In a wonderful way, yet withal briefly, St. Paul defines the destiny of Christians in every age and among all peoples when he says at the beginning of his first epistle to the Corinthians that they are "called to be saints." We cannot for a moment assume that the apostle expected anything less of them than this high attainment, and yet the outlook from the human side was far from promising. The city of Corinth was known far and wide for the grossness of its idolatry, and in studying Paul's epistles we discover that the sensuality which is always a concomitant of false religion crept into the Corinthian church through some of the converts. Besides this, we also learn that pride of intellect was prevalent, and the discussions which sprang from an acquaintance with the Greek philosophy and so-called wisdom worship turned thought away from the simplicity of Christ to what the apostle names "the wisdom of men." This inevitably led to strife and divisions; and so we read: "One saith, I am of Paul: and another, I am of Apollos:" and this in entire forgetfulness that they were only "babes in Christ."
Paul very wisely meets this argument of personal preference and division when he asks, "Is Christ divided?" and explains that he and Apollos were but the ministers through whom they had come into the understanding of Truth: for then as now Christ, God's idea, was one and indivisible, and this is the all important consideration for us today. On page 583 of Science and Health Christ is defined as "the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error." Our work in Christian Science discloses the fact that there is much incarnate error to be destroyed for every one of us. The beliefs of the whole race respecting the reality and inevitableness of sin, sickness, and death, whether received through inherited tendencies or through our early religious teaching, have left with us the impression—the conviction, in fact—that material things are at least as real as things spiritual, and these things are constantly in evidence from the mortal standpoint. When Paul thought upon all this, he said in a sorrowful outburst, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Happily he was not ignorant of the way and means of deliverance, for he had found these in Christ, Truth, and so was prepared to face the ordeal of dying daily to the mortal sense of man, in order that the new man—the real man in God's likeness—might be reflected by him.
It is very interesting at this point to note that St. Paul not only had to struggle with the slowly passing illusions of the Corinthian converts, but also with the differences of opinion which prevailed among the apostles themselves. In the second chapter of Galatians we read that circumcision had become a burning question, and Peter and Paul were at odds about it, Paul saying, "When Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed." He goes even farther, and says that Barnabas was affected by this error on the part of Peter and others, and was "carried away with their dissimulation." It is, however, very beautiful to read Peter's words respecting Paul, written many years after. These are to be found in his second epistle, where he speaks of him as "our beloved brother Paul," and referring to Paul's epistles says that in them are "some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction." These two had learned to see each other in the light of Truth, and had left a long way behind them the mortal concepts which in the earlier years of their ministry had caused them to differ.
