Counsel and Comfort Spoken from a City Pulpit (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1864 Excerpt: ... XVII. THE NEEDFULNESS OP LOVE TO CHRIST. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha."--1 Cor. xvi. 22. THINK, my friends, that words so solemn as these need nothing beyond their own weighty meaning to commend them to our grave attention. Still, it is worth our remembering, because it is something that shows St. Paul attached especial importance to them, that the great Apostle wrote them with his own hand, at the close of an Epistle which, according to his wont, he had dictated to another. Some think that it was part of " the thorn in the flesh" he bore, that his hands always trembled so, that he wrote slowly and with pain. And you can all imagine how, when this Epistle came to Corinth, and the Christians there bent over its leaves in little groups, all anxious to know what was St. Paul's last message to them, though they would read with deep concern the Apostle's words, traced in the clear, bold handwriting of Stephanas, and Fortunatus, and Achaicus, they would look with deeper interest yet upon the tremulous lines, where the Apostle had at the last taken the pen into his own hand, and striven to give in a single sentence the sum of all he had said before. If there was anything in the whole Epistle which more than another he wished them to remember, surely they had it here Preached at the celebration of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. And as to the words in which this verse is expressed, you know that Anathema means accursed, and Maranatha means The Lord is coming. So the text means, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed;" and it is understood that the addition of the Maranatha makes a more solemn fashion of denouncing such a one's doom. But it is easier to understand the Apostle's meaning than ...