2 Corinthians 12:21

2 Corinthians 12:21. lest, when I come again, my God should humble me before you. So bound up was his comfort in this and all his churches with their spiritual prosperity, that the prospect of finding the church which of all others lay most at his heart in the deplorable condition here described, sickened him at the thought of it, and held out to him only humiliation, in place of delight, in visiting them, and I should mourn for many of them that have sinned heretofore falling back into those pollutions from which they had been delivered. Since chap. 7 seems to speak a different language, the conjecture that some interval took place between the writing of all that preceded the three last Chapter s and what we there find, and that disquieting news had in the interval reached the apostle, seems to amount almost to a certainty. See introduction to chap. 10, and repented not of the uncleanness, and fornication, and lasciviousness which they committed. Missionaries who have been the happy instruments of rescuing sensual heathens from such vices as these, but find to their grief the same tendency, after a time, to return upon them, can best enter into the apostle's feelings as here expressed, and will be the best expositors of them.