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Apostles given, lost, and restored [by T. Carlyle].
Apostles given lost and restored - by T. Carlyle Author:Thomas Carlyle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tile should be fellow-heirs and of the same body—Eph. Hi. 5, of that mystery of which Paul was the proper steward. It was an act for which Petr himself, in his i... more »gnorance, needed to be prepared by an express vision. In order then to show, not only that the Gentiles were to share in th privileges of the Jews, but that they were to do so on an independent footing anil not as subsidiary to the Jews, God repeated, as far as it could be repeated, the act done at Pentecost, and gave to the Gentiles the Holy Ghost, not through the Jews, but direct. This, however, did not prove that baptized Geutiles should receive the Spirit without apoetles. It might as well be used to prove that Gentiles need not be baptized, in order to receive the Spirit, and thus to contradict the promise throngh Peter. It merely proved that they were to receive the Spirit from Christ, and not from the Jewish polity. Th second passage Is the precise counterpart of the first. Paul was onbaptized. He was not a member of Christ. He could not receive the Spirit throngh apostles, who were eent to give the Spirit to the church alone. If he was to receive the Spirit, he behoved to do so in another and extraordinary manner ; for his position was abnormal. It pleased God, that, like the centurion, Paul should so receive the gift, and be subsequently baptized—and so it was. Moreover, even granting that he received the Holy Ghost through the hands of Ananias, we can see reasons for his receiving the gift through the hands of a man which did not apply to the case of Cornelius. Paul, though the predestined apostle to the Gentiles, was himself a Jew. God showed otherwise that bis apostlesh:p was not derived from the Jews. But there was no ???e??ry call to assert his independent reception of the Spirit es a man. There was, there...« less