THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER.
1 Corinthians xiv. 33, 40.
Practically, the amount of confusion prevalent in the church of Corinth, arising from irregularities incident to the exercise of “tongues,” and to the undisciplined energies of a mixed congregation, appears to have almost rivalled the disorder in the theatre of Ephesus, when the whole city was filled with confusion, and some cried one thing, and some another; for the assembly was confused, and the most part knew not wherefore they were come together. So, when the whole church of Corinth were come together into one place, and all spoke with tongues, to outsiders that for the nonce stepped inside they must appear mad. All things were done indecorously and in most admired disorder. Now, St. Paul was for having all things done decently and in order. “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” Order is Heaven’s first law. The same apostle is prompt to remind the Thessalonians that he behaved himself not disorderly among them; and this he did because he heard that there were some among them which walked disorderly—ἀτάκτως. The apostolic canon for both Corinth and Thessalonica, and all other churches, is, Πὰντα δὲ κατὰ τάξιν γινέσθω. Let them all walk by this same rule, and all mind this same thing.
As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony, unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man, they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s ordaining, or ordering,—
“How mean the order and perfection sought
In the best product of the human thought,
Compared to the great harmony that reigns
In what the Spirit of the world ordains!”
Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote, infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what is order.” Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:—
“Distance deceives the sight. Ye move and sway