GALATIANS, The Book of, Sylvester Hassell The epistle to the Galatians encounters, not the spirit of presumptuous freedom (as those to the Corinthians), but the spirit of a willful bondage, which returns, after its own stubborn and insensate fashion, to the elements of the world and the flesh; and this epistle asserts the direct revelation from Christ of the apostolic doctrine which shines out more clearly as a dispensation of the Spirit and of liberty. It was directed against those Judaizing teachers who undermined Paul’s apostolic authority, and misled the Galatians churches into an apostasy from the gospel of free grace to a false gospel of legal bondage. The epistle to the Galatians treats of the same subject as that to the Romans —the preparativeness and subordination of the law to the gospel. It is a remarkable fact that the two races represented by the original readers of these epistles—the Celtic and the Latin—have far departed from the doctrines taught them in them, and gone back from gospel freedom to legal bondage—thus repeating the apostasy of the fickle-minded Galatians. The Pauline gospel was for centuries ignored, misunderstood, and (in spite of Augustine) cast out by Jerusalem of old. But these two epistles, more than any other books of the New Testament, inspired the Reform-ation of the sixteenth century, and are to this day the Gibraltar of evangelical Protestantism.” (Hassell’s History pg 206)