The life and work of St. Paul

30 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL.
A similar but more remarkable instance of this apparent subordination of
the historic context in the illustrative application of prophetic words is found
in 1 Cor. xiv. 21. St. Paul is there speaking of the gift of tongues, and
speaking of it with entire disparagement in comparison with the loftier gift
of prophecy, i.e., of impassioned and spiritual teaching. In support of this
disparaging estimate, and as a proof that the tongues, being mainly meant as
a sign to unbelievers, ought only to be used sparingly and under definite
limitations in the congregations of the faithful, he quotes from Isaiah xxviii. II1 the verse which he does not in this instance borrow from the LXX. version
" With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people, and
yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord" The whole meaning
and context are, in the original, very interesting, and generally misunderstood.
The passage implies that since the drunken, shameless prieste and prophets
chose, in their hiccoughing scorn, to deride the manner and method of the
divine instruction which came to them, 2 God should address them in a wholly
different way, namely, by the Assyrians, who spake tongues which they could
not understand ; and yet even to that instruction the stern and unintelligible
utterance of foreign victors they should continue deaf. This passage, in a
manner quite alien from any which would be natural to us, St. Paul embodied
in a pre-eminently noble and able argument, as though it illustrated, if it did
not prove, his view as to the proper object and limitations of those soliloquies
of ecstatic spiritual emotion which were known as Glossolalia, or " the Gift of
Tongues."
One more instance, and that, perhaps, the most remarkable of all, will
enable us better to understand a peculiarity which was the natural result of
years of teaching. In Gal. iii. 16 he says, " Now the promises were spoken to
Abraham and to his seed. He saith not, AND TO SEEDS, as applying to
many, but, as applying to one, AND TO THY SEED who is Christ." Certainly
at first sight we should say that an argument of immense importance was
here founded on the use of the Hebrew word zero, hi the singular, 3 and its
and that the inference which St. Paul
representative the