1 W. E. Chadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 247.
2 Quintin Hogg, 303.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 353
else besides, it needs our love. True, even love may sometimes err; but the cure for love's mistakes is just more love. We never blunder because we love ; we often blunder because we do not love enough. God help us all, that like Whittier, we may live and die, giving our love to the world ! 1
5. St. Paul's first application of his great principle refers to the use of "tongues" — a gift of ecstatic, and probably highly smotional utterance, and evidently very highly prized by the Corinthians. St. Paul at once refuses to consider the gift apart from the personality through which it is exercised. If that personality is not motived by love the speaker has become a mere instrument of sound without moral (or spiritual) character.
If Two applications at once suggest themselves : first, to what is termed popular preacJiing, however eloquent and clever, which does not proceed from a Christianized heart, which is not inspired by the love of souls, and whose object is not the salvation or edification of men; secondly, to the emotional singing of hymns whose words, if studied carefully apart from the music, are seen to be either heresy or nonsense, if they do not come perilously near to blasphemy.2
I.
Intellect or Character?
1. St. Paul has been alluding in the preceding chapter to sundry and various endowments, abilities, and qualifications by which certain individuals in the early Christian community were gifted and distinguished by Divine providence, for the purpose of the more speedy propagation of the Gospel, and of attracting, retaining, and edifying new candidates for that community. And one purpose of the Apostle in referring to these extraordinary gifts and faculties is to put the favoured possessors of them upon their guard, lest they should become puffed up and self-complacent in the consciousness of their distinctions, and employ them for their own exaltation, instead of for the furtherance of God's honour in the welfare and progress of humanity.
Of the precise nature of these mysterious gifts, we know little more than that, having answered their temporary purpose, they
1 G. Jackson, Memoranda Paulina, 51.
2 W. E. Chadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 248. I COR. — 23
354 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
exist no longer. But whatever they were, it is obvious that the best way of applying for our own edification the Apostle's admonitions with respect to them will be to translate, as it were, those extraordinary gifts into their modern equivalents, which are variously distributed amongst us under the common name of " talents." We have no miraculous gift of Tongues ; but we have scholars whose laborious industry has mastered languages to such a degree as almost to repair the inconvenience of Babel and to reduce its confusion to order. We have no miraculous gift of Prophecy : but we have men of far-sighted sagacity to discern the signs of the times, of profound wisdom to prepare for the recep- tion and interpretation of those phenomena, and possessed of an eloquence little short of miraculous in propounding their projects and recommending them for acceptance by a free people. And whatever might be the precise nature of what St. Paul terms " gifts of healing, gifts of help, gifts of government," we can have no doubt that they each have their corresponding though ordinary and unmiraculous endowments in the present day, exhibited in the various evolutions of art, science, philosophy, political and religious administration ; each of them, like the Pentecostal gifts, and like "every good and perfect gift," proceeding from the Father of Lights ; each of them liable to misuse by the vanity of man ; each of them therefore necessitating a word of caution in the spirit of the Apostle. Such gifts there are corresponding to those of tongues, of knowledge, of prophecy, of discovery, of contrivance or administration; gifts working through all the range of commerce, politics, the camp, the court, the Church, or in the fields of literature and science. These are the gifts which, under the names of talent, force, and genius, men (and no wonder) are ready to bow down before and worship ; these are the gifts before which we are least reluctant and ashamed to offer homage, sometimes approaching to extravagance — gifts that are dazzling to the beholder, and cannot therefore but be more or less danger- ous to the possessor ; gifts that must be used with watchfulness lest they should bear that possessor up into the region of super- ciliousness ; lest they should set him above the plain tasks, the common duties, the homely sympathies, the social kindnesses, the meekness, the modesty, the concession, the considerateness, and the fair construction which we owe to one another.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 355
If In earlier days his standard had been almost purely intellectual, but in later life simplicity and charm and genuine goodness seemed to appeal to him most. He said, " The power of simple goodness is the greatest in the world." x
If The idea was early and unmistakably impressed on our minds, that to he good was the main thing in life ; that there was nothing else that could come into any comparison or competition with this ; that in fact nothing else mattered greatly. We knew that this was what our parents desired for us above all else, though I do not think there was much direct speaking about it, beyond a little explanation of our Sunday lessons, or an occasional word when we were saying our prayers.2