1 Corinthians 1

27. One can not but think that, as Tertius laid down the reed which he had used, the apostle took it into his own hand and added the sublime sentence of doxology with which the Epistle ends. God was able to establish the brethren according to Paul’s gospel, which was something more than “the gospel of the kingdom,” for it was a proclamation of the unseen Christ as the Saviour of the world. And, as in the gospel which Paul preached, and this wonderful Epistle which he has written, the divine wisdom is brightly displayed, the doxology is in these words: “To God only wise be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen.”, D. F.—This peculiar doxology, at the close of such an Epistle, connecting such a song of praise with the steadfastness of the saints of God, is very striking, and fraught with deep lessons to us. The glory of the God only mighty, and eternal, and wise, is connected with our being stablished; and the process of stablishing us depends on his being what he is here represented to be. We have to do with him as the God of power and wisdom and eternity. Bonar.

The Epistle to the Romans begins with the power of God, then declares his righteousness, and closes with adoration of his wisdom. It is so with the heart that receives the great truths with which this Epistle deals. It begins its new experience under the power of God who raised up Jesus Christ. It finds peace through the declaration of his righteousness. And then it rests in admiration and adoration of his wisdom in planning, providing, and applying the salvation of the world through Christ Jesus. D. F

1. PAUL, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our 2 brother, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ 3 our Lord, both their’s and our’s: grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and 4 from the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God 5 which is given you by Jesus Christ; that in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utter- 6 ance, and in all knowledge; even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: 7 so that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: 8 who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord 9 Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. 10 Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined to- 11 gether in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions 12 among you. Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; 13 and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were 14 ye baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Crispus 15 and Gaius; lest any should say that I had baptized in mine own name. And I baptized 16 also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other. 17 For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, 18 lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the 20 understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the dis- 21 puter of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolish- ness of preaching to save them that believe.

MEN had lost sight of God. Three kinds of selfishness had blinded them: self-admiration, self-will, self-indulgence; three forms of sin; three usurpers of the human soul. One—self-admiration—perverts and makes a rebel of the intellect; another—self-will—of the conscience; the other—self-indulgence—of the passions. In this threefold treachery and corruption the world had grown giddy, rapacious, and godless. Curiosity was all that was left as the highest aim in science; war, in enterprise; and a sensuous enthusiasm for the beautiful in art. Alexandria, Rome, and Athens represented these three ambitions. In losing his God, man had lost himself, as always happens. Faith in God and the dignity of man went down together. With divine worship fell human rights and liberties. The scholars and the priests mystified the people, the Epicureans tempted them, the Stoics flattered and despised them. There were gods enough: one for every propensity. But they were either patrons to be purchased, or abstractions to be apostrophized, or demons to be propitiated. Religion, where it was not a voluntary deception, had degenerated into an incantation and a ceremony. The priest, if he was a pagan, was a juggler or a dupe; if he was a Jew—read the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, and its eightfold woes on the hypocrites, to know what he was. There was intellect enough; but the amount of all that was, as Paul put it, that the world by wisdom knew not God, and never would till that “Logos,” or Messiah, came, who was the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation to them that believe. F. D. H.

(Read carefully pages 129-132.) Paul’s first missionary labor among the Corinthians extends over a year and a half, during which period he lived with Aquila and Priscilla, and wrought with his own hands to earn his daily bread. Some of the Jews, and those men of mark, as Justus and Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, were converted and baptized; but the Corinthian Church was mainly a Gentile one, and the questions there discussed were not Jewish, did not turn on the value of circumcision or the obligation of the law, but were such as concerned a people just converted from idolatry, and emerging from the corruption of heathen life in a city of Greece. This is the most varied and comprehensive of all the weighty letters of Paul, and exhibits throughout his fine tact and practical wisdom. It is less theological than the Epistle to the Romans; more casuistical in the good sense of that term. It says nothing of the law or of justification, discusses no doctrine whatever save that of the resurrection, but treats in a masterly manner of love, purity, conscience, discernment, and reverence in the Church of God. D. F.

