drian, to imitate, and (as second-rate minds will always do) to exaggerate Apollos's manner and method. As we have the most powerful reasons to believe that Apollos himself was not actually at the head of an anti-Paulistic party, but remained in close friendship with the Apostle, we may safely conclude that his name was adopted for the purpose of expressing the nature of the system which his imitators professed to follow. In a similar manner we must conceive that the names of James* (who, as the local president of the congregation at Jerusalem, could not reside at Corinth) and of Cephas (who, as the Apostle of the Circumcision, is not likely to have ever been in Greece) were taken by other portions of the Corinthian Church, under the guidance of teachers who respectively pretended to follow the views which they described as peculiar to each of those distinguished Apostles." †

In contrast to such teachers, St. Paul, in our present chapter, refers both to the matter and the manner of his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as a Rhetorician, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, -nor as a Philosopher, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative School; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that "God was in

*This is a mistake: James is not mentioned in this connection. "Heresy and Orthodoxy."

Christ reconciling the world unto himself"; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of God to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,

for that now neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a Doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the God of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and to life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls through the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the Mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their God, must of necessity. be of one communion;- for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it, and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it? Were there any who had power of withholding it? Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command? Not so, says St. Paul:-it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment; and in whatever bosom there is

not enough of the spirit of God to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy, nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the Image of God, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties, those that have the sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians constitute the one, and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter. Let us follow him through it.

(Verse 1.) "And I, brethren, came to you not in the pretensions of a Rhetorician or of a Philosopher to preach the Gospel of God; for I determined to profess no knowledge amongst you, except the knowledge of Jesus Christ, even him the crucified. " I refused, says St. Paul, to connect the practical Gospel, the divine principle that showed itself in the life and death of Christ, with any speculative tenets whatsoever. "Christ crucified " was to every disciple the symbol of Christian faith and practice, the image of a life passed and sustained by a spirit in communion with God. This symbol is powerfully expressive; and the Scriptural references to it leave no doubt that it is a practical, not a doctrinal em

blem, —that it is a Sign, not of speculative tenets, but of moral power, with which should be associated in the soul the filial trust, the unconquered love, the self-devotion of our Lord. The Scriptural usage, we say, leaves it in no doubt that these were the ideas intended to be awakened by the symbol " Christ crucified." "If any man will be my disciple," says our Lord himself, "let him take up his cross, and follow me." And what is the power that, in the very spirit of this chapter, St. Paul elsewhere ascribes to the cross of Christ? A power to crucify worldly affections, and for God and the Truth's sake to rise superior to earthly sufferings. He boasts not of knowledge, he pretends to no revelation of hidden things, he possesses only a practical power derived from Christ to conquer Evil:-"I glory only in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world."

*

And it cannot but strike us as very extraordinary, that these words, intended by St. Paul to express that he attached no importance to any thing but moral sympathy with the Christ of God, should now be cited in evidence that he attached no importance to any thing but certain doctrinal conceptions, that, in fact, these words should now be quoted in support of a speculative conception of Christianity, which was the very conception of it that St. Paul used them to disclaim: "We know nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified," say a certain class of preachers. But is this true? Do they not

* Gal. vi. 14.

pretend to know a vast deal more? - do they not connect this practical power and victory of the Christ, this life and death divine, after the very manner of St Paul's Gnostics, with doubtful speculations into the nature and origin of Evil, with peculiar views of the metaphysical essence of the Deity, with philosophical theories as to how God can operate on a human mind and pardon Sin?-and do they not, out of all these speculative elements, construct a System in which they find a place for Christ crucified, a system which, whether true or false, is nowhere constructed in the Scriptures, and which is totally foreign to the genius of the practical Gospel? St. Paul, to avoid divisions on merely intellectual topics, declared, "I will know nothing, as affecting Christians, but the moral spirit that was in the life and death of Christ." And the Preachers of this day, in direct opposition, declare that "only to know this is to know nothing"; for that" Christ crucified" is only one part of a vast system, which system arose in this way:-that there is an Evil Being in eternal conflict with God, a Dualism in the universe; that this Evil Being tempted Adam to sin; that this sin impregnated the whole of his race successively with the spirit of the Evil One, so that the Devil, and not God, is henceforth the Father of their moral natures; that God was willing to regenerate fallen man with a new spirit from himself, and to expel the Evil One, but that he could not do so in consistency with his Attributes, for his Authority had its claims as well as his Mercy, until some expiation had been offered to him, commensurate with