The second point in which St. Paul has been supposed to sanction an exaggerated form of Mysticism, is his extreme disparagement of external religion—­of forms and ceremonies and holy days and the like.  “One man hath faith to eat all things; but he that is weak eateth herbs.[101]” “One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike.”  “He that eateth, eateth unto the Lord, and giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks.”  “Why turn ye back to the weak and beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage again?  Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years.  I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed labour upon you in vain.[102]” “Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, nor taste, nor touch, after the precepts and doctrines of men?[103]” These are strongly-worded passages, and I have no wish to attenuate their significance.  Any Christian priest who puts the observance of human ordinances—­ fast-days, for example—­at all on the same level as such duties as charity, generosity, or purity, is teaching, not Christianity, but that debased Judaism against which St. Paul waged an unceasing polemic, and which is one of those dead religions which has to be killed again in almost every generation.[104] But we must not forget that these vigorous denunciations do occur in a polemic against Judaism.  They bear the stamp of the time at which they were written perhaps more than any other part of St. Paul’s Epistles, except those thoughts which were connected with his belief in the approaching end of the world.  St. Paul certainly did not intend his Christian converts to be anarchists in religious matters.  There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, that his spiritual presentation of Christianity had already been made an excuse for disorderly licence.  The usual symptoms of degenerate Mysticism had appeared at Corinth.  There were men there who called themselves “spiritual persons[105]” or prophets, and showed an arrogant independence; there were others who wished to start sects of their own; others who carried antinomianism into the sphere of morals; others who prided themselves on various “spiritual gifts.”  As regards the last class, we are rather surprised at the half-sanction which the apostle gives to what reads like primitive Irvingism;[106] but he was evidently prepared to enforce discipline with a strong hand.  Still, it may be fairly said that he trusts mainly to his personal ascendancy, and to his teaching about the organic unity of the Christian body, to preserve or restore due discipline and cohesion.  There have been hardly any religious leaders, if we except George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, who have valued ceremonies so little.  In this, again, he is a genuine mystic.