It was written at Ephesus early in the same year in which he left Ephesus for Macedonia (1 Cor. 16: 8). Its immediate occasion seems to have been the arrival at Ephesus of the family, or some of the family, of a Christian matron of Corinth named Chloe. These had brought unfavorable intelligence from the Corinthian Church. The apostle names only the report of divisions and parties; but we can hardly be wrong in believing that the news of the very serious matter treated in chapter 5 were brought by the same persons. These tidings, together with the questions on which apostolic counsels were requested, induced Paul to write this, one of the longest and most important of his pastoral letters, and the pattern, above all others, of earnest and weighty admonition and declaration springing out of circumstances. For of such a character, above all others, is this Epistle—not a treatise on any point or any system of Christian doctrine, as some others by this same apostle, but a series of fragments, or episodes, each of them occasional, arising out of something referred to him, or heard of by him, but not one of them devoid of interest for those who come after in all the long ages of the Church. No Epistle raises in us a higher estimate of the varied and wonderful gifts with which God was pleased to endow the man whom he selected for the apostle of the Gentile world, or shows us how large a portion of the Spirit, who worketh in each man severally as he will, was given to him for our edification. The depths of the spiritual, the moral, the intellectual, the physical world are open to him. He summons to his aid the analogies of nature. He enters minutely into the varieties of human infirmity and prejudice. He draws warning from the history of the chosen people; example from the Isthmian foot-race. He refers an apparently trifling question of costume to the first great proprieties and relations of Creation and Redemption. He praises, reproves, exhorts, and teaches. Where he strikes he heals. His large heart holding all, where he has grieved any, he grieves likewise; where it is in his power to give joy, he first overflows with joy himself. A.

1. Paul learned that his authority was questioned; and so he opens his Epistle with these words, written partly in self-defense: “Called to be an apostle through the will of God.” In the firm conviction of that truth lay all his power. No man felt more strongly than Paul his own insignificance. He told his converts again and again that he “was not meet to be called an apostle,” that he was “the least of all saints,” that he was the “chief of sinners.” And yet, intensely as he felt all this, more deeply did he feel something above and beyond all this, that he was God’s messenger, that his was a true apostleship, that he had been truly commissioned by the King; and hence he speaks with courage and with freedom. His words were not his own, but His who had sent him.

2. The church of God. The Church is that body of men in whom the Spirit of God dwells as the source of their excellence, and who exist on earth for the purpose of exhibiting the divine life and the hidden order of humanity: to penetrate and purify the world, and, as salt, preserve it from corruption. It has an existence continuous throughout the ages; continuous, however, not on the principles of hereditary succession or of human election, but on the principle of spiritual similarity of character. Paul asserted this spiritual succession when he said that the seed of Abraham were to be reckoned, not as his lineal descendants, but as inheritors of his faith. F. W. R.

The Christian Church is modeled on the Jewish congregation, and the word ecclesia is simply the translation of the Hebrew word signifying “congregation.” S.—Inasmuch as the synagogue existed when the temple was unknown, and remained when the temple fell, it followed that from its order and worship, and not from that of the temple, were copied in their general features the government, the institutions, and the devotions of those Christian communities which, springing directly from the Jewish, were first known as “synagogues” or “meeting-houses,” and afterward by the adoption of an almost identical word, “ecclesia,” “assembly-house.” A. P. S.

