CHAPS. V. - VII.

V. 1. It is commonly reported that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not even among the Gentiles, that a man should have his father's 2 wife. And you are puffed up! and have not rather mourned that he that hath done this thing might be 3 taken away from among you. For I, verily, as present in spirit, though absent in body, have judged already as if I was present, him that hath so done this thing, 4- In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you

and my spirit are gathered together, with the power 5 of our Lord Jesus Christ, to commit such an one to Satan for the extinction of the flesh, that the spirit 6 may be delivered in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your boasting is not good. Know ye not, that a little leaven

This fond clinging to the dominant idea of a Time, and eagerness to enthrone it for ever over the world of souls, falls in with the indolence of human nature, with an impatient demand for System that relieves from progress, and with the passionate tendencies with which men attach themselves to standards under which they have long been formed into Societies, and acted in corporate capacities. Under this weight of hereditary fidelity to a given Standard, there is no chance of sudden emancipation for the Society as a whole: - and if the associations formed under it have been coextensive with an entire People, individuals often struggle in vain, and minds, that, if left unfettered, would have gone rejoicing on their way through a succession of higher births of the soul, sink prostrate beneath its Rule.

The early Christians were not preserved from the common tendencies of Human Nature. Like other partial, and eager, minds, they seized upon leading points, and, in the exclusive interest attached to them, dropped out of view coördinate Truths. We find in the early Church two extremes, decidedly opposed to each other, but equally removed, in their opposite directions, from the spiritual Rule of the Gospel:

those who had their ideas of a Religion formed on the model of the Jewish Law, and never could emancipate themselves from the habit of allegiance to external authority and positive enactment, nor receive with any profound feeling of its reality the great doctrine, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within the soul; and those whose heathen and philosophic tendencies led them to interpret this freedom from

Law in an immoral sense, and to confound the Liberty of the Gospel with the Antinomian doctrine that the soul was independent of the impurities of the body, and was in fact elevated to higher perfection if it could dwell apart, in a cool region of its own, whilst it surrendered the physical nature to its native Evil, and placed it under no moral restraint. The first of these extremes, or the Jewish type of Christians, we find most distinctly characterized in the Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians. The latter, the Antinomian type of Christians, are very distinctly alluded to in the chapter on Corinthian morals now before us, and in the Epistles of St. John. For the true type of the Christian, the genuine subject of a Heavenly Kingdom, we must look to the Son of God, who felt the full force of the filial relation, and was the willing subject of paternal rule, who destroyed the Law by fulfilling it, by spiritualizing and expanding it, imparting to it, from the unmeasured love within, a depth and fulness of meaning which no outward Law can be made to express; — and they alone are his subjects, modelled in his spiritual image, in the fellowship of his spirit, who have the springs of all holy living in the inward fountains of divine affections, — and, bound not by Law, but by Love, have their Blessedness in Obedience, and seek the Righteousness of God, even the Righteousness that is born of filial Faith.

St. Paul's Corinthian converts, led by the speculative tendencies of their philosophic schools, and not preserved from that human weakness which, in

its exclusive estimate of one class of interests, depreciates and neglects all others, adopted the dogmatical, instead of the spiritual type of Christianity, and, whilst boasting the superiority of their Views, turned away the earnest eye of Christian regard from the impurity of their Lives. If men place the essence of Christianity in correctness of Opinion, they will involuntarily, and in spite of themselves, regard as less essential inward communion with God, and holiness of heart and life. This arises from no turpitude of the will, but from the natural conditions of limitation, the tendency to exclusiveness, under which all human faculties are constrained to work, and of which it is the part of wisdom to cultivate a profound and solemn consciousness. Christianity has perhaps in no respect conferred a greater blessing on the world, than in the sense of importance it has attached to speculative Truth, — 'destroying all such indifference as was betrayed in Pilate's memorable question, and imparting an earnest and solemn tone to the deep convictions of the heart. But unquestionably this blessing has hitherto been purchased at a great expense to Christian charity, and to the sense of the supreme importance of the purely spiritual sources of Virtue and Piety, and at present the profoundest want of the Christian world is some form of our Religion which will unite this supreme attachment to the spiritual faith of the Heart with a just sense of the undeniable importance of speculative Truth, to make peace between the moral and the intellectual elements of our nature, and to educate us into harmony, not

only with the affections, but with the mind of God. And who, that has any clear consciousness of this deep want, can doubt that God is preparing to supply it, and from the long ferment of its elements, and the exclusive development of some portions of its principles, that a full and perfect Christianity, to rise at length out of mixed agencies, to combine all partial truths, and to reconcile the warring world, is in the purpose of His providence? And with this view we mitigate our religious animosities; for, partial and incomplete as we all are, we learn to perceive that tendencies the most opposite to our own, may yet contribute something to the perfect form of Truth, the full and unmutilated Christianity which, uniting all real elements of Grace and Power, will appear at last, to explain the Past, and reconcile the Future.

The immoral tendencies and perplexities of the Corinthian Church, in contrast with their high speculative pretensions, which are described in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters, we shall now enumerate, noticing whatever difficulties may occur in the Apostle's treatment of these subjects.

I. He charges them with the scandal to Christianity, of retaining within its nominal communion a person notoriously guilty of leading an impure life. St. Paul, in this and in some other cases, advised excommunication, but it was always the excommunication of immorality, and never of heresy. In this respect the Church has precisely reversed the practice of the Apostle, always excommunicating for