Nothing worse is indicated here than took place at Thessalonica, at Corinth, at Philippi, at Jerusalem, in the earliest years of those churches, and we have no right to infer from the faults of James’s readers a relatively late stage in their Christian history. Nothing in the epistle, it is true, refers to them as if they had lately come from Judaism or heathenism, or breathes the fresh enthusiasm of a newly planted church, and the sense of the very recent conversion of the readers which is often