The Church is at once a divine institution, in that it is the perpetuated body of Christ and witness of his redeeming power, and it is also a practical manifestation of whatever spiritual life resides among us. It is the appointed means for unfolding and nourishing our capacities for piety. It is the soul’s house, collecting, protecting, cherishing, multiplying, spiritual life. This is what the Church is by intention, the Church of God’s design. But come into the Church as it is. What do we see? Life? interest? energy? reality? Pass in there from the streets of travel and the shops of merchandise. Is there life before you like the eager, throbbing intensity of life you leave behind you? Pass in there from the halls of legislation and political debate. Is there interest in duty and worship like the interest in the problems of public economy and the questions of party success? Pass in there from the schoolhouse and the university. Is there energy spent on forming righteous characters like the energy that beams in the faces and animates the ambition of students and their teachers? Pass in there from the joyous groups of kindred in their homes. Is there reality like the reality of the love and the sympathy, the fellowship and fervor, of families and wedlock, of parental devotion and filial gratitude? F. D. H.

Corinth. The city was the hot-bed of the world’s evil, in which every noxious plant, indigenous or transplanted, rapidly grew and flourished; where luxury and sensuality throve rankly, stimulated by the gambling spirit of commercial life, till Corinth now in the Apostle’s time, as in previous centuries, became a proverbial name for moral corruption. Amid this universal degeneracy there were two classes among the Greek population. There were, first, the uncultivated and the poor, to whom the ancient glories of their land were yet dear, to whom the old religion was not merely hereditary, but true and living still, whose imagination still saw the solemn conclave of their ancient deities on Mount Olympus, and still heard Pan, and the Fauns, and the wood-gods piping in the groves. Very different, however, was the state of the cultivated and the rich. They had lost their religion. Their civilization and their knowledge of the world had destroyed that; and, that being lost, they retained no natural vent for the energies of the restless Greek character. Hence out of their high state of intellectual culture there arose a craving for “wisdom”; not the wisdom which Solomon spoke of, but wisdom in the sense of intellectual speculation. The energy which had found a safe outlet in war now wasted itself in the amphitheatre. The enthusiasm which had been stimulated by the noble eloquence of patriotism now preyed on glittering rhetoric. Men spent their days in tournaments of speeches, and exulted in gladiatorial oratory. F. W. R.

Them that are sanctified, called to be saints. Paul chooses to regard those to whom he is writing as being in all respects true Christians, as being worthy of their privileges, as answering to what God had done to them. He might have thought indeed that, if he wrote to them as redeemed, justified, sanctified, as having all things new, as being the children of God and the heirs of God, and the temples of the Holy Ghost, any individual who felt that he was none of these things, that sin was still mighty within him, and that he was sin’s slave, would neither deny his own conscience nor yet call Paul a deceiver, but would read in the difference between Paul’s description of him and the reality the exact measure of his own sin and need of repentance and watchfulness. But he does not rely on this only: he notices sins as actually existing; he mingles the language of reproof and of anxiety, so as to make it quite clear that he did not mean his descriptions of their holiness and blessedness to apply to them all necessarily; he knew full well that they did not; but yet he knew also that, considering what God had done for them, it was monstrous that they should not be truly applicable. Let us ponder all the magnificence of the Scriptural language, not as describing what we are when we are full of sin, nor yet as mere exaggerated language, which must be brought down to the level of our present reality. Let us consider it as containing the words of truth and soberness; not one jot or one tittle needs to be abated; it must not be lowered to us, but we rather raised to it. It is a truth, it is the word of God, it is the seal of our assurance; it is that which good men of old would have welcomed with the deepest joy, which to good men now is a source of comfort unspeakable. For it tells us that God has done for us, is doing, will do, all that we need; it tells us that the price of our redemption has been paid, the kingdom of heaven has been set open, the power to walk as God’s children has been given; that so far as God is concerned we are redeemed, we are saved, we are sanctified; it is but our own fault merely that we are not all of these actually and surely. T. A.

5. Utterance. Knowing a truth is one thing, being able to express it is quite another thing; and then, again, to be able to express a truth is one thing, but to dare to do it is another thing altogether. “Utterance” implies both power and courage. And therefore the power of utterance becomes, by the grace of God, truly a faculty divine. F. W. R.

