higher ground and attach importance to special modes of keeping the Sabbath, let us speak of any outward ordinances, any specialties of observance, as absolutely divine law-our own view of which is not

* Colossians, iii. 17.

only good for ourselves, but compulsory upon others, without which they cannot be religious -what is this but to fall to the level of the Galatian apostates-to remove unto another gospel- to mix up the life of religion with beggarly elements; in other words, to materialise and dishonour it? What is it but to sink the life in the form, the essence in the accident-to turn away from God and the soul's rest in Christ to the bondage of burdens which neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? What is it but to confuse men's sense of religion-to falsify their ideas of sin, and hence their ideas of righteousness; and so to leave them a prey to the first form of superstition which may be powerful enough to lay hold of them?

But let us take a still more general illustration, no less in the spirit of our text. St Paul, we have seen, when he became a Christian, did not altogether cease to be a Jew; and this was still more true of the other apostles. In this very Epistle, as already adverted to, there is unhappy evidence of the extent to which St Peter allowed the old unsoftened Jewish spirit to assert itself in his conduct, and of the manner in which St Paul was forced to withstand him. "I with

stood him to the face," St Paul says, "because he was to be blamed."* Of St James, the author of the Epistle known by his name, and the head of the Church in Jerusalem, there is reason to think that he never ceased to be a Jew at all, and that he only imperfectly understood the freer Christian views of St Paul.

What a lesson is there in all this for us, who have sometimes difficulty in recognising each other to be Christians because we do not belong to the same Christian communion or Church, as it is called! What a monition as to the right way in which we should regard all such outward distinctions! These distinctions may by no means be unimportant-they may have much value for the life of religion in some; but they are all of its accidents-none of its essence. And so soon as we begin to look upon them as essential-as marking religion in men, instead of merely denoting the sections of the religious community-we begin to fall to the Galatian level. We come to think of our denomination -Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or something else more than of Christ, and of the keeping of rites more than of the hearing of faith. We leave the Gospel of St Paul, and sink to that of St Galatians, ii. 11.