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burden — told of their blind quest after God, and God's ceaseless quest after them — they listened till he came to speak of resur- rection and judgment. And then, offended rather than amused, they broke in and said. " We will hear thee again of this matter." And so he had to forsake cultured Athens, and make for busy Corinth.
And now, as he writes, the antagonisms and the victories of those early days in Corinth come back to him. His mingled feelings are represented by a series of contrasts. First, he contrasts the hearers who were hostile to his preaching (the Jews and the Greeks) with those who accepted it (the " called "). Next, he contrasts the message he had to deliver (a crucified Christ) with the expectations of those hearers who asked for signs and sought after wisdom. Then he contrasts the estimates formed of that same message — a " stumblingblock " and " foolish- ness " to those who were asking for signs of power and wisdom ; the "power and wisdom of God" to those who believed. The subject accordingly is St. Paul's preaching, and we have three natural divisions.
I. The Hearers. II. The Message. III. The Eeception of the Message.
I.
The Hearees.
What the city of Corinth was we know ; it was rich, luxuri- ous, commercial, lascivious. East and West met in it, and mingled their vices and their faiths. Thither had come the Jew, and built his synagogue, opened his bazaar, made a place for himself on the exchange, and used his knowledge of the Eastern men and markets to bring their wares and their ways to the men of the West. There, too, was found the Greek, subtle, full of the pride of race and intellect and achievement, speculative, argumentative in his very commerce, and beating out in the manner of the Schools the questions connected with the prin- ciples and profits of trade. There, too, was the Roman, with the spirit of the soldier who had become sovereign, scornful of the poor civilian and the mean merchant, thinking the world had
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 5
been made to be conquered, and he to be its conqueror. And in the face of this mixed and divided community St. Paul preached. You can imagine him, after a day's hard toil at his handicraft, in the evening stealing along the quay, watched by few, cared for by fewer, a man who could not be conquered, and who had in him vaster ambitions for the good of men than could find room in the mind of imperial Caesar. And if you had followed him you might have seen him climb by a mean stair to a meaner upper room, where the slave, set free for an hour by his master, or the wharfinger escaping from loading or unloading his ship, or the porter seeking release from the burden he had carried throughout the day, met to hear this preacher, mean in appear- ance, but great in dignity and in power.
If The education of the human race has been an affair of unconscious co-operation. One department of it has been put out to one race, another to another. For illustration look at Athens and then at Jerusalem. In Greece we find the first- class minds of the ancient world. Thales, Pythagoras, Demo- critus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pheidias, Praxiteles, Archimedes, Thucydides are, in their several ways, prophets of the intellect. They stand for philosophy, physics, mathematics, art, music, politics, the whole sphere of things with which the mind can busy itself. They are the pioneers of research, openers of the ways in which truth-seekers have been travelling ever since. When you pass from Greece to Palestine you find yourself in another world. Open on Isaiah or Micah, read the New Testa- ment from cover to cover, and you will find scarce a word about mentality. There is nothing about philosophy, or geometry, or music, or painting, or the science of history, or the science of politics. If you kept to the Bible, you would learn nothing worth knowing about the physical universe; no hint of the methods by which its secrets are to be disclosed. Summing the two up, you may say : Greece is all for knowledge ; Palestine is all for character. We are learning to-day the immeasurable debt we owe to both. When you ask, " Which is the mightier ; which the more important ? " Huxley's statement (" clever men are as common as blackberries ; the rare thing is to find a good one "), remembering what he stood for, may well set us thinking.1
The Apostle divides the ancient world into two classes of men : those whom God has taken under His direction and
1 J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 57.
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enlightened by a special revelation, the Jews; the others whom He " has left to walk in their own ways," the Gentiles, designated here by the name of their most distinguished representatives, the Greeks. Each of these groups has its demands, and the demands are different.
i. Jews. " Jews ask for signs."
As proof that God was in their midst and as a revelation of God's nature, the Jews required a sign, a demonstration of physical power. It was one of Christ's temptations to leap from a pinnacle of the Temple, for thus He would have won accept- ance as the Christ. The people never ceased to clamour for a sign. They wished Him to bid a mountain be removed and cast into the sea ; they wished Him to bid the sun stand still or the Jordan retire to its source. They wished Him to make some demonstration of superhuman power, and so put it beyond a doubt that God was present.