“Whenever I look at Peter, my very heart leaps for joy. If I could paint a portrait of Peter I would paint upon every hair of his head ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’”— LUTHER.
“Quel Padre vetusto
Di santa chiesa, a cui Cristo le chiavi
Racommandó di questo fior venusto.”
DANTE, Paradiso, xxxii. 124.
“Blessed is the eunuch, which with his hands hath wrought no iniquity, nor imagined wicked things against God: for unto him shall be given the special gift of faith, and an inheritance in the temple of the Lord more acceptable to his mind. For glorious is the fruit of good labours: and the root of wisdom shall never fall away.”—WISD. 3:14, 15.
THE peace, the progress, the edification, the holiness of the Church, were caused, no doubt, by that rest from persecution which seems to have been due to the absorption of the Jews in the desire to avert the outrageous sacrilege of Gaius. And yet we cannot but ask with surprise whether the Christians looked on with indifference at the awful insult which was being aimed at their national religion. It would mark a state of opinion very different from what we should imagine if they had learnt to regard the unsullied sanctity of Jehovah’s Temple as a thing in which they had no longer any immediate concern. Can we for one moment suppose that James the Lord’s brother, or Simon the Zealot, were content to enjoy their freedom from molestation, without caring to take part in the despairing efforts of their people to move the compassion of the Legate of Syria? Is it conceivable that they would have stayed quietly at home while the other Jews in tens of thousands were streaming to his headquarters at Cæsarea, or flinging the dust upon their heads as they lay prostrate before him at Tiberias? Or was it their own personal peril which kept them from mingling among masses of fanatics who indignantly rejected their co–operation? Were they forced to confine their energies to the teaching of the infant churches of Palestine because they were not even allowed to participate in the hopes and fears of their compatriots? We may fairly assume that the Jewish Christians abhorred the purposed sacrilege; but if the schools of Hillel and Shammai, and the cliques of Hanan and Herod, hated them only one degree less than they hated the minions of Gaius, it is evident that there could have been nothing for the Apostles to do but to rejoice over their immediate immunity from danger, and to employ the rest thus granted them for the spread of the Kingdom of God. The kings of the earth might rage, and the princes imagine vain things, but they, at least, could kiss the Son,1 and win the blessing of those who trusted in the Lord. It was the darkest midnight of the world’s history, but the Gosnen of Christ’s Church was brightening more and more with the silver dawn.
To this outward peace and inward development was due an event which must continue to have the most memorable importance to the end of time—the admission of Gentiles, as Gentiles, into the Church of Christ. This great event must have seemed inevitable to men like St. Stephen, whose training as Hellenists had emancipated them from the crude spirit of Jewish isolation. But the experience of all history shows how difficult it is for the mind to shake itself free from views which have become rather instinctive than volitional; and though Jesus had uttered words which could only have one logical explanation, the older disciples, even the Apostles themselves, had not yet learnt their full significance. The revelation of God in Christ had been a beam in the darkness. To pour suddenly upon the midnight a full flood of spiritual illumination would have been alien to the method of God’s dealings with our race. The dayspring had risen, but many a long year was to elapse before it broadened into the boundless noon.
But the time had now fully come in which those other sheep of which Jesus had spoken—the other sheep which were not of this fold2—must be brought to hear His voice. Indirectly, as well as directly, the result was due to St. Paul in a degree immeasurably greater than to any other man. To St. Peter, indeed, as a reward for his great confession, had been entrusted the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and, in accordance with this high metaphor, to him was permitted the honour of opening to the Gentiles the doors of the Christian Church. And that this was so ordained is a subject for deep thankfulness. The struggle of St. Paul against the hostility of Judaism from without, and the leaven of Judaism from within, was severe and lifelong, and even at his death faith alone could have enabled him to see that it had not been in vain. But the glorious effort of his life must have been fruitless had not the principle at stake been publicly conceded—conceded in direct obedience to sanctions which none ventured to dispute—by the most eminent and most authoritative of the Twelve. And yet, though St. Peter was thus set apart by Divine foresight to take the initiative, it was to one whom even the Twelve formally recognised as the Apostle of the Uncircumcision, that the world owes under God the development of Christian faith into a Christian theology, and the emancipation of Christianity from those Judaic limitations which would have been fatal to its universal acceptance.3 To us, indeed, it is obvious that “it would have been impossible for the Gentiles to adopt the byelaws of a Ghetto.” If the followers of Christ had refused them the right–hand of fellowship on any other conditions, then the world would have gone its own way, and Mammon and Belial and Beelzebub would have rejoiced in the undisturbed corruption of a Paganism which was sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of shame.
