LECTURES

ON THE

EPISTLES TO THE CORINTHIANS.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

ACTS xviii. 1. June 1, 1851.

It has been customary with us for more than three years to devote our Sunday afternoons to the exposition throughout of some one Book of Scripture, and our plan has been to take alternately a Book of the Old and of the New Testament. I have selected for our present exposition the Epistles to the Corinthians, and this for several reasons-amongst others, for variety, our previous work having been entirely historical.* These Epistles are in a different tone altogether: they are eminently practical, rich in Christian casuistry. They contain the answers of an inspired apostle to many questions which arise in Christian life.

There is, too, another reason for this selection. The state of the Corinthian Church resembles, in a remarkable degree, the state of the Church of this town in the present day. There is the same complicated civilization; the religious quarrels and differences of sect are alike; the same questions agitate society; and the same distinctions of class exist now as then. For the heart of Humanity is the same in all times. The principles, therefore, which St. Paul applied to the Corinthian questions will apply to those of this time. The Epistles to the Corinthians are a witness that religion does not confine itself to the inward being of man alone, nor solely to the examination of orthodox opinions. No! Relig ion is life, and right instruction in religion is not the investigation of obsolete and curious doctrines, but the application of spiritual principles to those questions, and modes of action,

*The Book of Genesis.

which concern present existence, in the Market, the Shop, the Study, and the Street.

Before we can understand these Epistles, it is plain that we must know to whom, and under what circumstances, they were written, how the writer himself was circumstanced, and how he had been prepared for such a work by previous discipline. We make, therefore,

I. Preliminary inquiries respecting Corinth, viewed historically, socially, and morally.

II. Respecting the Apostle Paul.

I. Inquiry respecting Corinth.

We all know that Corinth was a Greek city, but we must not confound the town to which St. Paul wrote with that ancient Corinth which is so celebrated, and with which we are so familiar in Grecian history. That Corinth had been destroyed nearly two centuries before the time of these Epistles, by the Consul Mummius, B.C. 146. This new city, in which the apostle labored, had been built upon the ruins of the old by Julius Cæsar, not half a century before the Christian Church was formed there. And this rebuilding had taken place under very different circumstances—so different as to constitute a new population.

Greece, in the time of the Roman dictators, had lost her vigor. She had become worn out, corrupt, and depopulated. There were not men enough to supply her armies. It was necessary, therefore, if Corinth were to rise again, to people it with fresh inhabitants, and to reinvigorate her constitution with new blood. This was done from Rome. Julius Cæsar sent to his re-erected city freedmen of Rome, who themselves, or their parents, had been slaves. From this importation there arose at once one peculiar characteristic of the new population. It was Roman, not Greek; it was not aristocratic, but democratic; and it held within it all the vices as well as all the advantages of a democracy.

Observe the peculiar bearing of this fact on the Epistles to the Corinthians. It was only in such a city as Corinth that those public meetings could have taken place, in which each one exercised his gifts without order; it was only in such a city that the turbulence and the interruptions and the brawls which we read of, and which were so eminently characteristic of a democratic society, could have existed.

It was only in such a community that the parties could have been formed which marked the Christian Church there; where private judgment, independence, and general equality existed, out of which parties had to struggle, by dint of force

and vehemence, if they were to have any prominence at all. Thus there were in Corinth the advantages of a democracy; such, for instance, as unshackled thought; but also its vices, when men sprang up crying, "I am of Paul, and I of Apollos." Again, the population was not only democratic, but commercial. This was necessitated by the site of Corinth. The neck of land which connects northern and southern Greece had two ports, Cenchreæ on the east, and Lechæum on the west, and Corinth lay between either seaboard. Thus all merchandise from north to south necessarily passed there, and all commerce from east to west flowed through it also, for the other way round the Capes Malea and Tænarum (Matapan) was both longer and more dangerous for heavilyladen ships. Hence it was not by an imperial fiat, but by natural circumstances, that Corinth became the emporium of trade. Once rebuilt, the tide of commerce, which had been forced in another direction, surged naturally back again, and streamed, as of old, across the bridge between Europe and Asia.

From this circumstance arose another feature of its society. Its aristocracy was one not of birth, but of wealth. They were merchants, not manufacturers. They had not the calm dignity of ancient lineage, nor the intellectual culture of a manufacturing population. For let us remember that manufactories must educate. A manufacturer may not be a man of learning, but an educated man he must be, by the very necessity of his position. His intelligence, contrivance, invention, and skill, which are being drawn out continually every hour, spread their influence through his work among the very lowest of his artisans. But, on the other hand, Trade does not necessarily need more than a clear head, a knowledge of accounts, and a certain clever sagacity. It becomes, too, a life of routine at last, which neither, necessarily, teaches one moral truth, nor, necessarily, enlarges the mind. The danger of a mere trading existence is, that it leaves the soul engaged not in producing, but in removing productions from one place to another; it buries the heart in the task of money-getting; and, measuring the worthiness of manhood and of all things by what they severally are worth, too often worships mammon instead of God. Such men were the rich merchants of Corinth.

In addition to this adoration of gold, there were also all the demoralizing influences of a trading seaport. Men from all quarters of the globe met in the streets of Corinth, and on the quays of its two harbors. Now, one reason why a population is always demoralized by an influx of strangers, con

tinually going and coming, is this: a nation shut up in itself may be very narrow, and have its own vices, but it will also have its own growth of native virtues; but when peoples mix, and men see the sanctities of their childhood dispensed with, and other sanctities, which they despise, substituted; when they see the principles of their own country ignored, and all that they have held venerable made profane and common, the natural consequence is that they begin to look upon the manners, religion, and sanctities of their own birthplace as prejudices. They do not get instead those reverences which belong to other countries. They lose their own holy ties and sanctions, and they obtain nothing in their place. And so men, when they mix together, corrupt each other; each contributes his own vices and his irreverence of the other's good, to destroy every standard of goodness, and each in the contact loses his own excellences. Exactly as our young English men and women, on their return from foreign countries, learn to sneer at the rigidity of English purity, yet never learn instead even that urbanity and hospitality which foreigners have as a kind of equivalent for the laxity of their morals. Retaining our own haughtiness, and rudeness, and misanthropy, we graft upon our natural vices sins which are against the very grain of our own nature and temperament.

Such as I have described it was the moral state of 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.

more.

Another element in the city was the Greek population. To understand the nature of this we must make a distinction. I have already said that Greece was tainted to the core. Her ancient patriotism was gone. Her valor was no Her statesmen were no longer pure in policy as in eloquence. Her poets had died with her disgrace. She had but the remembrance of what had been. Foreign conquest had broken her spirit. Despair had settled on her energies. Loss of liberty had ended in loss of manhood. Her children felt the Roman Colossus bestriding their once beloved country. The last and most indispensable element of goodness had perished, for hope was dead. They buried themselves in stagnancy. But remark, that amid this universal degeneracy there were two classes. 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 mere