because our lot may have chanced to fall in the retirement of a country town, or perhaps in the obscurity of a village, the time may come, sooner than we think, when it shall be said, Where is now the church of England? Let us betimes take warning. "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten," said our Lord to the church of Laodicea, whose worst crime it was, that she was "neither hot nor cold." "Be zealous, therefore, and repent. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.'

SERMON XIV.

For I have determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.*-1 Cor. ii. 2.

AMONG various abuses in the Corinthian church, which this epistle, as appears from the matter of it, was intended to reform, a spirit of schism and dissension, to which an attempt to give a new turn to the doctrines of Christianity had given rise, was in itself the most criminal, and in its consequences the most pernicious. Who the authors of this evil were, is not mentioned, and it were idle to inquire. They were run after in their day, but their names have been long since forgotten; nor is any thing remembered of them, but the mischief which they did. The general character of the men, and the complexion of their doctrine, may easily be collected from this and the subsequent epistle. They were persons who, without authority from Heaven, had taken upon themselves to be preachers of the gospel. The motive from which they had engaged in a business for which they were neither qualified nor commissioned, was not any genuine zeal for the propagation of the truth, or any charitable desire to reclaim the profligate, and to instruct the ignorant; but the love of gainof power and applause,-the desire, in short, of those

* Preached in the Cathedral Church of Gloucester, at a Public Ordination of Priests and Deacons.

advantages which ever attend popularity in the character of a teacher. A scrupulous adherence to the plain doctrine of the gospel had been inconsistent with these views, since it could only have exposed them to persecution. Whatever, therefore, the Christian doctrine might contain offensive to the prejudice of Jew or Gentile, they endeavoured to clear away by figurative interpretations, by which they pretended to bring to light the hidden sense of mysterious expressions, which the first preachers had not explained. While they called themselves by the name of Christ, they required not that the Jew should recognise the Maker of the world, the Jehovah of his fathers, in the carpenter's reputed son; nor would they incur the ridicule of the Grecian schools, by maintaining the necessity of an atonement for forsaken and repented sins, and by holding high the efficacy of the Redeemer's sacrifice.

Such preaching was accompanied with no blessing. These pretended teachers could perform no miracles in confirmation of their doctrine: it was supported only by an affected subtlety of argument, and the studied ornaments of eloquence. To these arts they trusted, to gain credit for their innovations with the multitude. Not that the Corinthian multitude, more than the multitude of any other place, were qualified to enter into abstruse questions -to apprehend the force, or to discern the fallacy of a long chain of argument-or to judge of the speaker's eloquence; but they had the art to persuade the people that they excelled in argument and rhetoric. They told the people, that their reasoning was such as must convince, and their oratory such as ought to charm: and the silly people believed them, when they bore witness to themselves. St. Paul they vilified, as a man of mean abilities, who either had not himself the penetration to discern I know not what hidden meaning of the revelation of which he was the minister, or had 'not the talents of a teacher in a sufficient degree to carry his disciples any considerable length, and, through his inability, had left untouched

those treasures of knowledge which they pretended to disclose.

This sketch of the characters of the false teachers in the Corinthian church, and of the sort of doctrine which they taught, is the key to the apostle's meaning, in many passages of this epistle, in which, as in the text, he may seem to speak with disparagement of wisdom, learning, and eloquence, as qualifications of little significance in a preacher of the gospel, and as instruments unfit to be employed in the service of divine truth. In all these passages, a particular reference is intended to the arrogant pretensions of the false teachers, to their affected learning, and counterfeit wisdom. It was not that, in the apostle's judgment, there is any real opposition between the truths of revelation and the principles of reason;-or that a man's proficiency in knowledge can be in itself an obstacle in the way of his conversion to the Christian faith;-or that an ignorant man can be qualified to be a teacher of the Christian religion; which are the strange conclusions which ignorance and enthusiasm, in these later ages have drawn from the apostle's words: but he justly reproaches the folly of that pretended wisdom, which, instead of taking the light of revelation for its guide, would interpret the doctrines of revelation by the previous discoveries of human reason; and he censures the ignorance of that learning, which imagines that the nature of the self-existent Being, and the principles of his moral government of the world, are in such sort the objects of human knowledge, as, like the motions of the planets, or the properties of light, to be open to scientific investigation: and he means to express how little is the amount, and how light the authority of the utmost wisdom that may be acquired in the schools of human learning, in comparison of that illumination which was imparted to him by the immediate influence of the Divine Spirit, the fountain of truth and knowledge, on his mind.

That this is the true interpretation of what the apostle

M

says, or hath been supposed to say, in disparagement of human learning, may appear from this consideration,We have, in the twelfth chapter of this epistle, a distinct enumeration of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, which were nine, it seems, in number. In a subsequent part of the same chapter, we have an enumeration of ecclesiastical offices,-nine also in number. The nine gifts, and the nine offices, taken in the order in which they are mentioned, seem to correspond; the first gift belonging to the first office, the second to the second, and so on:* only, it is to be supposed, that as the authority of all inferior offices is included in the superior, so the higher and rarer gifts contained the lower and more common. At the head of the list of offices, as the first in authority, stand apostles and prophets; by which last word are meant expounders of the Scriptures;-for, that the exposition of Scripture was the proper office of those who were called prophets in the primitive church, is a thing so well understood, and so generally acknowledged, that any particular proof of it upon the present occasion may be spared. Corresponding to these two offices, at the head of the catalogue of gifts, stand "the word of wisdom," and "the word of knowledge." The word of wisdom seems to have been a talent of arguing from the natural principles of reason, for the conviction and conversion of philosophical infidels. This was the proper gift of the apostles, who were to carry the glad-tidings of salvation to distant nations, among which the light of revelation had either never shone, or had at least for ages been extinguished. The word of knowledge was the talent of holding learned arguments from the ancient prophecies, and other writings of the Old Testament, to silence the objections of Jewish adversaries, and to demonstrate the consistency of the gospel with former revelations. This was the proper gift of those who were appointed to expound the Scriptures in congregations of the faithful, once formed by the preaching of the apostles.

* Vide Appendix.

These persons, by the way, bore the name of prophets, because their office in the church stood in the same rela tion to the office of the apostles, as that of the prophets under the law to the office of Moses. The Jewish prophets were only guardians and expounders of the law prescribed by Moses, and of the revelation which he published. The prophets in the primitive church were not the publishers of the gospel, but expounders of what the apostles had previously taught. The apostolic gift, the word of wisdom, consisted, it should seem, in an intuitive knowledge of philosophic truth, and an insight into the harmony of the faith which the apostles taught, with what are called the principles of natural religion. The prophetic gift, the word of knowledge, consisted in a prompt recollection of all parts of the sacred writings, and an insight into the harmony of the different revelations. It pleased God to commit the first preaching of the gospel to men whose former occupations and conditions may be supposed to have excluded them from the pursuits and the attainments of learning, and from the advantages of education, "that the excellency of the power might be of God-not of them." But it is evident, that these gifts, with which he was pleased to adorn the two first offices in the Christian church, were to those first preachers instead of education: for the qualities of a penetrating judgment in abstruse questions, and a ready recollection of written knowledge, which the first preachers enjoyed by the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit, are in kind the very same which men, to whom this supernatural assistance is denied, may, with God's blessing, acquire in a less degree, by long and diligent study. These talents existed unquestionably in the minds of the first inspired preachers, in a degree in which, by the mere industry of study, they cannot be attained. The apostles were, by infinite degrees, the best informed of all philosophers; and the prophets of the primitive church were the soundest of all divines; but yet the light of inspiration, and the light of learning,