At the present moment, I do not suppose there is an English missionary in any heathen land who would trouble himself whether the materials of his dinner had been previously offered to idols or not.  On the other hand, I suppose there is no Protestant sect within the pale of orthodoxy, to say nothing of the Roman and Greek Churches, which would hesitate to declare the practice of circumcision and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and dietary rules, shockingly heretical.

Modern Christianity has, in fact, not only shifted far to the right of Justin’s position, but it is of much narrower compass.

Justin
___________/\________________
/                             \
Judaeo-Christianity   Modern Christianity  Paganism
Judaism     _____/\_____                   _______/\_______
/            \                 /                \
I.     II.     III.      IV.         V.   VI.     VII.      VIII.

For, though it includes VII., and even, in saint and relic worship, cuts a “monstrous cantle” out of paganism, it excludes, not only all Judaeo-Christians, but all who doubt that such are heretics.  Ever since the thirteenth century, the Inquisition would have cheerfully burned, and in Spain did abundantly burn, all persons who came under the categories II., III., IV., V. And the wolf would play the same havoc now, if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed by the secular arm.

Further, there is not a Protestant body except the Unitarian, which would not declare Justin himself a heretic, on account of his doctrine of the inferior godship of the Logos; while I am very much afraid that, in strict logic, Dr. Wace would be under the necessity, so painful to him, of calling him an “infidel,” on the same and on other grounds.

Now let us turn to our other authority.  If there is any result of critical investigations of the sources of Christianity which is certain,[76] it is that Paul of Tarsus wrote the Epistle to the Galatians somewhere between the years 55 and 60 A.D., that is to say, roughly, twenty, or five-and-twenty years after the crucifixion.  If this is so, the Epistle to the Galatians is one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, of extant documentary evidences of the state of the primitive Church.  And, be it observed, if it is Paul’s writing, it unquestionably furnishes us with the evidence of a participator in the transactions narrated.  With the exception of two or three of the other Pauline Epistles, there is not one solitary book in the New Testament of the authorship and authority of which we have such good evidence.

And what is the state of things we find disclosed?  A bitter quarrel, in his account of which Paul by no means minces matters, or hesitates to hurl defiant sarcasms against those who were “reputed to be pillars”:  James “the brother of the Lord,” Peter, the rock on whom Jesus is said to have built his Church, and John, “the beloved disciple.”  And no deference toward “the rock” withholds Paul from charging Peter to his face with “dissimulation.”