can never be said in itself to help religion in any minds.

The words which I have taken as my text seem to me to suggest a train
of thought having an immediate bearing on this subject. St Paul has
been speaking of himself in the passage from which the text is taken.
He has been commending himself--a task which is never congenial to
him. But his opponents in the Corinthian Church had forced this upon
him; and now he asks that he may be borne with a little in "his
folly." He is pleased to speak of his conduct in this way, with that
touch of humorous irony not unfamiliar to him when writing under some
excitement. He pleads with his old converts for so much indulgence,
because he is "jealous over them with a godly jealousy." He had won
them to the Lord. "I have espoused you," he says, "to one husband,
that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ." This had been
his unselfish work. He had sought nothing for himself, but all for
Christ. That they should belong to Christ--as the bride to the
bridegroom--was his jealous anxiety. But others had come in betwixt
them and him--nay, betwixt them and Christ, as he believed--and
sought to seduce and corrupt their minds by divers doctrines. "I fear,
lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty,
so your minds should be corrupted from _the simplicity that is in
Christ_."

What the special corruptions from Christian simplicity were with which
the minds of St Paul's Corinthian converts were assailed, it is not
necessary for us now to inquire. Their special dangers are not likely
to be ours. What concerns us is the fact, that both St Paul and
Christ--his Master and ours--thought of religion as something simple.
Attachment to Christ was a simple personal reality, illustrated by the
tie which binds the bride, as a chaste virgin, to the bridegroom. It
was not an ingenuity, nor a subtilty, nor a ceremony. It involved no
speculation or argument. Its essence was personal and emotional, and
not intellectual. The true analogy of religion, in short, is that of
simple affection and trust. Subtilty may, in itself, be good or evil.
It may be applied for a religious no less than for an irreligious
purpose, as implied in the text. But it is something entirely
different from the "simplicity that is in Christ."

It is not to be supposed that religion is or can be ever rightly
dissociated from intelligence. An intelligent perception of our own
higher wants, and of a higher