CHAP. XIII.] WHEN I WAS A CHILD. 227 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I || thought as a child: but when I | Or, reasoned. became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For *now we see through a glass, † darkly; 2 Cor. iii. 18. & v. 7. Phil. iii. 12. † Gr. in a riddle. ing that which is "perfect," superseding that which is "in part" by the comparison of childhood. The child knows nothing respecting any human thing thoroughly, and he speaks, understands, and thinks according to his very imperfect knowledge; and so it is in spiritual things. At present we speak of them, understand them, and think or reason about them very imperfectly; hereafter we shall look back upon our present state as comparative ignorance. This is not to be taken as if the knowledge of the child is false. He knows that he has parents, he knows them personally in a way that no stranger can know them, he knows when and how he pleases them, or displeases them, he knows that he owes all to them and depends upon them. And what in spiritual things is analogous to this knowledge is true-that no matter to what scale of existence we shall be permitted to advance, we shall never look upon this knowledge as false. All further development of utterance or intellect must be founded upon this, built upon this infantile knowledge as true, every advance must be a further and more complete realization of what we knew when we first exercised our faculty of cognition. A further illustration may be taken from the comparison of the Old Dispensation with the New. Nothing in the Old Dispensation was false and yet it has passed away. Take the offering of sacrifices. It was not false worship; it was, when offered faithfully, acceptable to God, but it has utterly passed away, and is superseded by an infinitely higher showing forth of the All-atoning Death. and 12. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face," &c. The word translated glass (kσóπтρov) never signifies a window, but always a mirror; and it would be a mirror of highly polished brass or other metal, for making which the Corinthians were famous. We now see spiritual things as if we were looking at their reflexion in a mirror, and this was always more or less dim or blurred or imperfect. So Chrysostom: "Because the glass sets before us the things seen in some way or other," he adds, "darkly, to show very strongly that the present knowledge is most partial." We can only determine the meaning of “darkly," 228 NOW I KNOW IN PART. [I. COR. but then 'face to face: now I know in part; but then shall 1 Matt. xviii, I know even as also I am known. 10. 1 John iii. 2. .... (or in an enigma) by the expression "face to face," to which it is opposed. The passage seems to be parallel to that in St. John where the Apostles say to the Lord, "Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb" (or parable); and to what God says about Moses: "If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold" (Numbers xii. 6-8). Being profoundly ignorant of the conditions under which God reveals Himself to us even now, and much more so of what will be accorded to us in the beatific vision, even an Apostle can only express himself in such terms as "darkly," as opposed to "face to face""knowing in part," as opposed to "knowing as I am known." We must reverently close our lips, or if we speak we must be content to say after the Psalmist: "As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." (Ps. xvii. 15.) But how can it be said that we shall know God even as we are known of Him? This does not mean that we shall know Him as perfectly as He knows us, for we shall always be finite and He infinite, and the finite cannot compass the infinite; but we shall know Him not through His works, not through His scriptures, or through His revelations, but as one intelligent being knows another. He knows us, not by our works, or by anything else which proceeds from us, such as our words, by which we show ourselves to our fellows, but as we are in ourselves, and we shall know Him by a similar knowledge clearly and distinctly, but not by an equal knowledge. 13. 66 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three, but," &c. I do not think that because the Apostle here pronounces charity or love to be greater than faith and hope that therefore he means that faith and hope only exist in this state of things, and faith will in the future state of blessedness be "lost in sight," and hope will be lost in fruition. Faith must always be exercised by the creature, for faith is dependence upon the supreme God, and the highest CHAP. XIV.] FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY. 229 13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. angels feel their entire dependence upon Him far more than any below them do, and every creature must hope that God will ever sustain him in holiness, and look forward to higher and higher degrees of nearness to God; but love is the greatest because love is the character of God. God, Who knows all things, cannot believe as His creatures do, and God, Who inhabits eternity cannot hope as His creatures do, but God can love-God is love. It cannot be said that God is faith, nor can it be said that God is hope, but it is said that God is love. FOLL CHAP. XIV. a b 'OLLOW after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. 66 a ch. xii. 31. b Numb. xi. 25, 29. 