the possession of the Master’s mind (ii. 10, 16, vii. 25, 40). To their Lord, not to their fellow-servants, they are answerable. By His “call’’ and ‘‘ compulsion ”’ they serve the Gospel (i. 1, ix. 16 f., xii. 28). How presumptuous for the Corinthians to be “ puffed up for one against the other” of God’s servants! All alike are theirs, while they are Christ’s and Christ is God’s (iii. 4 f., 2l-iv. 6). Let men look above the stewards to the Master, above the instruments to God who “ worketh all things in all” (xii. 4 ff.). The Christian teachers are God’s temple-builders ; heavy their loss, if they build amiss; terrible their ruin, if instead of strengthening they destroy the fabric (iii. 10-17). Their maintenance is not bestowed by the Church as wages by an employer, but enjoined on the Church by the Lord’s ordinance, upon the same principle of justice which allows the threshing ox to feed from the corn (ix. 7-12).
The readers must learn what it means to belong to ‘“‘ the Church of ἀοἆ”. Despite their presumed knowledge (viii.), “‘ ignorance of God” is at the root of their errors (xv. 34). Newly emancipated from heathenism, they are slow to realise the character and claims of the God revealed to them in Christ. The first four chapters seek at every point to correct this ignorance ; indeed, this underlying vein runs through the Epistle (cf in this respect 1 Thess. passim). Πάντα εἰς δόξαν Θεοῦ is the maxim that Paul dictates to his readers (x. 31), and that governs his mind throughout the letter.
2. The nature of the Christian community is the subject of chaps. xii. and xiv., but it pervades the Epistle no less than that of the sovereign claims of God: “to the Church of God in Corinth” the Apostle writes.
The Grzeco-Roman cities at this time were honey-combed, in all grades of life, with private associations—trade-guilds, burial clubs and friendly societies, religious coniraternities ; their existence sup- plied a great social need, and formed a partial substitute for the political activity suppressed by the levelling Roman empire. These organisations prepared heathen society for Church life; and Chris- tianity upon Gentile soil largely adopted the forms of combination in popular use, borrowing from the Greek club almost as much as from the Jewish synagogue. But it transformed what it borrowed. In the Churches of God established in Thessalonica and Corinth the first stones were laid of the Christian structure of society. New conceptions of duty and kinship are unfolded in this Epistle, which have yet to receive full development. Paul’s sociology naturally met with resistance from men reared in Paganism; human nature is still against it. The Corinthians brought into the Church their