Pantheon; and not immediately would Christianity come to be apprehended in its character of destructiveness, not as claiming a share for itself, but as the total subverter of Polytheistic worship,-making the universe and the soul the only fit temples of the One Everlasting and Omnipresent. With such minds the difficulty would be to obtain a reception for the new religion, not as a Philosophy, but as a Life; not as a source of intellectual or speculative interest, but as a moral spirit, breathing tender and purifying influences into the affections, developing the force of conscience, withdrawing the soul from the outer shrine to the voice of the eternal Spirit within the breast, and conforming the entire man to that divine harmony, that holy will of God, of which conscience is the faint announcer in each soul, and Christ the perfect image. The Grecian mind was extravagantly addicted to fanciful, and speculative, philosophizing; and largely used its religion as a means of sanctifying its vices, of elevating its vilest desires into the worship of some patron God presiding over the earthly and passionate elements of our mixed nature, converting deeds of darkness into the mysteries of a sacred service; and if Christianity, through native force and the vigor of its great Apostle, made its way into such minds, there could be little hope that it should take no taint or bias from such souls, that it should all at once maintain an absolute independence on their past practices, and not be drawn into the vortex of the prevailing intellectual and practical habits. We often ask, Why does not Christianity work greater and more instant effects?

We forget that Christianity can get into a man's soul only through the existing sympathies and affinities he may happen to have with it; and that it exercises a moral power only through the love, and free will, of every heart. Now the Corinthian, though drawn to the Gospel by some secret and powerful sympathy, would not on the instant cease to be the man he had been;- he was not prepared to forget in a moment his favorite philosophy, or to renounce at once his former indulgences; and the tendency would rather be to engraft, as far as possible, his old ideas and usages on the new and healthy stock of Christianity, than to find for it immediately a clear admission into an empty bosom.

Such, then, were some of the elements of contention that divided the unity of every Gentile Church. They all had their origin in previous habits, or attachment to system, which prevented the reception of Christianity simply as a moral influence, as a spirit of Life penetrating and remodelling the heart, and breathing its purity and beneficence into the character. Putting aside the unbelieving Jews, there were the Palestinians, some of whom recognized Jesus only as the Messiah of the Jews, and these waited for his second coming and his Messianic reign; whilst others of them would accept the idea of his being the Saviour of the World, only by compelling the World to take upon it the yoke of Moses, as well as the spiritual rule of Christ: these two divisions, the most exclusively Jewish, ranged themselves in Corinth under the name of Peter (Cephas in the Aramean dialect), as the Apostle of

the Circumcision. Then there were the Alexandrians, who connected both Judaism and Christianity with Orientalism, whose grand philosophical problem was the speculation on Evil, and who believed that God, retiring from all communication with matter, conducted the creation and government of the world through mediatorial Emanations from himself, of which emanations Christ was the chief. This is the party known in the Church by the name of Gnostics, and at Corinth Apollos was their reputed leader: whilst among the Grecians there was the philosophic party, who, like the orthodox of the present day, identified Christianity with some speculative tenets; — and what we may call the Antinomian party, who were either the insincere and unworthy disciples of all ages, disciplined by their own passions, not by the spirit of the Son of God, or the prototypes of those fanatics of later times (and this is the tendency of all doctrines that teach the native corruption of man), who have maintained that the body was so radically and incurably worthless, that it might be given over to corruption without imparting contamination to the associated soul, that had no common essence with it, and was of another element.

It was to maintain the unity of the Church Universal against these unspiritual strifes, that St. Paul wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians; and the great principle unfolded in it is the practical spirit, the moral force of Christianity, that it is neither a philosophy, nor a system of doctrines, nor a ritual, nor a law;-that any of these may combine with it, or refuse to combine with it, without

a

affecting its essence or its efficacy,- for that it is itself a baptism of the heart and of the moral affections into the spirit of the life of Christ, baptism not by Paul, nor Cephas, nor Apollos, but by the Holy Ghost,—a devotion of the whole man, not to any theories or speculations whatsoever, but to the mercy, the self-denial, the trust in God even to death, of the cross of Christ. Here have we from an Apostle, and he the most speculative and theoretical of them all, an exposition of the sources of Christian unity; and putting aside the superficial differences of the intellect, he penetrates to the deep, unchanging heart of man, and declares that all are of the Body of Christ in whom his spirit of love and consecration lives and works, and that this is the fellowship of the Son of God, to be so united to him by inward bonds, that through the imitation and the obedience of love he is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and entire redemption.* We must bear in mind, then, the sectarian state of the Corinthian Church in the examination, to which we now proceed, of the first chapter of this Epistle.

It might be possible to present in a few words the train of ideas in this introductory chapter, but it is the duty of an expositor, not to give the bare thought, but if possible to let us into the spirit of the living writer, and to clothe the exposition with his individuality. I shall therefore aim chiefly to throw emphasis, as it were, on those passages that

* 1 Cor. i. 30.

are most characteristic of St. Paul, and are in his peculiar manner. And I shall often have to ask your attention to two of these characteristics, - the closeness with which he adheres to his object in writing; and the rapidity and effect with which he draws conclusions, and makes applications, without any formal approach or statement of the preliminary grounds, — leaving it to the reader to discover the suppressed. premises. He is at once the most discursive, and the most condensed of writers, - discursive in allowing his thoughts and heart free play, — condensed, in the quantity of argument and emotion he concentrates on every subject which he touches on his rapid way.

In the very salutation, occupying the first three verses, he lifts a warring and distracted Church out of the hot and close atmosphere of local contentions, into the loftiness and serenity of catholic sentiment. He presents them to God as part of the Church Universal. He associates them with the communion of saints. Place and circumstance disappear, for throughout the world, and in the world beyond the grave, the people of God, those who have fellowship with Christ, have one heart, and breathe one spirit. Inasmuch as each has some resemblance to him, all must have that common resemblance to one another. Here, in the very first sentence, we have the essence of the Epistle: "Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, and Sosthenes our brother, unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, called to be saints, with all, in every place, who are disciples of Jesus Christ our