rfect Future. With regard to the other statement, the abiding
of faith, hope, charity, that, too, has been misapprehended as if it
indicated that faith and hope belonged to this state of things only,
and that love was the greatest of the three, because it was
permanent. The reason for that misconception has mainly lain in the
misunderstanding of the force of '_Now_,' which has been taken to
mean 'for the present,' as an implied contrast to an unspoken 'then';
just as in the previous verse we have, '_Now_ we see through a glass,
_then_ face to face.' But the 'now' in this text is not, as the
grammarians say, temporal, but logical. That is, it does not refer to
time, but to the sequence of the Apostle's thought, and is equivalent
to 'so then.' 'So then abideth faith, hope, charity.'

The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with the
permanent, in Christian experience. If we firmly grasped the truth
involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice
revolutionised.

I. I ask this question--What will drop away?

Paul answers, 'prophecies, tongues, knowledge.' Now these three were
all extraordinary gifts belonging to the present phase of the
Christian life. But inasmuch as these gifts were the heightening of
natural capacities and faculties, it is perfectly legitimate to
enlarge the declaration and to use these three words in their widest
signification. So understood, they come to this, that all our present
modes of apprehension and of utterance are transient, and will be
left behind.

'Knowledge, it shall cease,' and as the Apostle goes on to explain,
in the verses which I have passed over for my present purpose, it
shall cease because the perfect will absorb into itself the
imperfect, as the inrushing tide will obliterate the little pools in
the rocks on the seashore. For another reason, the knowledge, the
mode of apprehension belonging to the present, will pass--because
here it is indirect, and there it will be immediate. 'We shall know
face to face,' which is what philosophers mean by intuition. Here our
knowledge 'creeps from point to point,' painfully amassing facts, and
thence, with many hesitations and errors, groping its way towards
principles and laws. Here it is imperfect, with many a gap in the
circumference; or like the thin red line on a map which shows the
traveller's route across a prairie, or like the spider's thread in
the telescope, stretched athwart the blazing disc of the