7. Of this future coming, of this true advent-season of eternity, though much is known, much too is hidden. Between the Church and the Church’s head there still subsists, even in this intimate union, a mysterious separation; and on the period of that separation a holy reserve. It has already lasted for ages, and we can not dare to predict at what epoch it is to close. The veil that hangs before the celestial sanctuary is still undrawn; and it is vain for us to “marvel,” as of old the expectants of Zacharias, that the High Priest of our profession “tarrieth so long in the temple.” He has willed it that, certain of his eventual arrival, we should remain in uncertainty as to its destined moment. “The times and the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power” he would have us desire, and expect, and conjecture, but not dare to define. W. A. B.

8,9. Paul’s congratulation contains a ground of hope for the continuance and successful issue of those blessings—“God shall confirm you to the end”; and again, “God is faithful.” He relies not on any stability of human goodness; he knows that he can not trust to their inherent firmness or fidelity: his ground of confidence is in God. He does not count on their faithfulness to God, but on God’s faithfulness to them. F. W. R.—Yet faith in man and faithfulness in God are the two members of one spiritual harmony. Neither is to be conceived without the other. Man, without God, would be fatherless; and God has almost permitted us to say that without his people (the “little children” whom he wills not “to perish”) he would himself be, as it were, childless in his own celestial family! W. A. B.

There is complete fellowship with Christ. It is to this that we are called by a faithful God; and is it not a high and glorious calling? Fellowship in his Cross, his grave, his resurrection, his throne, his glory! All this faith secures to us; and of all this the Holy Spirit bears witness to us. Believing, we are reconciled, saved, accepted, blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus. Let us walk worthy of it, as men who really believe it, happy, holy, unworldly, zealous, generous, loving. Let us carry the consciousness of our calling into everything, great or small; into business, daily life, recreations, reading, education, everything; maintaining our true position before men; manifesting our proper character; letting the world know our prospects, and doing nothing inconsistent with what we profess to be now, and with what we shall be when the Lord comes. Bonar.

11. Contentions among you. It is painful to be compelled to acknowledge among the Christians of the apostolic age the existence of so many forms of error and sin. It was a pleasing dream which presented the primitive church as a society of angels, and it is not without a struggle that we bring ourselves to open our eyes and behold the reality. But yet it is a higher feeling which bids us thankfully to recognize the truth, that “there is no partiality with God,” that he has not rendered schism and heresy impossible in any age of the Church. C.—Nothing more certainly cats out the heart and life of religion than party spirit. Christianity is love; party spirit is the death of love. Christianity is union amid variety of views; party spirit is disunion. F. W. R.

12. Certain persons had arisen as teachers antagonistic to Paul, and claiming superiority to him on various accounts: some as representing the teaching of Peter, an elder apostle; some as following the Alexandrine learning of Apollos; some again as having had the advantage of nearer personal intercourse with Christ himself; while the followers of Paul were degenerating into the same type of a mere personal adhesion to him, instead of following him as he followed Christ. This confused embryo state of parties appears to have been all that can be safely assumed. A.

Apollos had been educated at Alexandria, the university of the world, and we are told that he was mighty in the Scriptures and remarkable for eloquence. The eloquence of Paul was rough and burning; it stirred men’s hearts, kindling in them the living fire of truth; that of Apollos was more refined and polished. Peter was as gifted in his way as Paul; but there was this difference between them: that, whereas the Spirit of God had detached Paul from Judaism by a sudden shock, in the heart of Peter Christianity had been regularly and slowly developed; he had known Jesus first as the Son of man, and afterward as the Son of God. It was long before he realized God’s purpose of love to the Gentiles. In his conception the Messiah was to be chiefly King for the Jews; therefore all the Jewish converts, who still clung to very much that was Jewish, preferred to follow Peter. F. W. R.

