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Nevertheless he revealed himself in every page of his writings and was evidently a man of broad sympathies, an acute observer, a careful historian, and a loyal friend. The story of his companionship with Paul begins in the record of the apostle’s second missionary journey when he was about to sail from Troas on the memorable voyage which resulted in establishing Christianity on a new continent.
Not such as, from Christian and brotherly charity, did privately chide and rebuke him, for the matter was not then depending in private rebukes, but by the Apostle’s direction it was brought to the church’s part and to public discipline, the scandal itself being so public and notoriously manifest; they were, therefore, such as had public office and authority to chide him.
If all the days whereof the Apostle condemned the observation were Judaical days prescribed in the ceremonial law, then do our divines falsely interpret the Apostle’s words against popish holidays, and the Papists do truly allege that their holidays are not condemned by the Apostle.
A banishment that had, at first, brought Him to the immediate vicinity of the strongholds of Shí’ah orthodoxy and into contact with its outstanding exponents, and which, at a later period, had carried Him to the capital of the Ottoman empire, and led Him to address His epoch-making pronouncements to the Sulṭán, to his ministers and to the ecclesiastical leaders of Sunní Islám, had now been instrumental in landing Him upon the shores of the Holy Land—the Land promised by God to Abraham, sanctified by the Revelation of Moses, honored by the lives and labors of the Hebrew patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets, revered as the cradle of Christianity, and as the place where Zoroaster, according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s testimony, had “held converse with some of the Prophets of Israel,” and associated by Islám with the Apostle’s night-journey, through the seven heavens, to the throne of the Almighty.
Our Master would not have the Jews to rest upon the testimony of John Baptist himself, but would have them to search the Scriptures, John v. 33, 34, 39, by which touch stone the Bereans tried the Apostle’s own doctrine, and are commended for so doing, Acts xvii. 11.
Sect. 4. Thus we see how the Apostle’s reasons hold good against our holidays; let us see next what respects of difference the Bishop can imagine to evidence wherefore the Judaical days may be thought condemned by the Apostle, and not ours. He deviseth a double respect; and first he tells us, that the Jewish observation of days was to a typical use.
I am therefore to digress with them. And I perceive, ere we know well where they are, they are passed from Scripture to custom. And after he saith, that we are taught by the Apostle’s example in “points of this nature, of ceremony or circumstance, ever to pitch upon habemus, or non habemus talem consuetudinem.” Ans. 1.
Impelled by such thoughts as these, he sat writing in the great chair, when the pleasant summer breeze came in through his open casement; and also when the fire of forest logs sent up its blaze and smoke, through the broad stone chimney, into the wintry air. Before the earliest bird sang, in the morning, the apostle’s lamp was kindled; and, at midnight, his weary head was not yet upon its pillow.
Howbeit the Apostle gave his judgment, that he should be excommunicate, because he ought not to have been tolerated in the church, yet, for all that, he should not have been indeed excommunicate and thrust out of the church of Corinth, except the ministers and elders of that church had, in name of the whole body of the same, judicially cast him forth and delivered him to Satan, which plainly argueth that he should not have been excommunicate by the Apostle’s authority alone, but by the authority of the church of Corinth.
So that it can never be proved that the meaning of these words, “He hath put all things under his feet,” is, that all government in this world is given to Christ as Mediator; and whoever saith so, must needs acknowledge that Christ’s exercising of government, as he is Mediator, over all principalities and powers, shall continue after all things shall be put under his feet; or that Christ shall not govern as Mediator, “till all things be put under his feet,” which is so contrary to the Apostle’s meaning, that Christ shall then cease to reign as Mediator.