And as this deliverance of the Gentiles was due directly to the letters and labours of St. Paul, so the first beginnings of it rose indirectly from the consequences of the persecutions of which he had been the most fiery agent. The Ravager of the Faith was unconsciously proving himself its most powerful propagator. When he was making havoc of the Church, its members, who were thus scattered abroad, went everywhere preaching the word. To the liberal Hellenists this was a golden opportunity, and Philip, who had been a fellow–worker with Stephen, gladly seized it to preach the Gospel to the hated Samaritans. The eye of Jesus had already gazed in that country on fields whitening to the harvests, and the zeal of Philip, aided by high spiritual gifts, not only won a multitude of converts, but even arrested the influence of a powerful goês, or sorcerer, named Simon.4 Justin Martyr calls him Simon of Gitton, and he has been generally identified with Simon Magus, the first heresiarch,5 and with Simon the Cyprian, whom Felix employed to entrap the wandering affections of the Queen Drusilla. This man, though, as afterwards appeared, with the most interested and unworthy motives, went so far as to receive baptism; and the progress of the faith among his former dupes was so remarkable as to require the immediate presence of the Apostles. St. Peter and St. John went from Jerusalem to confirm the converts, and their presence resulted not only in the public discomfiture of Simon,6 but also in that outpouring of special manifestations which accompanied the gift of the promised Comforter.
But Philip had the honour of achieving yet another great conversion, destined to prove yet more decisively that the day was at hand when the rules of Judaism were to be regarded as obsolete. Guided by divine impressions and angel voices he had turned his steps southward along the desert road which leads from Eleutheropolis to Gaza,7 and there had encountered the retinue of a wealthy Ethiopian eunuch, who held the high position of treasurer to the Kandake of Meroe.8 There seems to be some reason for believing that this region had been to a certain extent converted to Judaism by Jews who penetrated into it from Egypt in the days of Psammetichus, whose descendants still exist under the name of Falâsyán.9 The eunuch, in pious fulfilment of the duties of a Proselyte of the Gate—and his very condition rendered more than this impossible—had gone up to Jerusalem to worship, and not improbably to be present at one of the great yearly festivals. As he rode in his chariot at the head of his retinue he occupied his time, in accordance with the rules of the Rabbis, in studying the Scriptures, and he happened at the moment to be reading aloud in the LXX. version10 the prophecy of Isaiah, “He was led as a sheep to slaughter, and as a lamb before his shearer is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. In his humiliation his judgment was taken away, and his generation who shall declare? for his life is being taken from the earth.”11 Philip asked him whether he understood what he was reading? The eunuch confessed that it was all dark to him, and after having courteously invited Philip to take a seat in his chariot, asked who it was to whom the prophet was referring. Philip was thus enabled to unfold the Christian interpretation of the great scheme of prophecy, and so completely did he command the assent of his listener, that on their reaching a spring of water—possibly that at Bethsoron, not far from Hebron12—the eunuch asked to be baptised. The request was addressed to a large–hearted Hellenist, and was instantly granted, though there were reasons which might have made a James or a Simon hesitate. But in spite of the prohibition of Deuteronomy,13 Philip saw that the Christian Church was to be an infinitely wider and more spiritual communion than that which had been formed by the Mosaic ritual. Recalling, perhaps, the magnificent prediction of Isaiah,14 which seemed to rise above the Levitical prohibition—recalling, perhaps, also some of the tender words and promises of his Master, Christ—he instantly stepped down with the eunuch into the water. Without any recorded confession of creed or faith—for that which is introduced into Acts 8:37 is one of the early instances of interpolation15—he administered to one who was not only (as is probable) a Gentile by birth, but a eunuch by condition, the rite of baptism. The law of Deuteronomy forbade him to become a member of the Jewish Church, but Philip admitted him into that Christian communion16 in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither bond nor free.17
The subsequent work of Philip in the towns of Philistia and the sea–coast, as well as during his long subsequent residence at Cæsarea18 was doubtless fruitful, but for Christian history the main significance of his life lay in his successful mission to detested Samaritans, and in that bold baptism of the mutilated alien. Deacon though he was, he had not shrunk from putting into effect the divine intimations which foreshadowed the ultimate obliteration of exclusive privileges. We cannot doubt that it was the fearless initiative of Philip which helped to shape the convictions of St. Peter, just as it was the avowed act of St. Peter which involved a logical concession of all those truths that were dearest to the heart of St. Paul.