Envy and strife go often under the mask of zeal. These whom the apostle addresses were apt to glory in their carnal strifes. It is easy to tack on a pretense of religion, and to baptize envious contests with a glorious name. There are so many things that look like zeal but are not; and our own interest is so often concerned in the interests of religion, that we have need to suspect ourselves, lest the wild gourds of frowardness and passion be mistaken for the planting of the Lord, zeal and righteousness. There are two shrewd presumptions upon which, if you can not absolutely condemn such motions, you have cause to suspect them. One is, when they boil up into irregular and strange actions; true zeal, though it increase the stream, does not usually overflow the banks, and break one rule to vindicate another. The other is, when we are apt to glory and boast, as in the case before us. T. M.

13. What was Paul’s method of curing schism, and of making men truly one who had been “divided”? He directed every eye, and every heart, and every spirit, to one object—Jesus Christ, the personal Saviour, the center and source of unity; in fellowship with whom all men would find their fellowship with each other. N. M.

14-17. It may be expected that those whom the apostle baptized with his own hands were converts distinguished from the rest by some circumstance, either of eminence or of connection with him. Accordingly, of the three names here mentioned, Crispus (Acts 18: 8) was a “chief ruler of the Jewish synagogue at Corinth, who believed in the Lord, with all his house.” Gaius (Rom. 16: 23) was Paul’s host at Corinth, and the host, he tells us, “of the whole Church.” The household of Stephanas, we read in the sixteenth chapter of this Epistle, “were the first-fruits of Achaia.” Paley.

17. Paul knew that “Christ had sent him to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the Cross of Christ should be made of none effect.” All the arts of rhetoric and philosophic argument, the “excellency of speech and wisdom,” the “enticing words of man’s wisdom,” were abjured by the very apostle who was qualified to use them on the very field that invited and provoked their display, in order to give place to the “manifestation of spirit and of power,” to prove that the simplicity of preaching was God’s instrument for saving them that believe, and to assure the converts that “their faith was not in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God.” S.

18-21. In this passage we have a sublime strain of prophetic utterance from Paul, coming with such irresistible power of inspiration, and with such self-attesting credentials of the Spirit of truth in its majestic affirmations, as to supersede argument, and leave the poor conceits of irreligious knowledge and genius to contempt. F. D. H.—The sects of philosophers, though numerous and exceedingly various, ous, were all agreed in proudly trusting in themselves that they were wise, and despising others. Their published opinions, their private speculations, their personal immorality, made them irreconcilable adversaries of Christianity. It went up into their schools, and called their wisdom foolishness, and rebuked their self-conceit. As with the Epicureans and Stoics who encountered Paul, mockery was the natural expression of their minds when they heard of the resurrection of the dead. The apostles, therefore, in attempting to propagate the gospel among the Gentiles, were opposed by all the wit and learning and sophistry, all the pride and jealousy and malice, of every sect of philosophers. Mellvaine.

19. Destroy wisdom of the wise.** Modern idolatry has raised two altars, to which a crowd of idolaters press forward. One of these is the altar of matter, the other that of intellect. Upon both, human victims are offered; for all idolatrous worship is murderous worship. The adoration of intellect has its barbarity as well as the adoration of matter. The man of intellect finds his account in sparing nothing. He who despises most passes for having the most sagacity. It has been said that the heart often has intellect, but that the intellect has no heart. In the unrestrained pleasures of the intellect, as in the unrestrained pleasure of the senses, the heart dries up. A. V.

21. Till we arrive at that world of glory we have no reason to expect any grace but in the diligent use of means appointed thereto. If the Ethiopian eunuch is to be instructed in the gospel, Philip must be miraculously directed to him to open to him its glad tidings. If Cornelius is to receive the same blessing, an angel shall instruct him where to find a teacher; but not a ray of light does he receive except through God’s appointed ordinance—the foolishness of human preaching saving them that believe. Look to it, then, that you undervalue not these outward ministrations; look to it, also that you do not rest in them, but in his Spirit accompanying them. Look through and above all ordinances to the God of ordinances. Goode.—To make Christianity depend on the power of its preachers or the skill of theologians is at once to measure absolute beauty, truth, and good by mortal competency, and to stimulate the pulpit with a spur as foreign from gospel simplicity as it is insulting to the authority of God. The function of a clergy is not the audacious one of representing the Majesty of Heaven, but to plead generously with the reluctance of men; not to dole out God’s compassion by the petty dimensions of their intelligence, but to be unpretending heralds of a Christ who makes their weakness his strength, and even the foolishness of preaching the wisdom of God unto salvation. F. D. H.

22. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ 23 crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them 24 which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger 26 than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, 27 not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to 28 confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that 29 are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of 30 God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: that, 31 according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

WHAT Christianity really is appears most evidently in its filling vessels that are insignificant and contemptible in human eyes with a heavenly glory which infinitely outshines all earthly glory, since it pours into them the powers of the world to come, compared with which all the powers of earth are nothing. In all ages the glorious declaration of the apostle in verse 27 has been amply verified in the operations of the gospel. Listen while Gregory describes the life of a man who, in the lowest worldly station, in the most needy and helpless lot, manifested the glory of a divine life: “He had been worn out by long illness; he could neither stand, nor sit upright in his bed, nor raise his hand to his mouth, nor turn himself from one side to the other. Whatever he received in alms he distributed with his own hands to the poor. He could not read, but he had purchased a Bible; he received all pious men as his guests, who read to him constantly out of the Bible. And thus, without being able to read, he became acquainted with the whole Bible. Amid all his pains he endeavored to thank God, and to spend day and night in praising him. When he felt himself near death he begged his visitors to stand up near him, and to sing psalms with him in expectation of his approaching dissolution. And as he was singing with them he made a sudden pause, and exclaimed aloud: ‘Hush! do you not hear how the praise of God sounds in heaven?’ And, as he applied the ear of his heart to this praise of God which he perceived mentally, the holy soul departed from the body.” N.

22. The Jews. In their way they were religious, but it was a blind and bigoted adherence to the sensuous side of religion. They had almost ceased to believe in a living God, but they were strenuous believers in the virtue of ordinances. God only existed to them for the benefit of the Jewish nation. To them a Messiah must be a World-prince. To them a new revelation could only be substantiated by marvels and miracles. To them it could have no self-evident spiritual light; and Paul describes the difficulty which this tendency put in the way of the progress of the gospel among them in the words: “The Jews require a sign.” F. W. R.

The Greeks seek after wisdom. Full of system and of science, of the all-sufficiency of reason, the dignity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of stoical wisdom and virtue, they must needs regard with supercilious contempt an unsystematic and unscientific religion, first promulgated in an unpolished and unlettered corner of the world, by the son of a carpenter, who never studied at

Athens or at Rome; preached afterward by illiterate fishermen and mechanics, and received with eagerness by the illiterate populace. They would never endure a religion that rejected the aid of eloquence and learning, in the pursuit of which they had spent their lives; a religion that laid open the weakness and depravity of the human heart, and the insufficiency of our own powers, either to lead us to a just knowledge of our duty or support us in the due performance of it, without supernatural aid; which inculcated the necessity of a mediator, a redeemer, a sanctifier, and required the very unphilosophical virtues of meekness, humility, contrition, self-abasement, self-denial, renovation of heart and reformation of life; which taught the doctrines of a resurrection from the grave, and an eternal existence in another world. P.

23. Unto the Jews a stumblingblock. The scribes and Pharisees turned away from the Cross, and their hatred darkened into derision, not merely because of a pride of wisdom, but because of a complacent self-righteousness that knew nothing of the fact of sin, that never had learned to believe itself to be full of evil, that had got so wrapped up in ceremonies as to have lost the life; that had degraded the divine law of God, with all its lightning splendors, and awful power, into a matter of “mint and anise and cummin.” Not transgression shuts a man out from mercy. Transgression, which belongs to us all, makes us subjects for the mercy; but it is pride, self-righteousness, trust in ourselves, which “bars the gates of mercy on mankind”; and the men that are condemned are condemned not only because they have transgressed the commandments of God, but “this is the condemnation, that light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” A. M.

