ffend."--1 COR. viii. 13.

Of all the great writers of the world, the apostle Paul perhaps most
needs to be read with the eye of the heart, as well as with the eye of
the understanding. Moral sympathy is an essential condition of the full
understanding of the apostle's words. Most especially is it needed in
such passages as the present, in which he gives vehement and even
passionate utterance to his vivid sympathies with the weaker brethren
who were still struggling with the difficulties and perplexities from
which his powerful genius had already emancipated him, or who were
tormented by doubts which he had laid happily at rest for ever. There is
no great writer who is less careful to guard himself from even grave
misconstructions, or whose eager, impetuous sentences, when matters
which touch his sympathies and affections are in question, are more
likely, if formulated into maxims and rules of action, to lead weak
minds astray. Indeed, there is a sense in which the Bible is the most
unguarded of all books. Meant more than any other book to be a guide of
action, it is less careful about misunderstandings of its meaning, and
lays itself open to more complete misapprehensions, than any other book
in the world. And this precisely because it will be read with the spirit
as well as with the understanding. It needs no worldly scholarship; but
it will not make its meanings plain to those who do not care to bring to
bear on it, not the attention of their heads only, but that of their
hearts. How many startling sentences are there which, in the first
flash of their meaning, seem to strike at the root of institutions or
principles which we learn from other passages the Bible is most
earnestly solicitous to maintain and secure. Take some utterances of the
mind of the apostle Paul about women for instance, as isolated dicta;
treat them as complete authoritative utterances, giving the law to us;
the result would be the utter confusion of all man's most sacred
relations, and the overthrow of human society. There are words too,
uttered by yet more sacred lips, which it needs no little spiritual
experience and insight to avoid misunderstanding, and applying to uses
which the whole tenour of the Saviour's life and teaching would sternly
condemn. Paul, a man vividly sympathetic and tender, easily touched by
suffering, easily drawn by love, intense, passionate, and impetuous,
suffers himself ever and anon to express in one short, startlin