influencing a corrupt urban life with the leaven of the gospel. It is
very practical in tone, and the doctrine which it contains is not
stated separately, but is throughout woven into the cords of the
apostle's argument. There is nothing in the New Testament equal to
this Epistle in its power of bringing us close to the difficulties of
the Church in an ancient city. We seem to see the men and women who
composed it--their eagerness for religious novelties, their debased
surroundings, their anarchic divisions, their frail sense of moral
responsibility. And a modern reader will probably lay the letter down
with a conviction that our great modern cities have much to learn from
the words written by St. Paul to Corinth, "the light of Greece."

The Epistle is very olderly in arrangement. It deals first with the
report which St. Paul had received about the Corinthian Church
(i.-vi.); then it answers various questions {137} which the Corinthians
had submitted to him (vii.-xi. 1). Then follow directions based on the
report and the questions.

The letter opens with a significant salutation and thanksgiving (i.
1-9). St. Paul then proceeds to rebuke the Corinthian _tendency to
party spirit_. There were apparently four parties in the Church. The
first asserted that they were followers of _Paul_; the second preferred
the rhetorical preaching of _Apollos_ to Paul's simplicity; the
third--probably Judaizers--ranged themselves under the name of _Cephas_
as the leader of the original apostles; the fourth repudiated human
leaders, and arrogantly named their clique that of _Christ_, thereby
insinuating that the other parties were less Christian than themselves.
It is evident that all these four names were really used as party
watchwords. St. Paul says that he has _transferred by a fiction_ (iv.
6) the action of the wranglers to himself and Apollos. He means by
this, not that the Corinthians did not employ these names in their
strife, but that he and Apollos were in no sense responsible for the
strife. Some perplexity has been caused by the name of the
Christ-party. It is thought by some that they were rigid Jewish
Christians from Jerusalem (2 Cor. iii. 1; xi. 22). But it is more
probable that they were only a body of Christians who protested against
the parties named after human leaders, and saying, "We are the people,"
made a new party of their own.

St. Paul shows that this sectarian spirit is entirely alien to the
who