inconsistent they were with the relation which believers bear to Christ and to each other ; and how careful he had been to avoid all appearance of desiring to be a party leader among them. He had even abstained from baptizing lest any should say he baptized in his own name, ch. 1, 10-16. He had bap- tized only a few among them, for his business was to preach rather than to baptize.
As one class of his opponents directed their attacks against his want of philosophy and rhetorical refinement as a preacher, he for a time leaves the subject of their party contentions, and addresses himself to these objections. He tells them that he did not preach the wisdom of this world, because God had pronounced it to be folly, because all experience proved it to be inefficacious to bring men to the knowledge of God, be- cause God had determined to save men by the preaching of Christ as crucified, because their history showed that it was not the wise who embraced the gospel, but God so adminis- tered his grace as to force all men to acknowledge that it was of him, and not of themselves, that they became united to Christ, and thereby partakers of the true wisdom, as well as of righteousness, holiness and redemption, 1, 17-31. Such being the case, he had come among them, not with the self- confidence of a philosopher, but as a simple witness to bear testimony to the fact that the Son of God had died for our re- demption. Under a deep sense of his insufficiency, he spoke to them with fear and trembling, relying for success not on his own powers of persuasion, but wholly on the power with which the Holy Spirit accompanied the truth ; knowing that the true foundation of faith was not argument, but the witness of the Spirit with and by the truth, 2, 1-5. Howbeit, although he repudiated human wisdom, the gospel which he preached was the true wisdom, a system of truth which God had made known, which was far above the power of man to discover, but which the Spirit of God had revealed. This divine wis- dom he preached not in the words which the rhetorician pre- scribed, but which the Holy Ghost dictated. Both the truths