The Pulpit Commentary — 1 Corinthians — Section 170

the Judge. But it is Christ, Head of the Church, not Christ, the Judge of the nations, on the throne of the last day. Suffering in the body was ordained for the well- being of the spirit. Natural laws, if violated, revenge themselves on the violator. /\_pparently, however, much more is meant in this instance. The culprit bad gone beyond natural law. A member of the Church, and nominally retaining his place amoncr those "called to be saints," he had sacrificed, in a most ruthle&1 manner, those spiritual relations which are to the immortal man more sacred and enduring than any and all other ties. If his vice, reeking and dripping with the foulest slime of earth, had invaded the spiritual realm of Christ's kingdom, the act of excommunication cannot pause at simple excision. Nay; of that other world, whose mysteries envelop us-a worlcl of spirit and spirits within the world of the senses-the offender and the Church and St. Paul were inhabitants, and, hour by hour, the realities of life were most real in this occult domain. There-the great secrets lie, the secret sources of motive and purpose, of strength and weakness, and of life and death. The;·e----we get our tragedies, so that Shakespeare found it impossible to write 'Macbeth' without" supernatural solicitings," and even the Platonic Brutus must face the vengeance of the other world in the tent near Sardis. And there-this judgment allies itself with Satanic agency in subordina- tion to Christ's authority. And there, finally, over all, is infinite tenderness; and, though ruin might be wrought on the outward man, seeing that his sin was specially heinous and involved in a signal way the most terrible retributions of an outraged body, yet it remained possible that his spirit might be "saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."-L. Vers. 6-13.-Supplementary views and explanations. Was nothing necessary except to get rid of the offender? That was to be done, but something else was quite aa much of an exigency. Here, then, we see the extent to which the enormous evil had spread, for the whole Church had been infected. If the vice had assumed in onl. man the completest form of social iniquity, what was the state of the atmosphere in which this was possible? Such corruption was not sporadic: the whole air was poisoned; and in this state of things nothing short of a general purification would suffice. For, in the midst of this widespread taint, you are breathing out your com- placent self-conceits. Glorying (boasting) is not good. 'l'o glory in a time like this of your privileges, gifts, eloquence, devotion to leaders, is a wretched delusion, bad enough under any circumstances, incomparably worse now, because of the immense contrast between your state of mind and your actual condition. This is St. Paul's argument. llut his logic is not content to be logic only. Buoyant and flexible as are his reasoning~, he must have the help of metaphors, since all our greatest thoughts tend to perfect themselves by means of the imagination. Beyond the illustrative imagination (for he is very utilitarian in the use of images) he seldom i?0es, and he is especially given to the habit of using the interrogatory imagination. "Know ye not that a little leaveu leaveneth the whole lump?" Purge it out-an earnest word; cleanse and purify by ridding the Church of its moral defilement, and so complete the work begun in the excommunicntion of the incestuous man. It is "old leaven," the relic of the natu, al man, and it threatens to destroy the new man of Christ's kingdom. For what now is the Divme ideal of a Christian? A new creature in Christ. And what the ideal of the Church? A new brotherhood of humanity in Christ. 'l'herefore, purge out the okt leaven, and be a new lump, remembering that even discipline executed in Christ's name has its dangers, and may divert us from attention to our own spiritual condition. Inas- much, then, as St. Paul looked on the excision of the ungodly member of the Church, and the internal purification of the Church in all its members, as branches of one and the same duty, be presses his argument under the idea of a new lump-not a mere outer reform, but a thoroughgoing inward renewal by the grace of the Spirit. Such language could have emanated from no man who had not been a religious Jew. Nor could it have proceeded from one who was simply a spiritual Jew. It was a Christian thinker, a thinker of catholic insight, who saw into Judaism from the cross of Calvary, when that cross and its Divine Sacrifice had the great darkness under which they stood cloared· away by Pentecost. Once St. Paul had understood the scrupulous removing of the leaven by the Jews from their homrs in a very different way. Once he had seen in the Pass- over and kindred institutions a life-giving and perpetual force. Now, however, the-  J. i-1 THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. [ea. v. 1-13.