In the peaceful visitation of the communities which the undisturbed prosperity of the new faith rendered both possible and desirable, Peter had journeyed westward, and, encouraged by the many conversions caused by the healing of Æneas and the raising of Tabitha, he had fixed his home at Joppa, in order to strengthen the young but flourishing churches on the plain of Sharon. That he lodged in the house of Simon, a tanner, is merely mentioned as one of those incidental circumstances which are never wanting in the narratives of writers familiar with the events which they describe. But we may now see in it a remarkable significance. It shows on the one hand how humble must have been the circumstances of even the chiefest of the Apostles, since nothing but poverty could have induced the choice of such a residence. But it shows further that Peter had already abandoned Rabbinic scrupulosities, for we can scarcely imagine that he would have found it impossible to procure another home,19 and at the house of a tanner no strict and uncompromising follower of the Oral Law could have been induced to dwell. The daily contact with the hides and carcases of various animals necessitated by this trade, and the materials which it requires, rendered it impure and disgusting in the eyes of all rigid legalists. If a tanner married without mentioning his trade, his wife was permitted to get a divorce.20 The law of levirate marriage might be set aside if the brother–in–law of the childless widow was a tanner. A tanner’s yard must be at least fifty cubits distant from any town,21 and it must be even further off, said Rabbi Akibha, if built to the west of a town, from which quarter the effluvium is more easily blown. Now, a trade that is looked on with disgust tends to lower the self–respect of all who undertake it, and although Simon’s yard may not have been contiguous to his house, yet the choice of his house as a residence not only proves how modest were the only resources which Peter could command, but also that he had learnt to rise superior to prejudice, and to recognise the dignity of honest labour in even the humblest trade.
It is certain that two problems of vast importance must constantly have been present to the mind of Peter at this time: namely, the relation of the Church to the Gentiles, and the relation alike of Jewish and Gentile Christians to the Mosaic, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say— though the distinction was not then realised—to the Levitical law. In the tanner’s house at Joppa these difficulties were to meet with their divine and final solution.
They were problems extremely perplexing. As regards the first question, if the Gentiles were now to be admitted to the possession of full and equal privileges, then had God cast off His people? had the olden promises failed? As regards the second question, was not the Law divine? had it not been delivered amid the terrors of Sinai? Could it have been enforced on onenation if it had not been intended for all? Had not Jesus himself been obedient to the commandments? If a distinction were to be drawn between commandments ceremonial and moral, where were the traces of any distinction in the legislation itself, or in the words of Christ? Had He not bidden the leper go show himself to the priest, and offer for his cleansing such things as Moses has commanded for a testimony unto them?22 Had He not said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil?”23 Had He not even said, “Till heaven and earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled?”24
These perplexing scruples had yet to wait for their removal, until, by the experience of missionary labour, God had ripened into its richest maturity the inspired genius of Saul of Tarsus. At that period it is probable that no living man could have accurately defined the future relations between Jew and Gentile, or met the difficulties which rose from those considerations. St. Stephen, who might have enlightened the minds of the Apostles on these great subjects, had passed away. St. Paul was still a suspected novice. The day when, in the great Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, such problems should be fully solved, was still far distant. There is no hurry in the designs of God. It is only when the servitude is at its worst that Moses is called forth. It is only when the perplexity is deepest that Saul enters the arena of controversy. It was only in the fulness of time that Christ was born.
But even at this period St. Peter—especially when he had left Jerusalem—must have been forced to see that the objections of the orthodox Jew to the equal participation of the Gentiles in Gospel privileges could be met by counter objections of serious importance; and that the arguments of Hebraists as to the eternal validity of the Mosaic system were being confronted by the logic of facts with opposing arguments which could not long be set aside.
