heaven is that of marriage. Very beautiful it is to see how
this fiery Paul, like the ascetic John, who never knew the sacred joys
of that state, lays hold of the thought of the Bridegroom and the Bride,
and of his individual relation to both as indicating the duties of the
Church and the solicitude of the Apostle. He says that he has been the
intermediary who, according to Oriental custom, arranged the
preliminaries of the marriage, and brought the bride to the bridegroom,
and, as the friend of the latter, standing by rejoices greatly to hear
the bridegroom's voice, and is solicitous mainly that in the tremulous
heart of the betrothed there should be no admixture of other loves, but
a whole-hearted devotion, an exclusive affection, and an absolute
obedience. 'I have espoused you,' says he, 'to one husband that I may
present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear lest . . . your mind
should be corrupted from the simplicity that is towards Him.'

Now that metaphor carries in its implication all that anybody can say
about the exclusiveness, the depth, the purity, the all-pervasiveness of
the dependent love which should knit us to Jesus Christ. The same
thought of whole-hearted, single, absolute devotion is conveyed by
other Scripture metaphors, the _slave_ and the _soldier_ of Christ. But
all that is repellent or harsh in these is softened and glorified when
we contemplate it in the light of the metaphor of my text.

So I might leave it to do its own work, but I may perhaps be allowed to
follow out the thought in one or two directions.

The attitude, then, which corresponds to our relation to Jesus Christ is
that, first, of a faith which looks to Him exclusively as the source of
salvation and of light. The specific danger which was alarming Paul, in
reference to that little community of Christians in Corinth, was one
which, in its particular form, is long since dead and buried. But the
principles which underlay it, the tendencies to which it appealed, and
the perils which alarmed Paul for the Corinthian Church, are perennial.
He feared that these Judaising teachers, who dogged his heels all his
life long, and whose one aim seemed to be to build upon his foundation
and to overthrow his building, should find their way into this church
and wreck it. The keenness of the polemic, in this and in the contextual
chapters, shows how real and imminent the danger was. Now what they did
was to tell people that Jesus Christ had