St. Paul notes three abuses, into which these Corinthians fell, all three borrowed from the heathen mysteries. They revelled at the Love Feasts, they fell into moral disorder, and they gave way to hysterical ravings. The third abuse St. Paul was a little puzzled at, and he dealt with it more leniently than with the drunkenness and debauchery of his converts. He was prepared to humour the wild exhibition, perhaps in hopes that by degrees the converts, as they mended their morals, would mend in this particular also. The outburst of incoherent ravings to which he referred was much the same as what had occurred in the heathen mysteries, and the same phenomena are met with to the present day among North American Indians and negroes. We have seen a Schaman in the same state in Siberia. These Corinthians, some tipsy with the wine they had drunk in excess, others half starved, but frenzied by their easily-wrought-on religious feelings, jabbered disconnected, unintelligible words. They raved, fell into cataleptic fits, and made a scene of confusion and uproar such as is hardly to be found out of the wards of Bedlam. In the heathen temples women were placed over cracks in the rock, whence exhaled intoxicating vapours, and becoming giddy, they uttered oracular sentences, which were generally nonsense, and could, therefore, be interpreted to mean anything. The apostle now met with the outbreak of a phenomenon among his converts very similar, which he could not understand, and did not know in what manner to treat. He contented himself with giving rules for its direction. He struck at the root of the spiritual disturbances when he insisted on a moral reformation. Till that was effected, there would be no abatement of these perplexing and indecent manifestations. Where there were incoherent ravings, there “an interpreter” was to be set in the assemblies to make what sense he could out of the unintelligible noises. The discipline to which the Corinthians were subjected by St. Paul brought them to some sort of order for awhile, but it is not to be expected that, with the lofty standard of life set before them, there would not be found a considerable number who would kick at it. St. Paul, in his polemics against the Judaisers, had written with heat against the law, and had exalted the freedom of the Gospel. He had not supposed it necessary to nicely discriminate between the ceremonial obligations and the moral commands of the law. Accordingly a good many of his converts took the matter into their own hands, and he was surprised and confounded to find a party fully prepared to take his strongest words _au pied de la lettre_, to roll moral and ceremonial commands into one bundle, and throw all overboard. Accordingly we find that the early Church was infested with a multitude of Evangelicals, professing themselves to be disciples of St. Paul, appealing to his words as their justification, and casting all morality to the winds.