For if Christ had said that He came to fulfil the Law, had He not also said many things which showed that those words had a deeper meaning than the primâ facie application which might be attached to them? Had He not six times vindicated for the Sabbath a larger freedom than the scribes admitted?25 Had He not poured something like contempt on needless ceremonial ablutions?26 Had He not Himself abstained from going up thrice yearly to Jerusalem to the three great festivals? Had He not often quoted with approval the words of Hoshea: “I will have mercy and not sacrifice?”27 Had He not repeatedly said that all the Law and the Prophets hang on two broad and simple commandments?28 Had He not, both by word and action, showed His light estimation of mere ceremonial defilement, to which the Law attached a deep importance?29 Had He not refused to sanction the stoning of an adulteress? Had He not even gone so far as to say that Moses had conceded some things, which were in themselves undesirable, only because of the hardness of Jewish hearts? Had He not said, “The Law and the Prophets were UNTIL JOHN?”30
And, besides all this, was it not clear that He meant His Church to be an Universal Church? Was not this universality of the offered message of mercy and adoption clearly indicated in the language of the Old Testament? Had not the Prophets again and again implied the ultimate calling of the Gentiles?31 But if the Gentiles were to be admitted into the number of saints and brethren; if, as Jesus Himself had prophesied, there was to be at last one flock and one Shepherd,32 how could this be if the Mosaic Law was to be considered as of permanent and universal validity? Was it not certain that the Gentiles, as a body, never would accept the whole system of Mosaism, and never would accept, above all, the crucial ordinance of circumcision? Would not such a demand upon them be a certain way of insuring the refusal of the Gospel message? Or, if they did embrace it, was it conceivable that the Gentiles were never to be anything but mere Proselytes of the Gate, thrust as it were outside the portals of the True Spiritual Temple? If so, were not the most primary conceptions of Christianity cut away at the very roots? were not its most beautiful and essential institutions rendered impossible? How could there be love–feasts, how could there be celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, how could there be the beautiful spectacle of Christian love and Christian unity, if the Church was to be composed, not of members joined together in equal brotherhood, but of a proletariate of tolerated Gentiles, excluded even from the privilege of eating with an aristocracy of superior Jews? Dim and dwarfed and maimed did such an ideal look beside the grand conception of the redeemed nations of the world coming to Sion, singing, and with everlasting joy upon their heads!
And behind all these uncertainties towered a yet vaster and more eternal question. Christ had died to take away the sins of the world; what need, then, could there be of sacrifices? What significance could there be any more in the shadow, when the substance had been granted?33 Where was the meaning of types, after they had been fulfilled in the glorious Antitype? What use was left for the lamp of the Tabernacle when the Sun of Righteousness had risen with healing in His wings?
Such thoughts, such problems, such perplexities, pressing for a decided principle which should guide men in their course of action amid daily multiplying difficulties, must inevitably have occupied, at this period, the thoughts of many of the brethren. In the heart of Peter they must have assumed yet more momentous proportions, because on him in many respects the initiative would depend.34 The destinies of the world during centuries of history—the question whether, ere that brief aeon closed, the inestimable benefits of the Life and Death of Christ should be confined to the sectaries of an obsolete covenant and a perishing nationality, or extended freely to all the races of mankind—the question whether weary generations should be forced to accept the peculiarities of a Semitic tribe, or else look for no other refuge than the shrines of Isis or the Stoa of Athens—all depended, humanly speaking, on the line which should be taken by one who claimed no higher earthly intelligence than that of a Jewish fisherman. But God always chooses His own fitting instruments. In the decision of momentous questions, rectitude of heart is a far surer guarantee of wisdom than power of intellect. When the unselfish purpose is ready to obey, the supernatural illumination is never wanting. When we desire only to do what is right, it is never long before we hear the voice behind us saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it,” however much we might be otherwise inclined to turn aside to the right hand or to the left.
