Now, the Apostle, in this context, gives us a little autobiographical glimpse which is singularly and interestingly confirmed by some slight incidental notices in the Book of the Acts.  He says, in the context, that he was with the Corinthians ’in weakness and in fear and in much trembling,’ and, if we turn to the narrative, we find that a singular period of silence, apparent abandonment of his work and dejection, seems to have synchronised with his coming to the great city of Corinth.  The reasons were very plain.  He had recently come into Europe for the first time and had had to front a new condition of things, very different from what he had found in Palestine or in Asia Minor.  His experience had not been encouraging.  He had been imprisoned in Philippi; he had been smuggled away by night from Thessalonica; he had been hounded from Berea; he had all but wholly failed to make any impression in Athens, and in his solitude he came to Corinth, and lay quiet, and took stock of his adversaries.  He came to the conclusion which he records in my text; he felt that it was not for him to argue with philosophers, or to attempt to vie with Sophists and professional orators, but that his only way to meet Greek civilisation, Greek philosophy, Greek eloquence, Greek self-conceit, was to preach ’Christ and Him crucified.’  The determination was not come to in ignorance of the conditions that were fronting him.  He knew Corinth, its wealth, its wickedness, its culture, and knowing these he said, ’I have made up my mind that I will know nothing amongst you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’

So, then, this Apostle’s conception of his theme was—­the biography of a Man, with especial emphasis laid on one act in His history—­His death.  Christianity is Christ, and Christ is Christianity.  His relation to the truth that He proclaimed, and to the truths that may be deducible from the story of His life and death, is altogether different from the relation of any other founder of a religion to the truths that he has proclaimed.  For in these you can accept the teaching, and ignore the teacher.  But you cannot do that with Christianity; ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life’; and in that revealing biography, which is the preacher’s theme, the palpitating heart and centre is the death upon the Cross.  So, whatever else Christianity comes to be—­and it comes to be a great deal else—­the principle of its growth, and the germ which must vitalise the whole, lie in the personality and the death of Jesus Christ.

That is not all.  The history of the life and the death want something more to make them a gospel.  The fact, I was going to say, is the least part of the fact; as in some vegetable growths, there is far more underground than above.  For, unless along with, involved in, and deducible from, but capable of being stated separately from, the external facts, there is a certain commentary or explanation of them:  the history is a history, the biography is a biography, the story of the Cross is a touching narrative, but it is no gospel.