1. "Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy." Literally, pursue charity." Bishop Wordsworth supposes that there is here an allusion to the games. "Pursue her with the earnestness with which the runners strive after the prize. Make charity your aim and end (σкoπòç) in the whole race of your spiritual life." "And desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy." Spiritual gifts being all of them, if sensibly and devoutly used, of the greatest benefit to the Church, are to be desired, but the Apostle specifies prophecy as the most useful. We now come to a comparison, drawn out at great length, between the usefulness of the gift of tongues and that of prophecy. There is no passage of the New Testament which gives us such an insight into the spiritual state of the earliest Church, at least as it existed in such a city as Corinth. It lets us into its extraordinarily abnormal, rather, perhaps, if one might say so, prenormal state. For here are actually gifts of the Holy Ghost used by converted Christians 230 TONGUES. [I. COR. for vain-glorious purposes-used not for edification, but in a disorderly way, so that if a heathen man came in, and found the Church as a body exercising a particular one of these gifts, he would pronounce them to be mad. It appears that one at least of these gifts might be used senselessly, without regard to the purpose for which God had apparently given it, so much so that many learned men holding the highest rank amongst expositors write as if God had no intelligible purpose in bestowing it. I have examined in Excursus III. in my volume of notes on the Acts, to which I must refer the reader, the two rival theories which have been held on this subject; the first of these, held by all ancient expositors, being that the gift of tongues was an ability to speak in human languages, which those who possessed it had never learnt; the second that it was the expression of ecstatic devotion, that it was unintelligible to the hearers, and, according to many, generally so to the speaker. I shall now briefly recapitulate my reasons for believing that the gift of tongues was the gift of speaking in human languages not previously learnt by the utterer, and then, as I proceed with the exposition, draw attention to several places in this chapter which absolutely require that such should be the meaning, and are incompatible with any other explanation whatsoever. 1. Christ, in his parting charge, as given by St. Matthew, says, "Go ye and teach all nations;" and as given by St. Mark, says, "Go ye to all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." Apparently He seemed to command an impossibility, for the Galileans to whom He gave these charges were "unlearned and ignorant men," and being probably not young men, would find it very difficult to acquire the knowledge of any language so as to teach in it the mysteries of the faith. 2. On the day of Pentecost a great number of Jews residing in different countries were gathered together in Jerusalem, and these men were astonished beyond measure at hearing the Apostles, and perhaps others, who only knew Aramaic imperfectly, speak to them in their own tongues the wonderful works of God. It is clear from this that the Apostles did not speak to them in Creek, which was extensively used as a common mode of intercourse throughout the East, but in Parthian, in Median, in Persian, or in Mesopotamian; and this was the aspect of the miracle which impressed them. Quite independent of any actual instruction which they CHAP. XIV.] TONGUES. 231 received, the fact that men who but a short time before knew not a word of their particular language now addressed them in that language, convinced them that there was here a putting forth of the power of God, such as had never been recorded in their sacred history since the confusion of tongues. They constantly heard of miracles of healing, and with prophecy, true or false, they were familiar, but neither Moses nor any succeeding prophet had ever given to men such a power as was now given from heaven by Jesus of Nazareth. But let this be noticed, that the force of the miracle in convincing them of the truth of the Gospel wholly depended on their understanding the tongue. If it had been some tongue which no one of the assembled multitude could understand much more, if it had been some ecstatic utterance-it would have been no sign whatsoever of the truth of the Gospel, or of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. Now this account of the Pentecostal gift of tongues must rule all other notices of it; so that whenever the gift of tongues is mentioned, it must mean such languages as were spoken at Pentecost,intelligible tongues, tongues spoken by some race or other which some present, or some who might be present, could verify. And with this accords the remarkable fact, that all the places in which the gift of tongues is spoken of as exercised, are places to which men of different nationalities resorted: 1. In Jerusalem, where devout men from every nation under heaven were gathered together; 2. In Cæsarea, more a Gentile than a Jewish city, and the port of Palestine, thronged by soldiers and sailors from all parts of the world; 3. In Ephesus, the resort for commerce or pilgrimage of all Asia Minor; 4. and in Corinth, the city with two ports, having merchants and sojourners from all the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Euxine. We now come to the exposition of the chapter, which presents no difficulty if the reader bears in mind that the gift of tongues was used by the Corinthians in a wrong way. It was given that the foreigners outside the pale of the Church might be witnesses of a miracle by which they might understand that the power of the Creator of the human mind was put forth on behalf of Christianity; so that the proper place for its use was where men of all nations flocked together for commerce or any other purpose. Instead of this, it was used in the Church where all spake the same tongue, and no one could verify it. |