With such uncertainties in his heart, but also with such desire to be guided aright, one day at noon Peter mounted to the flat roof of the tanner’s house for his mid–day prayer.35 It is far from impossible that the house may have been on the very spot with the one with which it has long been identified. It is at the south–west corner of the little town, and the spring in the courtyard would have been useful to the tanner if he carried on his trade in the place where he lived. A figtree now overshadows it, and there may have been one even then to protect the Apostle from the Syrian sun. In any case his eyes must have looked on identically the same scene which we may now witness from that spot; a small Oriental town with the outline of its flat roofs and low square houses relieved by trees and gardens; a line of low dunes and sandy shore; a sea stretching far away to the Isles of the Gentiles—a golden mirror burning under the rays of the Eastern noon in unbroken light, except where it is rippled by the wings of the sea–birds which congregate on the slippery rocks beneath the town, or where its lazy swell breaks over the line of reef which legend has connected with the story of Andromeda. It is a meeting–point of the East and West. Behind us lie Philistia and the Holy Land. Beyond the Jordan, and beyond the purple hills which form the eastern ramparts of its valley, and far away beyond the Euphrates, were the countries of those immemorial and colossal despotisms—the giant forms of empires which had passed long ago “on their way to ruin:” before us—a highway for the nations—are the inland waters of the sea whose shores during long ages of history have been the scene of all that is best and greatest in the progress of mankind. As he gazed dreamily on sea and town did Peter think of that old prophet who, eight centuries before, had been sent by God from that very port to preach repentance to one of those mighty kingdoms of the perishing Gentiles, and whom in strange ways God had taught?36
It was high noon, and while he prayed and meditated, the Apostle, who all his life had heen familiar with the scanty fare of poverty, became very hungry. But the midday meal was not yet ready, and, while he waited, his hunger, his uncertainties, his prayers for guidance, were all moulded by the providence of God, to the fulfilment of His own high ends. There is something inimitably natural in the way in which truths of transcendent importance were brought home to the seeker’s thoughts amid the fantastic crudities of mental imagery. The narrative bears upon the face of it the marks of authenticity, and we feel instinctively that it is the closest possible reflection of the form in which divine guidance came to the honest and impetuous Apostle as, in the hungry pause which followed his mid–day supplications, he half–dozed, half meditated on the hot flat roof under the blazing sky, with his gaze towards the West and towards the future, over the blazing sea.
A sort of trance came over him.37
The heaven seemed to open. Instead of the burning radiance of sky and sea there shone before him something like a great linen sheet,38 which was being let down to him from heaven to earth by ropes which held it at the four corners.39 In its vast capacity, as in the hollow of some great ark, he saw all the four–footed beasts, and reptiles of the earth, and fowls of the air,40 while a voice said to him, “Rise, Peter, slay and eat.” But even in his hunger, kindled yet more keenly by the sight of food, Peter did not forget the habits of his training. Among these animals and creeping things were swine, and camels, and rabbits, and creatures which did not chew the cud or divide the hoof—all of which had been distinctly forbidden by the Law as articles of food. Better die of hunger than violate the rules of the Kashar, and eat such things, the very thought of which caused a shudder to a Jew.41 It seemed strange to Peter that a voice from heaven should bid him, without exception or distinction, to slay and eat creatures among which the unclean were thus mingled with the clean;—nay, the very presence of the unclean among them seemed to defile the entire sheet.42 Brief as is the narrative of this trance in which bodily sensations assuming the grotesque form of objective images became a medium of spiritual illumination,43 it is clearly implied that though pure and impure animals were freely mingled in the great white sheet, it was mainly on the latter that the glance of Peter fell, just as it was with “sinners” of the Gentiles, and their admission to the privileges of brotherhood, that his thoughts must have been mainly occupied. Accordingly, with that simple and audacious self–confidence which in his character was so singularly mingled with fits of timidity and depression, he boldly corrects the Voice which orders him, and reminds the Divine Interlocutor that he must, so to speak, have made an oversight.44
“By no means, Lord!”—and the reader will immediately recall the scene of the Gospel,in which St. Peter, emboldened by Christ’s words of praise, took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying, “Be it far from Thee, Lord,”— “for,” he added, with a touch of genuine Judaic pride, “I never ate anything profane or unclean.” And the Voice spake a second time: “What God cleansed, ‘profane’ not thou;” or, in the less energetic periphrasis of our Version, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.” This was done thrice, and then the vision vanished. The sheet was suddenly drawn up into heaven. The trance was over. Peter was alone with his own thoughts; all was hushed; there came no murmur more from the blazing heaven; at his feet rolled silently the blazing sea.
