a partner in His saving work.
They said that obedience to the Jewish law, ceremonial and other, was a
condition of salvation, along with trust in Jesus Christ as the Messiah.
And because they thus shared out the work of salvation between Jesus
Christ and something else, Paul thundered and lightened at them all his
life, and, as he tells us in this context, regarded them as preaching
another Jesus, another spirit, and another gospel. That particular error
is long dead and buried.

But is there nothing else that has come into its place? Has this old
foe not got a new face, and does not it live amongst us as really as it
lived then? I think it does; whether in the form of the grosser kind of
sacramentarianism and ecclesiasticism which sticks sacraments and a
church in front of the Cross, or in the form of the definite denial that
Jesus Christ's death on the Cross is the one means of salvation, or
simply in the form of the coarse, common wish to have a finger in the
pie and a share in the work of saving oneself, as a drowning man will
sometimes half drown his rescuer by trying to use his own limbs. These
tendencies that Paul fought, and which he feared would corrupt the
Corinthians from their simple and exclusive reliance on Christ, and
Christ alone, as the ground and author of their salvation, are perennial
in human nature, and we have to be on our guard for ever and for ever
against them. Whether they come in organised, systematic, doctrinal
form, or whether they are simply the rising in our own hearts of the old
Adam of pride and self-trust, they equally destroy the whole work of
Christ, because they infringe upon its solitariness and uniqueness. It
is not Christ and anything else. Men are not saved by a syndicate. It is
Jesus Christ alone, and 'beside Him there is no Saviour.' You go into a
Turkish mosque and see the roof held up by a forest of slim pillars. You
go into a cathedral chapter-house and see one strong support in the
centre that bears the whole roof. The one is an emblem of the Christless
multiplicity of vain supports, the other of the solitary strength and
eternal sufficiency of the one Pillar on which the whole weight of a
world's salvation rests, and which lightly bears it triumphantly aloft.
'I fear lest your minds be corrupted from the simplicity' of a
reasonable faith directed towards Christ.

And in like manner He is the sole light and teacher of men as to God,
themselves, their duty, their destinie