Foolishness. The Greek philosophers expected to have all the difficulties relating to Jesus and the resurrection cleared up to them, to have all the reasons on which God acted laid open before them, and all his proceedings with mankind justified on the principles of human wisdom. Till this were done, the doctrine of Christ crucified would always appear “foolishness to the Greeks.” P.

Paul did not become less a philosopher by being a Christian, but the energies of his mind were given neither to philosophy nor to literature, but to something far higher. And so, now, many of the finest spirits of our race are diverted from science by the practical calls and self-denying duties arising from the spiritual wants of the world. But does this dwarf the intellect? Can that dwarf the intellect which shows it realities more grand than those of science; which, with a full comprehension of the nature and processes and ends of science and of literature, yet gives them their rightful though subordinate place? Never. For energy and balance, I would rather have the intellect formed by the Bible alone—by grappling with its mighty questions, by communing with its high mysteries, by tracing its narratives, by listening to its matchless eloquence and poetry—than to have that formed by all the popular literature and the scientific tracts in existence; and if these should practically exclude the Bible, instead of being a blessing, they would only bring disaster. M. H.

24. Christ himself is, in his sacrifice, the mighty power of God. This is the power that has new-created and sent home, as trophies, in all the past ages, its uncounted myriads of believing, new-created, glorified souls. It can do for you, O sinner of mankind! all that you want done. Go to the Cross, and meet there God in sacrifice. Behold him, as Jesus, bearing your sin, receiving the shafts of your enmity! Embrace Him, believe in Him, take Him to your inmost heart. Do this, and you shall feel sin die within you, and a glorious quickening—Christ the power of God, Christ in you the hope of glory—shall be consciously risen upon you as the morn of your new creation. H. B.

25. Whence was it that they who, while Christ was alive, did not withstand the attack of the Jews, afterward, when Christ had died and been buried, set themselves against the whole wide world? Hold fast these two heads of the argument: How did the weak overcome the strong? And, being the men they were, how did it occur to them to form such a plan unless they had the help of God? Chrys.

26. This should read, “How that not many of you are wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble.” A.—That which remained concealed from philosophers and sages, in the most brilliant periods of the human intellect, twelve poor fishermen, from the lakes of Judea, quitted their nets to announce to the world. Certainly they had not more of imagination, of reason, of heart, or of conscience than the rest of mankind; yet they put to silence the wisdom of sages, emptied the schools of philosophers, closed the gates of every temple, extinguished the fire on every altar. They exhibited to the world their crucified Master, and the world recognized in him that which their anxious craving had sought in vain for three thousand years. A new morality, new social relations, and a new universe sprung into being at the voice of these poor men, ignorant of letters and of all philosophy.

27-29. Things which are not.** He has brought into competition riches and poverty, wisdom and ignorance, philosophy and rusticity; but poverty, rusticity, and ignorance have conquered. From time to time he has called to his aid genius and power, and permitted them to coöperate in his work; but when he has so willed it, the sling of the young son of Jesse has sufficed to overthrow Goliath. The smallness of the means has only served to enhance the power of him who employed them. In all time the Church has been sufficient to the Church, truth has been sufficient to truth. Eloquence and enthusiasm have not done so much for this sacred cause as the modest virtues, the uniform activity, and the patient prayers of thousands of believers whose names are unknown. A. V.—In that day of simple spiritual revelation, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, all earthly distinctions leveled, and all ranks and badges forgotten, the question shall not be, Who was highest, who lowest? who richest or who most beautiful? who cultivated alone, or refined alone? But, Who loved God and man, who honored the right, who was loyal to truth, who lived and walked in the Spirit, who had faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and out of that faith, as toward Christ himself, did minister to those hungry, athirst, naked, strangers, sick, in

prison? So, many that are here first shall be last, and the last first. F. D. H.