What did it mean? St. Peter’s hunger was absorbed in the perplexity of interpreting the strange symbols by which he felt at once that the Holy Spirit was guiding him to truth— to truth on which he must act, however momentous were the issues, however painful the immediate results. Was that great linen sheet in its whiteness the image of a world washed white,45 and were its four corners a sign that they who dwelt therein were to be gathered from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south; and were all the animals and creeping things, clean and unclean, the image of all the races which inhabit it? And if so, was the permission—nay, the command—to eat of the unclean no less than of the clean an indication that the Levitical Law was now “ready to vanish away;”46 and that with it must vanish away, no less inevitably, that horror of any communion with Gentile races which rested mainly upon its provisions? What else could be meant by a command which directly contradicted the command of Moses?47 Was it really meant that all things were to become new? that even these unclean things were to be regarded as let down from heaven? and that in this new world, this pure world, Gentiles were no longer to be called “dogs,” but Jew and Gentile were to meet on a footing of perfect equality, cleansed alike by the blood of Christ?
Nor is the connexion between the symbol and the thing signified quite so distant and arbitrary as has been generally supposed. The distinction between clean and unclean meats was one of the insuperable barriers between the Gentile and the Jew—a barrier which prevented all intercourse between them, because it rendered it impossible for them to meet at the same table or in social life. In the society of a Gentile, a Jew was liable at any moment to those ceremonial defilements which involved all kinds of seclusion and inconvenience; and not only so, but it was mainly by partaking of unclean food that the Gentiles became themselves so unclean in the eyes of the Jews. It is hardly possible to put into words the intensity of horror and revolt with which the Jew regarded swine.48 They were to him the very ideal and quintessence of all that must be looked upon with an energetic concentration of disgust. He would not even mention a pig by name, but spoke of it as dabharacheer, or “the other thing.” When, in the days of Hyrcanus, a pig had been surreptitiously put into a box and drawn up the walls of Jerusalem, the Jews declared that a shudder of earthquake had run through four hundred parasangs of the Holy Land.49 Yet this filthy and atrocious creature, which could hardly even be thought of without pollution, was not only the chief delicacy at Gentile banquets,50 but was, in one form or other, one of the commonest articles of Gentile consumption. How could a Jew touch or speak to a human being who of deliberate choice had banqueted on swine’s flesh, and who might on that very day have partaken of the abomination? The cleansing of all articles of food involved far more immediately than has yet been noticed the acceptance of Gentiles on equal footing to equal privileges.
And doubtless, as such thoughts passed through the soul of Peter, he remembered also that remarkable “parable” of Jesus of which he and his brother disciples had once asked the explanation. Jesus in a few words, but with both of the emphatic formulæ which He adopted to call special attention to any utterance of more than ordinary depth and solemnity—“Hearkenuntome,everyoneofyou, andunderstand;” “Ifanymanhathearstohear,lethim hear,”51—had said, “There is nothing from without a man entering into him which can defile him.” What He had proceeded to say—that what truly defiles a man is that which comes out of him—was easy enough to understand, and was a truth of deep meaning; but so difficult had it been to grasp the first half of the clause, that they had asked Him to explain a “parable” which seemed to be in direct contradiction to the Mosaic Law. Expressing His astonishment at their want of insight, He had shown them that what entered into a man from without did but become a part of his material organism, entering, “not into the heart, but into the belly, and so passing into the draught.” THIS, HE SAID—as now for the first time, perhaps, flashed with full conviction into the mind of Peter—MAKING ALL MEATS PURE;52— as he proceeded afterwards to develop those weighty truths about the inward character of all real pollution, and the genesis of all crime from evil thoughts, which convey so solemn a warning. To me it seems that it was the trance and vision of Joppa which first made Peter realise the true meaning of Christ in one of those few distinctutterances in which he had intimated the coming annulment of the Mosaic Law. It is, doubtless, due to the fact that St. Peter, as the informant of St. Mark in writing his Gospel, and the sole ultimate authority for this vision in the Acts, is the source of both narratives, that we owe the hitherto unnoticed circumstance that the two verbs “cleanse” and “profane”—both in a peculiarly pregnant sense—are the two most prominent words in the narrative of both events.
