LECTURE XXVII.

DECEMBER 7, 1851.

And

1 CORINTHIANS, xv. 1-12. -"Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received. and wherein ye stand;- By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. -For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received. how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: - And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.— -Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed. -Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?"

IN the regular course of our Sunday afternoon Ex positions, we are now arrived at the 15th chapter of St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians. We are al aware that this is the chapter selected by our Church to be read at the Funeral Service, and to almost all of us every syllable stands associated in our memory with some sad and mournful moment in our lives; when every word, as it fell from the lips of the minister, seemed like the knell of death to our hearts. This is one reason why the exposition of this chapter is attend ed with some difficulty. For we have been so little accustomed to look upon it as consisting of Argument and Doctrine, and it has been, by long and solemn associations, so hallowed in our memories, that it sounds more like stately music heard in the stillness of night, than like an argument; and to separate it into parts,

to break it up into fragments, appears to us to be almost a profanation, even though it be for the purpose of exposition.

The whole of this chapter is occupied with the proof of the doctrine of the Resurrection. On the present occasion, however, we confine ourselves to the first twelve verses. This subject, like almost all the others treated of in this Epistle, had been forced upon the Apostle in consequence of certain errors and heresies which had crept into the Corinthian Church. That Church presented a singular spectacle that of a Christian body, large numbers of which denied the doctrine of the Resurrection, who, notwithstanding, were still reckoned by St. Paul as not having forfeited their Christianity. The first thing we learn from this is, the great difference made by the Apostle between moral wrong-doing and intellectual error. For we have found in an earlier chapter, when in this same Church, the crime of incest had been committed by one of its members, the Apostle at once commanded that they should separate the guilty person from their communion; but here, although some had fallen into error upon a doc-. trine which was one of the cardinal doctrines of the Church, the Apostle does not excommunicate them, nor does he hold that they have forfeited their Christian profession. They are wrong, greatly wrong, but still he expostulates with them, and endeavors to set them right.

Let us examine this a little further. In the present day disbelief of the doctrine of the Resurrection is almost equivalent to the deepest infidelity. A man who doubts, or openly denies the doctrine of a life to come, is a man we can in no case call a Christian. But there is a vast difference between this doubt as expressed in the time of the Apostle, and as in the present day. In the present day this denial arises out of materialism. That is, there are men who believe that Life and Soul and Spirit are merely the results and phenomena of the juxtaposition of certain particles of matter. Place these particles in a certain position,

they say, and the result will be Motion, or Electricity -call it what you will; place them in another position, and there will result those phenomena which we call Life, or those which we call Spirit; and then separate those particles, and all the phenomena will cease, and this is the condition which we term Death. Now the unbelief of those distant ages was something very different from this. It was not materialism, but an ultraspiritualism which led the Corinthians into error. They denied the resurrection of the body, because they believed that the materials of which that body was composed were the cause of all evil; and they hailed the Gospel as the brightest boon ever given to man, chiefly because it gave them the hope of being liberated from the flesh with its corrupt desires. They looked upon the resurrection taught by the Apostle as if it were merely a figurative expression. They said, “Just as out of the depth of winter, spring rises into glory, so, figuratively speaking, you may say there is a resurrection of the soul when it rises above the flesh and the carnal desires of nature. That is the resurrection; beyond it there is none." On examining the Epistles of St. Paul, we find many traces of the prevalence of such doctrine. So, for instance, in one place we find the Apostle speaking in condemnation of some "who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection was passed already." That is, as we have already said, they thought that the only resurrection was the regeneration of society. And again, in the beginning of his Second Epistle to this same Church we read: "We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." That is, in opposition to this erroneous doctrine, the Apostle taught that that which the Christian doctrine desires is not merely to be separated from the body, or, in their language, to be "unclothed," but something higher far, to be "clothed upon;" not the destruction or transition merely of our desires and appetites, but the enlarging and ennobling these into

a higher and better life. In this chapter, the Apostle sets himself to controvert this erroneous notion. And he does it by a twofold line of argument; first, by historical proofs of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and after that he proves the truth of the resurrection by the demonstration of the absurdity of all opposite views.

I. In the first place, by historical proofs of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. These are contained manifestly in the earlier verses, from the fourth to the end of the eighth verse, where he shows that Christ was seen, after His resurrection, by Cephas, then by the twelve; after that, by above five hundred brethren at once; and, last of all, by himself also, "as of one born out of due time." The first thing here which the Apostle has to do, is to set at rest at once and for ever the question of what was the apostolic doctrine. For these men did. not set themselves up against the Apostle's teaching, but they misunderstood what that teaching actually was. For example, there are instances where St. Paul himself applies the term resurrection to the spiritual life, and these passages were taken up by these Corinthians, as if they referred to the only Resurrection. In the eleventh verse, therefore, he tells them, "Whether it were I or they"-i. e. the other Apostles-"80 we preached, and so ye believed:" and then he tells them that the Christian doctrine was not merely that there should be an Immortality, but rather this, that there should be a resurrection; not that there should be a mere formless existence, but that there should be an existence in a Form. And he tells them further, that the. resurrection was not merely a resurrection, but the resurrection; the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ being the substantial pledge of our immortality and our resurrection. By all his earnestness in saying this, the Apostle Paul testifies to the immense value and importance of historical Christianity.

Now, brethren, let us understand this matter. There are two forms in which it is conceivable that Chris

tianity may exist the one is essential Christianity; the other, historical Christianity. By the first we mean the essentials of the Christian doctrine. If we may suppose, for the sake of argument, that without the aid of Christ, without the intervention of His mediatorial intercession, a man could arrive at all the chief Christian doctrines; for instance, that God is the Father of all the human race, and not of a mere section of it; that all men are His children; that it is a Divine Spirit which is the source of all goodness in man; that the righteousness acceptable in His sight is not ceremonial, but moral, goodness; that the only principle which reconciles the soul to God, making it at one with God, is Self-sacrifice- he would have arrived at the essence of Christianity. And this is not a mere supposition, a simple hypothesis. For history tells us that before the Redeemer's advent there were a few who, by the aid of the Spirit of God, had reached to a knowledge which is marvellous and astonishing to us. And, in deed, the ancient fathers loved to teach of such men, that they, even although heathen, by the Eternal Word within them had been led to the reception of those truths which Christ came to teach: so that as amongst the Gentiles, "they, without the law, did by nature the things contained in the law," so likewise those men, without the knowledge of the actual historical Jesus Christ, had gained the knowledge of truths which came from his Spirit.

By historical Christianity, however, we mean not those truths abstractedly considered, but as actually existing in the life of Jesus Christ; not merely the truth that God is our Father, but the belief that though "no man hath seen God at any time," yet "the onlybegotten Son in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him;" not merely the truth of the sonship of our Humanity, but that there is One above all others who, in the highest and truest sense, is the only-begotten Son of God; not merely that goodness and spiritual excellence is the righteousness which is acceptable in God's sight, but that these are not mere dreams and