I. In the New Testament, Gamaliel appears twice, and both times in the most interesting way. First, he is the teacher of St. Paul, and so we are constantly led to speculate as to what part of his great pupil's character is due to him; and in the second place, when the Apostles were arrested very soon after the Pentecost for preaching Christ in Jerusalem. Gamaliel, a member of the Sanhedrim, before which they were brought for trial, uttered a memorable plea for toleration and delay of judgment. In the light of all the facts about him, it is not hard to see what sort of a man Gamaliel was. He was a great teacher and a great preacher of toleration. The scholar of truth must trust truth; that is Gamaliel's ground. The man of mere affairs may be a bigot, but not the scholar; the student must claim for himself and for all men, liberty.
II. There are some men whose whole influence is to keep history open, so that whatever good thing is trying to get done in the world can get done; not the doers of great things, but the men who help to keep the world so truly poised that good forces shall have chance to work. These words of Gamaliel seem to point him out as being such a man. To him, evidently, surrounding all that man does behind it and before it, and working through it there is God. And with God are the final issues and destinies of things. Work as man will, he cannot make a plan succeed which God disowns; work as man will, he cannot make a plan fail which God approves. That is a noble and distinct faith. It is stepping across the line between fear and courage, between restlessness and peace, between intolerance and charity, when a man thoroughly, heartily, enthusiastically, enters into that faith, when he comes to really believe that with all his heart and soul. These words of Gamaliel are the words of all really progressive spirits. The final glory of Gamaliel lies there. He believed that God was the only life of this world, that all who did not live in Him must die. We do not know whether Gamaliel became a Christian before he died, whether in this life he ever saw that the true light which these poor prisoners adored was true and gave himself to Christ. But at least we know that if we have rightly read his character and story, he made the Christian faith more possible for other men, and he must somewhere, sometime, if not here, then beyond, have come to the truth and to the Christ Himself.
Phillips Brooks, Sermons in English Churches,p. 243.
References: Acts 5:38. Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 110; S. Macnaughton, Real Religion and Real Life,p. 309; C. P. Reichel, Church of England Pulpit,vol. x., p. 337; Phillips Brooks, Ibid.,vol. xxi., p. 279. Acts 5:38; Acts 5:39. Ibid., Contemporary Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 54; Ibid., The Anglican Pulpit of To-day,p. 397. Acts 5:41; Acts 5:42. C. J. Vaughan, Church of the First Days,vol. i., p. 204.Acts 5:42. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 369; Contemporary Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 180; Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 327; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 232; vol. xxviii., p. 357; v. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 285.