LECTURE XIII.

St. Paul's Determination.

1 COR. ii. 2.

“For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."

AND was the Apostle wrong in his determination? He speaks as if the doctrine of the cross were ample enough, comprehensive enough, for all his powers. Does this, at all, indicate that he was of a narrow and contracted mind, which could apply itself to only one topic, whilst a hundred others, perhaps nobler and loftier, lay beyond its grasp ? Nay, not so; the tone of St. Paul abundantly indicates that he gloried in being thus limited to the Cross-gloried, because in comparison there was nothing else worth knowing-gloried, because this one knowledge might be said to include, or, where it did not include, to supersede every other. The tone of the Apostle is not that of a man who is apologizing for the limited character of his preaching, or its humiliating tendency; it is rather that of one who felt that the Corinthians had nothing to complain of, seeing that he had taught them the most precious, the most diffusive, the most ennobling of truths. Indeed, he had

known nothing amongst them, "save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified" but what else was there which, as sinners, it was important for them to learn? what which, if learnt, did not derive a fresh meaning, or fresh interest, from the Cross of the Redeemer?

Here, then, is our subject of discourse-the Apostle determined to know nothing save the Cross; but the Cross is the noblest study for the intellectual man, as it is the only refuge for the immortal. How different was the plan of the Apostle from that pursued by many who have undertaken the propagation of Christianity. It is recorded, we believe, of some of the Roman Catholic missionaries, that, in their endeavours to bring over the heathen to Christianity, they scrupulously kept the Crucifixion out of sight, considering that such a fact would invincibly prejudice those whom they wished to convince. And it is well known that the Moravian missionaries, men of extraordinary piety and zeal, laboured for a long time in Greenland, without, at least, giving prominence to the doctrine of the atonement, believing that it became them to clear the way, and prepare men's minds, before they advanced the truth of Christ's death-a truth so likely, as they thought, to give fatal offence even to the most degraded and barbarous. In each case the same feeling was at work—the feeling that there is something very humiliating in the Cross, and that human reason, and, yet more, human pride, must recoil from the thought of being saved by one who died as a malefactor. And you must all be aware that, whatever the error or mistake of the missionaries to whom we have referred, there is a great repugnance in men's minds to that doctrine which is virtually the essence of

Christianity, and that what St. Paul elsewhere calls "the offence of the Cross" can only cease with the thorough renewal of our nature. It must be immediately allowed that the scheme of Christianity is not one which commends itself at once to those whom it proposes to rescue; on the contrary, it is so constructed as almost necessarily to excite opposition, because, in place of flattering any one passion, it requires the subjugation of all. But, after all, the observable thing is that Christianity is valuable and glorious on those very accounts on which, in common estimation, it must move the antipathies of its hearers. The missionary might keep back all mention of the Cross, because fearful of exciting dislike and contempt. But, all the while, he would be withholding that which gives its majesty to the system, and striving to apologize for its noblest distinction.

It is sufficiently evident, from the words of our text, that this was the opinion of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. And we reckon it of importance that we should occasionally shift the ground of debate; that, in place of admitting what may be styled the shame of the Cross, we should boldly affirm and exhibit its glory. We know not that we ought to allow that the missionaries, of whom we have spoken, acted with prudence and penetration, even supposing that they had only carnal principles for their guidance. With all our admission, that, at the first hearing, there would be something repulsive in the doctrine of Christ crucified, we believe that this doctrine has only to be fairly exhibited, and fully expanded, in order to its attracting the warmest admiration-and we can think it in the highest degree probable, even if you shut out the consideration that faithful preaching alone may expect the divine

blessing, that missionaries would have made far greater way by insisting on and displaying the majesty of the Cross, than by keeping out of sight, or only partially exhibiting, what they erroneously thought so likely to displease. And it is this which, on the present occasion, we wish to make good. Give your close attention to so interesting a question. We are to set the Apostle against all those teachers who would, in any way or degree, keep back, or obscure, the doctrine of the Cross; and we are to see whether he did not display as much of wisdom as of boldness, when, in no tone of apology, but with the confi dence of one who knew that he had taught what was best worth the being learned, he exclaimed to the Corinthians, "I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."

Now, we need hardly observe to you, that, so far as Christ Jesus Himself was concerned, it is not possible to compute what may be called the humiliation or shame of the Cross. It is altogether beyond our power to form any adequate conception of the degree in which the Mediator humbled Himself, when born of a woman, and taking part of flesh and blood. It is beyond our power, because, with all our searchings, we cannot find out God, we cannot approach the confines of the Divine nature; and therefore, neither can we measure the mighty descent down which Divinity passed in assuming humanity. But, after all, the more surprising humiliation is that which seems to come more nearly within our measurement-the humiliation of the Man Christ Jesus, the humiliation to which the Mediator submitted after our nature had been assumed. In merely becoming man, or, rather, in becoming man without

the taint of original sin, the eternal Word did not bring Himself under the curse: He was not accessible to death, that great penalty of transgression; neither was He heir to any of that degradation which is, literally, our birthright as the seed of the apostate. But when the Redeemer, though He had done no sin, consented to place himself in the position of sinners—when, though the violated law had no claims upon Him, He voluntarily made Himself the subject of its exactions-then was it that He marvellously and mysteriously descended-there being, if we may venture to compare things, neither of which we can measure, something less overwhelming in the fact, that "the Word was made flesh," than in the other fact, that “being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross." Here it is that the word "shame" may justly be used for in this it was that Christ Jesus became "a ; curse for us." We read nothing of the shame of his becoming a man, but we do read of his dying a malefactor. Thus St. Paul declares of Him, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, "Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame"-an expression which equally marks that Christ was sensible of the indignities of his death, and that He made light of them when compared with the recompense which was to follow.

And if we allow that it was a shameful thing, that it involved a humiliation which no thought can measure, that the Lord of life and glory should have hung as a malefactor between earth and heaven, with what other emotions, you may ask, but those of sorrow and self-reproach, should we contemplate the Cross? Shall we exult in the Cross?