herein St. Paul had not one apostle, prophet or teacher, of that age who heartily joined in with him, except Timothy" (pp. 56-72).

"The great concerning debate, therefore, of that time [“the standing controversy between St. Paul and the apostles and teachers of the circumcision," p. 54] was reduced to these two questions: first, whether the Jewish converts were still obliged, in point of religion and conscience, to obey the whole law? and, secondly, whether the Gentile converts, as a matter of religion and conscience, were bound to comply with the Mosaic law of proselytism, as the necessary condition upon which the Christian Jews were to hold communion with them? In both these points the apostles, elders and brethren at Jerusalem, in consequence of their decree, stood to the affirmative; while Paul as stiffly maintained the negative against them. . . . . This controversy continued all St. Paul's lifetime, that is, from the year 49, in which the decree passed, to the year 68, when St. Paul was martyred at Rome. This controversy at length rose so high that the rest of the apostles, not excepting Peter, Barnabas and John Mark, not being able to come into St. Paul's scheme, thought themselves obliged to separate themselves from him, and leave him to preach his own gospel,' as he called it, among the Gentiles, in his own way. And though St. Paul still insisted upon immediate revelation for this, yet the rest of the apostles, it seems, never had any such revelation, nor could St. Paul ever convince them. . . . . Upon the whole, I think, it is evident, from all the memoirs of this great apostle's life which are still extant among us in the history of the Acts and his own genuine Epistles, that all his sufferings and persecutions all along arose from his struggling as much as possible for natural right and reason against the superstition of the Christian Jews and their pretended religious obligations to the law of Moses, which they thought themselves still as much obliged by as before" (pp. 78-80). In support of his claim to apostolic authority, and his right to preach Christ free from legal conditions, "Paul strenuously asserts himself to have been constituted and appointed sole apostle of the Gen

tiles by a revelation from Christ; he denies all jurisdiction and authority of the circumcision over them, not excepting, but expressly including, Peter himself" (p. 377). "If we take St. Paul's word for it, Peter had no more right to the apostleship of the Gentiles than he" [an opponent of Morgan's] “or I have" (Vol. II. p. 244). "There is no authentic account of any of the Twelve but Peter, James and John, as having had any share in preaching and spreading the gospel; and the rest, having been disappointed of the kingdom, might have betaken themselves to their fishing and respective callings again, for anything we know to the contrary" (Vol. II. p. 232).

The baneful spirit of Jewish Christianity was shewn not merely in persistent rejection of Paul's truer view of the faith: see Vol. I. p. 364. "But these Judaizers or Christian Jews did not stop here; but soon fell into gross idolatry, and set up a great number of mediators and intercessors with God instead of one. We have, indeed, no distinct, plain account of this in profane story, as we have very little of that kind before the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century. But it is confessed on all hands that the Apocalypse was writ long before, and is a book of the apostolic age. I think Sir Isaac Newton has proved it to be a genuine work of St. John's, and that it was written in Nero's time, two or three years before the destruction of Jerusalem. And however dark and obscure the prophetic parts of it may be, yet the doctrinals contained in it are very clear and cannot easily be mistaken. And from this book, I think, it appears plainly that the Christian Jews, so early as this, had established the mediation of angels, the invocation of the saints, and prayers for the dead. They prophesied the sudden downfal of the Roman empire, and the near approach of a fifth monarchy, by the coming of Christ with a sufficient power from heaven to set up his temporal kingdom at Jerusalem, when all enemies were to be destroyed by fire and sword, and the government of the earth to be given to these militant saints. .... But the great and dangerous part of the scheme, with regard to these primitive Christian Jews, was that they confined salvation to themselves. They believed in