While Peter thus pondered—perplexed, indeed, but with a new light dawning in his soul—the circumstance occurred which gave to his vision its full significance. Trained, like all Jews, in unquestioning belief of a daily Providence exercised over the minutest no less than over the greatest events of life, Peter would have been exactly in the mood which was prepared to accept any further indication of God’s will from whatever source it came. The recognised source of such guidance at this epoch was the utterance of voices apparently accidental which the Jews reckoned as their sole remaining kind of inspired teaching, and to which they gave the name of BathKol.53 The first words heard by Peter after his singular trance were in the voices of Gentiles. In the courtyard below him were three Gentiles, of whom one was in the garb of a soldier. Having asked their way to the house of Simon the Tanner, they were now inquiring whether a certain Simon, who bore the surname of Peter, was lodging there. Instantly there shot through his mind a gleam of heavenly light. He saw the divine connexion between the vision of his trance and the inquiry of these Gentiles, and a Voice within him warned him that these men had come in accordance with an express intimation of God’s will, and that he was to go with them without question or hesitation. He instantly obeyed. He descended from the roof, told the messengers he was the person whom they were seeking, and asked their business. They were the bearers of a strange message. “Cornelius,” they said, “a centurion, a just man, and a worshipper of God, to whose virtues the entire Jewish nation bore testimony, had received an angelic intimation to send for him, and hear his instructions. Peter at once offered them the free and simple hospitality of the East; and as it was too hot and they were too tired to start at once on their homeward journey, they rested there until the following morning. Further conversation would have made Peter aware that Cornelius was a centurion of the Italian band;54 that not only he, but all his house, “feared God;” that the generosity of his almsgiving and the earnestness of his prayers were widely known; and that the intimation to send for Peter had been given to him while he was fasting on the previous day at three o’clock. He had acted upon it so immediately that, in spite of the heat and the distance of thirty miles along shore and plain, his messengers had arrived at Joppa by the following noon.
The next morning they all started on the journey which was to involve such momentous issues. How deeply alive St. Peter himself was to the consequences which might ensue from his act is significantly shown by his inviting no fewer than six of the brethren at Joppa to accompany him, and to be witnesses of all that should take place.55
The journey—since Orientals are leisurely in their movements, and they could only travel during the cool hours—occupied two days. Thus it was not until the fourth day after the vision of Cornelius that, for the first time during two thousand years, the Jew and the Gentile met on the broad grounds of perfect religious equality before God their Father. Struck with the sacredness of the occasion—struck, too, it may be, by something in the appearance of the chief of the Apostles—Cornelius, who had risen to meet Peter on the threshold, prostrated himself at his feet,56 as we are told that, three hundred years before, Alexander the Great had done at the feet of the High Priest Jaddua,57 and, six hundred years afterwards, Edwin of Deira did at the feet of Paulinus.58 Instantly Peter raised the pious soldier, and, to the amazement doubtless of the brethren who accompanied him, perhaps even to his own astonishment, violated all the traditions of a lifetime, as well as the national customs of many centuries, by walking side by side with him in free conversation into the presence of his assembled Gentile relatives. This he did, not from the forgetfulness of an enthusiastic moment, but with the avowal that he was doing that which had been hitherto regarded as irreligious,59 but doing it in accordance with a divine revelation. Cornelius then related the causes which had led him to send for Peter, and the Apostle began his solemn address to them with the memorable statement that now he perceived with undoubted certainty that “GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS, BUT IN EVERY NATION HE THAT FEARETH HIM AND WORKETH RIGHTEOUSNESS IS ACCEPTABLE TO HIM.”60 Never were words more noble uttered. But we must not interpret them to mean the same proposition as that which is so emphatically repudiated by the English Reformers, “That every man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that law and the light of Nature.” Had this been the meaning of the Apostle—a meaning which it would be an immense anachronism to attribute to him—it would have been needless for him to preach to Cornelius, as he proceeded to do, the leading doctrines of the Christian faith; it would have been sufficient for him to bid Cornelius continue in prayer and charity without unfolding to him “only the name of Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved.” The indifference of nationality was the thought in Peter’s mind; not by any means the indifference of religions. All who, to the utmost of the opportunities vouchsafed to them, fear and love God with sincerity of heart, shall be saved by Christ’s redemption; some of them—many of them—will He lead to a knowledge of Him in this life; all of them shall see Him and know Him in the life to come.61
