the ineffable Feast, at which the Fare was the very Body and Blood
of Jesus Christ, and at which His death was solemnly represented (xi.
2-34).

St. Paul deals next with _spiritual gifts_, saying that they come from
God, and so give no ground for boasting, and that the exercise of them
is only pleasing to God if it be joined with charity. After a sublime
chapter on charity, he lays down some regulations for those who
possessed these abnormal gifts, which, it is evident, were already the
cause of disorders in the Church. The Corinthians, with their craving
for the miraculous, tended to set a high value on speaking with
tongues, but St. Paul upholds the superiority of the more intelligible
and useful gift of prophecy (xii.-xiv.).

The Epistle concludes with a splendid argument for the reality of the
_Resurrection_. It is directed against some false philosophy. St.
Paul claims for the fact of the resurrection of Christ the witness of
Scripture, of many honest and intelligent Christians, and of himself.
Then he goes on to show to the Corinthian objectors what a denial of
the resurrection of the dead involves. It means that Christ did not
rise, that I am preaching deceit, that you are believing a lie, that
the dead in Christ have no existence except as memories, that we who
have foregone the pleasures of this life have done so in pursuit of a
delusive phantom. But it cannot be so. Christ is really risen. And
St. Paul passes on to demonstrate the happy consequences which follow
from this. The Resurrection is the earnest of all that Christ will do
for man; and in the light of it Christian baptism for the sake of the
dead[1] and Christian heroism have their meaning (xv. 1-34).

{141}

In order to remove difficulties from the mind of an objector, St. Paul
discusses the kind of body which we shall have at the Resurrection. He
shows by analogies from nature (a) that God is able to effect the
transformation of a seed-grain into a new product, and can therefore
transform us while retaining a connection between our present and
future body; (b) that God is able to create a variety of embodiments,
and can therefore give us a higher embodiment than we now possess.
There will be a spiritual body adapted to the spiritual world, as truly
as our natural body is adapted to life in this world. Thus the gospel
is truly a gospel for the body as well as for the spirit. Our whole
personality will be saved, and nothing will be disc