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 specula tions 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

the indignity he had suffered in the rebellion of his children; that, to meet this moral necessity of God's nature, there were in his essence three Infinite Persons, and that one of these Persons was willing to suffer in the place of men; that an infinite indemnity being thus provided for the immeasurable insult of sin, the Austerity of God no longer restrained his Love, and his sanctifying Spirit might now operate upon those who, by thankfully recognizing the substituted expiation, paid this tribute to his violated Authority. And, Is this to know nothing but Christ the crucified? Is not this to leave practical religion, and the moral spirit of the Gospel, for the sake of that very speculative theosophy, those theories about God and the origin of Evil, against which St. Paul so earnestly contends as destructive of the simplicity of the Gospel sentiment, "the renewed union of the heart with God through the moral attraction of his Christ"? And mark how, in the third and in the following verses to the sixth, St. Paul indicates that it was a moral conviction, a spiritual sentiment, which he had labored to implant in the deeper heart of this speculative and light-minded people. Philosophy has no moral anxiety about its reception in the world, it produces its favorite system, or supposed demonstration, with undisturbed complacency. The Rhetorician has no tremors of the heart, no moral solicitude as to whether he shall touch the springs of life in the soul,- for his address is to the fancy and to the passions. But St. Paul, with something of the agony of his Master in Gethsemane, speaks of the solicitudes of a ministry ad

dressed to the hearts and moral affections of men : "And I was with you with none of the confident pretensions of a party leader, but in the consciousness of weakness, in holy fear and trembling, and my preaching was not directed towards speculative wisdom, but to excite within you the workings of that better spirit which is akin to the spirit of God, that your moral acceptance of the Christ- your faith — might not depend on the wisdom or rhetorical power of man, but, proceeding from the divine affections of your nature, should be founded on the persuasive power of God's spirit within you."

The remainder of the chapter, from the sixth verse, is a demonstration that Christianity, as a purely spiritual sentiment, is addressed only to the spiritual affections of man,-is understood only by that man who has in him some portion of God's spirit, and that, being thus addressed to the divinest element of the soul, to that spiritual conscience which knows no reasonings, but is the immediate voice of God, it can be made a source of Divisions only when it is seized upon, as it were, from without, by the faculties that are not spiritual, — by the speculative ones that lead to System-building, or by the imaginative and sensuous ones that lead to the exaltation of outward Forms. I will attempt to convey the meaning that is contained in the passage from the sixth to the end of the tenth verse.

66

Although Christianity is not of the nature of speculative knowledge, yet to those who are spiritual it is the divinest wisdom,-not, indeed, the wisdom of men of the world, nor of the intellectual Leaders of