Christ only as their national restorer and deliverer, or the hope and salvation of Israel; and they excluded the whole Gentile world from all the benefits of the kingdom, but on the condition of their being circumcised or at least being naturalized by proselytism. No Christian Jew ever believed in or preached Christ as the common Saviour of the world, of both Jew and Gentile, by a new law of his own, independent of the law of Moses. They always took the fifth monarchy or kingdom of the Messiah to be a temporal kingdom, which was immediately to succeed the destruction of the Roman, Latin or Western empire sealed at Rome. And they founded this kingdom in blood and temporal destruction, as the four monarchies before had been successively founded. And they believed that a new Jerusalem would be the metropolis of this empire, a city to be built without hands, and coming down from heaven, twelve thousand furlongs square, or fifteen hundred miles; and that all the Gentiles would be forced to bring in their riches and treasures as contributions and marks of homage to their Jewish Messiah, whose reign was to be a thousand years. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and the prophets, and all the believing holy Jews in every age or country, were to be raised from the dead to possess this kingdom, and to glut their revenge upon the Gentile, unbelieving world. This was the Jewish gospel, and this is the plain and evident doctrine of the Apocalypse. And whoever does not believe this must be damned, and the deepest curse or anathema is denounced at the close against that man who should add to or diminish from the words of this book.... . It is plain that the author looked upon all the events there represented to him as very near at hand and just ready to be accomplished. It is a revelation of things which were shortly to come to pass.'... It is evident that the author confines salvation to the Jews only: for when the saints come to be marked and entered into the book of life, to prevent their common destruction with the Gentile world, there are none marked or entered but Jews; only twelve thousand out of each tribe are marked for life, and these are gathered and selected out of every kindred and tongue and nation, where they were

then scattered and dispersed; but not one Gentile was to be saved" (pp. 364-372). The Jewish Christians narrowed the limits of salvation even more than the Jews had done (Vol. II. p. 250).

Morgan does not fail to observe and propose a solution of the inevitable problem as to how it was that "the Jewish and Gentile Christianity, or Peter's religion and Paul's," thus seemingly opposite and inconsistent, came "so soon afterwards to unite into one Catholic, Christian Church. The persecutions drove them together; and particularly that first and bloody persecution under Nero, as well as those that followed, in which the Gentile Christians were punished as Jews. For when the Gentile converts found that the heathen Gentiles were their common enemies, they united with the Jewish Christians, to the great advantage of Judaism in the Christian Church. They separated from the heathen Gentiles, as the Jews had always done before, and so became Jewish proselytes, which had been the chief thing in dispute. They likewise came into the notion of the fifth monarchy, or a temporal Jewish kingdom, by the sudden coming of Christ from heaven to destroy the Roman empire and to set up his own kingdom at Jerusalem. And the Gentile Christians being thus far reconciled to the Christian Jews, they joined with them likewise in setting up a hierarchy in the Church, or an external, visible authority and jurisdiction over conscience in matters of religion and eternal salvation. This hierarchy they called the true, visible, Catholic Church, out of which there could be no salvation. They assumed all the gifts and powers of the apostles to cast out devils and to give the Holy Ghost..... And the efficacy of all this they declared to depend on their administrations and the regular succession of their bishops from the apostles. They excluded all heretics, or dissenters and protestants, who would not submit to this church authority or anti-christian hierarchy, out of the kingdom of heaven; and declared episcopal disobedience to be not only a damnable but unpardonable sin, never to be expiated, even by the blood of martyrdom. This was the primitive, Catholic Church of the first three centuries" (pp. 377-379).

But it is a mistake to suppose "that the Catholics were then the whole Church, or the best Christians, any more than they are now. They called themselves the Catholic Church because they were the majority, and because they had impudence enough, on the strength of this majority, to claim a universal authority over the consciences of all Christians. They pretended to be the true and only rightful successors of the apostles. . . . . But at the same time there were great numbers of dissenters and protestants against this anti-christian claim of spiritual power, and who strenuously asserted and maintained the liberty of conscience and right of private judgment upon St. Paul's scheme, against any such general and enormous apostasy and depravation of all religion by a power claimed from Peter. But these truly primitive Christians. ... were branded as heretics, called in derision by the general name of Gnostics, because they pretended to be wiser than the Church, and claimed a right of judging for themselves" (pp. 380, 381). By their persecutions the early Catholics make it clear "that their anti-christian kingdom, or visible, Catholic, authoritative Church, subsisted before Mr. Whiston's date by several hundred years; and that St. Paul was not in the wrong when he declared it commenced in his time; and that it would be more fully and compleatly revealed and established as soon as 'he [this apostle himself] who then hindered it should be taken out of the way.' This is the plain and natural construction of St. Paul's words and sense" (p. 380). The Catholics claimed authority from St. Peter. "And though they could never prove by any authentic evidence that St. Peter ever was at Rome, or that his apostolical office and character would admit of his being bishop there, yet they built the Roman ecclesiástical hierarchy upon this most absurd and senseless supposition. But it must be owned that this hierarchical form of government in the Church did not begin at Rome. It began at Antioch in Syria, which was the mother Church of Christendom till the conversion of the Roman emperors shut her out, and substituted Rome and Constantinople in her place. But still you will find the same hierarchical anti-christian scheme in the