I. This declaration, at the time when it was first uttered, was probably equally astonishing to the Jew and the Greek: for the Jew, with his long-descended traditions, his sense of privilege of the most exalted kind, his habit of regarding the nations of the earth as in some degree unclean by the side of the people of the circumcision, to be told that within the pale of the Church he must doff his privilege and take rank according to his spiritual growth in Christ and not according to the purity of his blood; for the Greek, with his eager inquiring intellect, his keen sense of beauty, his frank enjoyment of full sensuous life, to be told that within the Church he was no better than one of the strange race the Chinese of the Roman world whom he knew vaguely as believing in wonders and worshipping abstractions, avoiding the hospitable board and the festive gatherings in which he himself so much delighted this was no doubt a hard saying, such as a true Greek would scarcely hear with patience. And hence it is, probably, that in its early day Christianity made more progress in mixed populations, like those of Antioch and Ephesus and Corinth, where the Jew was somewhat less a Jew, and the Greek somewhat less a Greek, than among the pure Jews of Jerusalem, or the pure Greeks of Athens.
II. But, however startling it might be, there it was, one of the root principles of the Christian Church. No doubt national or ethnic peculiarities have had a very large influence in determining mankind to receive the easy yoke of Christ, and in modifying the Christianity of various tongues and peoples; but once within the Church, a man is a man; the body, soul, and spirit of a man are the qualifications for entering the Church of Christ, not the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or pure descent from the shadowy glories of Theseus or Herodes.
III. The Christian Church of the first ages was emphatically a great brotherhood. Perhaps at the time when St. Paul argued for the admission of Jew and Greek into the same community many of his countrymen imagined that he was introducing a long war of sects into that society where all should be peace and love. Yet the war between Christian Jew and Christian Greek was soon past, and out of this fermenting mass sprang the Catholic Church as we see it at the end of the third century. May we not hope that the time will come when the old traditions of the English Church, freshened and vivified by new influences, under the guidance of the One Spirit, may rise to higher wisdom and new life, and win more perfectly the love of a larger fraternity?
S. Cheetham, Sermon preached on St. Andrew's Day,1871.
References: Romans 10:12; Romans 10:13. Homilist,new series, vol. ii., p. 463.Romans 10:13; Romans 10:14. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. v., p. 32.