** It has been thought proper to append the following Sermon to these Lectures, for reasons which will be found stated in the Preface.

THE DUTY

OF

LITURGICAL PREACHING

STATED AND ENFORCED.

1 Corinthians iii., 4, 5.

For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but Ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

OF Apollos, the minister here brought into a momentary comparison with the Apostle to the Gentiles, we learn but little from the Scriptures, or elsewhere. He is first mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, where we are told of him, that he was "born at Alexandria," and was "an eloquent man, and mighty in the Scriptures." Having been compelled, from the locality of his birth, to overcome the characteristic dislike of the Jew to learn a foreign language, and brought into daily collision with the philosophical and reasoning Greeks of that central city, he necessarily became a logician, (as the word which we translate "eloquent," seems

1 Acts xviii. 24.

more properly to imply,) and, possibly from his office of converting Greeks to the Jewish faith, became mighty, also, in the Scriptures, well versed in the established interpretations of the various prophecies, types, and ordinances of the Mosaic Law. This man, thus previously prepared for the work of an Evangelist, having first learned "the baptism of John," and then "the way of God more perfectly" from Aquila and Priscilla, was sent by the Church to Corinth, to carry on the work which Paul had been prosecuting, for nearly two years, in that important city.. There, we are told, his labours in edifying that Church of which St. Paul had already laid the foundation were abundantly successful. "He helped them much which had believed through grace: for he mightily convinced the Jews, and that publicly, shewing by the Scriptures that Jesus was Christ." The tone of his preaching at Corinth, then, we may reasonably infer, was in some degree dissimilar from that of St. Paul. He had a different object in view, and he effected it by different means. The basis of the Church had been already laid in the full establishment of the great doctrine of the Atonement; and probably, though it is not recorded, through the instrumentality of miracles. St. Paul thus describes the system which he pursued among

2 Acts xviii. 27, 28.

them: "I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified: and my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." Apollos, on the other hand, had, upon this foundation, thus firmly laid by "a wise master-builder," to erect such a superstructure as so solid a ground-work required, -that "the man of God," already rooted and grounded in love, "might be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." The course of his teaching, therefore, was, no doubt, in some degree more learned and argumentative, than the plain and elementary instruction of St. Paul. He had to contend with Jews who were well versed in the knowledge of their own Scriptures, and in the refinements and subtilties of their Rabbinical schools; and, with their own weapons, and in their own mode of argument, he had to encounter and confute his adversaries.

It is certain, however, from St. Paul's first Epistle to the Church at Corinth, that this neces

31 Cor. ii. 2, 4. The elementary and progressive system adopted by St. Paul towards the Corinthians (a fact too often forgotten in the indiscriminate teaching of our own day) is further shewn by the Apostle's assertion in ch. iii. v. 2. "I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able."

sary difference between his preaching and that of Apollos was attended with some consequences unfavourable to the progress of the Gospel. The true reason of this difference it would appear that many members of that Church had not perceived; but had erroneously conjectured that, there was some degree of discordance in the views which these two great Teachers had taken of the Gospel of Christ on this false supposition they had divided themselves into parties, siding with the one or with the other of the chief propagators of Christianity according as their supposed views of the Gospel happened to be in harmony, or otherwise, with their own. This spirit of contention St. Paul proceeds at length, and with his wonted eloquence and energy, to expose and allay; and especially by shewing, that there was no ground whatever for the dangerous notion which they had so fatally imbibed, and that the Gospel was but one, whether it were Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas who preached it; "We have received," says he, "not the spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth."

I have, on this occasion, laid these well-known 4 1 Cor. ii. 12, 13.