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A remarkable, yet most just, transition. St. Paul anticipates here a coming abuse and distortion. Pureness cannot be over-estimated. But there is a pursuit of pureness which is not according to knowledge. Witness the monastery and the confessional; witness the narrow, the enthralling, the degrading processes by which "ministers of God" have "given offence" in this matter — making purity the whole of grace, and debasing purity itself — as St. Paul saw some would debase charity — into a negative and a self-neutralising virtue. I read here the Divine warrant for the expansion of the human intellect; the assurance that the gospel is the friend and the nurse of enlightenment; that the true gospel never runs into corners, or hides its head in the sand, by reason of a fear of knowledge. I read here the benediction of God upon education — upon all that braces and adorns the intellect; upon all that enables a young man to judge of truth by truth, to exercise a sound mind upon doctrine presented to him, to try the very "spirits of the prophets," whether they are of God, by ascertaining the vigour, and the consistency, and the satisfactoriness to conscience, of the language they speak. Above all, I read here the solemn, the awful duty of each minister and of each Christian to gain a clear and a piercing insight into the gospel as a whole, into the Bible as the Book of Books. The knowledge of which St. Paul wrote was pre-eminently a gospel knowledge. He lived in days when that title, so honourable, so easily assumed, was beginning to be fraught with mischief and ruin to the Church of God. He himself said elsewhere, "Knowledge puffeth up; it is love which edifieth." And therefore we may be quite sure that the "knowledge" by which he "approved himself," was distinctly a knowledge of revelation — yet a knowledge no less checked and tempered by other knowledge, than prompted and inspired by a Spirit not of the world. In these days the importance of knowledge, side by side with pureness, is asserting itself as perhaps never before. The necessity of Christian people being also an educated people. That they should be able to hold their own against all comers. That they should be able to refute — and not to be frightened at — the gainsayers. The timidity of conscious ignorance is the cause of half our compromises and our cowardices. We Christians flee where no man pursueth, because we have not taken the measure of the possible capacities of the imagined pursuer. But not less is it necessary that Christian men should "know" their own gospel. We snatch up, here and there, a text or a word, a phrase or a clause, detach it from its context, never define, never balance, and then, following some party leader, fight for the name and never "know" the thing. And so it may happen that, under the banner of the name, we may even be fighting against the thing. We may have a zeal for God Himself — and "not according to knowledge." I speak fearlessly the praises of knowledge. Only let us take heed, first, that we be not bringing a "science falsely so called" into antagonism with Him who is "the truth"; and secondly, that we be quite sure that our Divine truth is the whole of truth — in other words, is Christ Himself — in His Deity, and in His Humanity — in His holiness, and His wisdom, and His love!

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned,

WEB: in pureness, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in sincere love,