Accordingly Peter proceeded to recall to these Gentiles all that they had heard62 of the preaching of peace by Jesus Christ the Lord of all; of His life and ministry after the baptism of John; how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power; how He went about doing good, and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil; and then of the Crucifixion and Resurrection from the dead, of which the disciples were the appointed witnesses, commissioned by the Voice of their risen Lord to testify that He is the destined Judge of quick and dead. And while Peter was proceeding to show from the Prophets that all who believed on Him should through His name receive remission of sins, suddenly on these unbaptised Gentiles no less than on the Jews who were present, fell that inspired emotion of superhuman utterance which was the signature of Pentecost. “The Holy Ghost fell upon them.” The six brethren who had accompanied Peter from Joppa might well be amazed. Here were men unbaptised, uncircumcised, unclean—men who had been idolators, dogs of the Gentiles, eaters of the unclean beast, whose touch involved ceremonial pollution—speaking and praising God in the utterances which could only come from hearts stirred by divine influence to their most secret depth. With bold readiness Peter seized the favourable moment. The spectacle which he had witnessed raised him above ignoble prejudices, and the rising tide of conviction swept away the dogmas and habits of his earlier years. Appealing to this proof of the spiritual equality of the Gentile with the Jew, he asked “whether any one could forbid water for their baptism?” No one cared to dispute the cogency of this proof that it was God’s will to admit Cornelius and his friends to the privileges of Christian brotherhood. Peter not only commanded them to be baptised in the name of the Lord, but even freely accepted their invitation “to tarry with them certain days.”
The news of a revolution so astounding was not long in reaching Jerusalem, and when Peter returned to the Holy City he was met by the sterner zealots who had joined Christianity, by those of whom we shall henceforth hear so often as “those of the circumcision,” with the fierce indignant murmur, “Thouwentestintothehouseofmen uncircumcised, and didst EAT WITH THEM!”63 To associate with them, to enter their houses, was not that pollution enough? to touch in familiar intercourse men who had never received the seal of the covenant, to he in daily contact with people who might, no one knew how recently, have had “broth of abominable things in their vessels”— was not this sufficiently horrible? But “toeatwiththem”— to eat food prepared by Gentiles—to taste meat which had been illegally killed by Gentile hands—to neglect the rules of the Kashar—to take food from dishes which any sort of unclean insect or animal, nay even “the other thing,” might have defiled—was it to be thought of without a shudder?64
Thus Peter was met at Jerusalem by something very like an impeachment, but he confronted the storm with perfect courage.65 What he had done he had not done arbitrarily, but step by step under direct divine guidance. He detailed to them his vision on the roof at Joppa, and the angelic appearance which had suggested the message of Cornelius. Finally he appealed to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which had been manifested in these Gentiles by the very same signs as in themselves. Was not this the promised baptism with the Holy Ghost? was it not a proof that God accepted these Gentiles no less fully than He accepted them?“What was I that I could withstand God?”
The bold defence silenced for a time the adversaries of what they regarded as an unscriptural and disloyal innovation. They could not dispute facts authenticated by the direct testimony of their six brethren,—whom Peter, conscious of the seriousness of the crisis, had very prudently brought with him from Joppa,—nor could they deny the apparent approval of heaven. The feeling of the majority was in favour of astonished but grateful acquiescence. Subsequent events prove only too plainly that there was at any rate a displeased minority, who were quite unprepared to sacrifice their monopoly of precedence in the equal kingdom of God. Even in the language of the others66 we seem to catch a faint echo of reluctance and surprise. Nor would they admit any general principle. The only point which they conceded was—not that the Gentiles were to be admitted, without circumcision, to full communion, still less that Jews would be generally justified in eating with them, as Peter had done—but only that “God had, it seemed, to the Gentiles also granted repentance unto life.”
Meanwhile, and, so far as we are aware, in entire independence of these initial movements, the Church had been undergoing a new and vast development in Syria, which transferred the position of the metropolis of Christianity from Jerusalem to Antioch, as completely as it was to be afterwards transferred from Antioch to Rome.