Men of Israel, help: This is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against the people, and the law, and this place; and moreover he brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled this holy place. For they had before seen with him in the city Trophimus the Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple. And all the city was moved, and the people ran together; and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of the temple: and straightway the doors were shut."
And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious
experiment. Paul never tried another
like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the
story which forbids the idea that it was compromise
but it suffices at any rate to raise the whole
question of the wisdom of compromise as a principle
of action. It is the one incident in Paul's
life where he might be thought even for a moment
to have embarked on that course. Wherever
else we see him, he is a man of firm and
unflinching principles, who made no concealment
of what he believed, and did not try to adjust
his convictions and practices to other convictions
and practices that were at variance with them.
In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul
