ADVERTISEMENT.

A FEW paragraphs, which were omitted in preaching, because they would have occupied too long a time, are now printed, and included in brackets.

Α

SERMON.

GALATIANS i. 8, 9.

"But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.

"As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other Gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed."

THE specific kind of false teaching, condemned in this awful sentence, was the doctrine of the Judaizing heretics, who preached the necessity of circumcision as well as of faith in Christ. This intermediate system of compromise was partly devised by men who, being Jews by birth, still clung to the Mosaic law; and partly by men of a corrupt and subtle mind, who shrank from the persecution of the Jewish zealots.

It would seem also, that even the Gnostic heretics, although themselves of Gentile birth, and uninitiated into Judaism, enforced nevertheless the necessity of circumcision. The reason of which St. Paul intimates, "If I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet

suffer persecution? Then is the offence of the cross ceased," (v. 11.) They thought to make faith in Christ a passport to reigning, and circumcision a talisman against suffering with Him.

Let all such, writes St. Paul, be cut off from the body of Christ. Yea, "though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel, beside that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."

It appears that the Judaizing teachers quoted the authority of St. Peter, St. James, and St. John, who, as they alleged, did not prohibit circumcision. "Observe the wisdom of the Apostle: lest any man should say, that he vaingloriously harped upon his own doctrines, he anathematizes also himself. And whereas the heretics betook themselves to authorities, as James and John, he therefore brings in angels also. Tell me not, he says, of James and John, for though the corrupter of the Gospel be one of the foremost angels of heaven, let him be accursed1."

Surely this apostolic sentence was not uttered against one isolated error, or against the wilful heretic, or for the first times of the Church alone, but, like the Gospel which it guards with its awful condemnation, is everlasting. We may no more swerve from the pure faith of Christ's Gospel, and be held guiltless, than the fickle Galatian, or the inflated Gnostic. And though wilful heresy be the blacker

1 S. Chrysostom in loc.