St. Paul's famous statement of universal fellowship radically proposes that Christian faith renders indifferent the distinctions of ethnicity, caste, and gender. His contention that Israel's covenantal bonds were illegitimately dividing the early Christian church suggested that all people were eligible for conversion regardless of their earthly stations. Relegating the rite of circumcision to local custom, St. Paul replaced the Jewish covenant with a broader universalism whose basis for inclusion was faith – an intrinsically internal state. As Julia Reinhard Lupton explains, “Once spiritualized, [God's covenant] can also be infinitely extended: No longer the singular badge of Jewish men, this new circumcision of the heart joins both sexes, all peoples, and all classes into common fellowship with Christ.” This spiritual ideal was a particular source of tension in early modern England during a time when the reverberations of the Reformation were still strongly felt and expanding Mediterranean trade was shifting England's worldview. On the one hand, St. Paul's assertion that outward rituals like circumcision held no value, that “the only thing that counts is faith which worketh by loue” (Galatians 5.6), constituted an important touchstone by which Protestants distinguished themselves from Catholics. It was an ideal frequently alluded to in English sermons by preachers such as John Donne, William Attersoll, and William Perkins, who embraced the notion of a “circumcision of the heart” as the true mark of Christianity.