1 Corinthians 1:10

Now I beseech you [a voice of entreaty], brethren, through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ [a voice of authority, enforced by threatened judgment (1 Corinthians 4:21). In this Epistle Paul has already used the name of Jesus nine times, thus emphasizing its virtue before he uses it as the symbol of supreme authority: as Chrysostom says, "he nails them to this name"], that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfected together in the same mind and in the same judgment. [The pride of Corinth showed itself largely in philosophical conceit, and the citizens who vaunted their superior intelligence were divided into sects, of whom Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, and later philosophers, were the heads. The church became inflated with this same intellectual vanity, and apparently sought to make Christianity the rival of philosophy by exalting her humble teachers to be heads of religio-philosophical sects, and rivals of Christ himself. As to this sinful condition the apstle gives an injunction, covering three points: 1. Unity of speech. 2. Unity of organization. 3. Unity of mind and judgment. They may be treated in their order as follows: 1. Paul first strikes at their speech, because then, as now, speculative discourses, philosophical dissertations, unscriptural reasonings, vapid dialectics for display's sake, etc., had become a fruitful cause of division. It is this speculative, argumentative spirit which genders confessions and creeds. 2. He strikes next at the divisions themselves, as the finished, completed evil complained of. But the divisions which he censures were mere parties in the church, not sects disrupting it, nor organized denominations professing to be "branches of the church." These greater divisions, and hence greater evils, came centuries later. 3. He proposes unity of mind and judgment as the ideal condition--the condition in which he had left them, and to which he would now restore them. The "mind" represents the inner state, the "judgment" the outward exhibition of it in action. In all this, Paul bespeaks not a partial, but a perfect, unity. "Perfected together" is a very suggestive phrase. Perfection of knowledge brings unity of thought and action, but defective understanding results in division. If one body of men, therefore, grows in truth faster than another, the tardiness of the latter tends to divide. All should grow and be perfected together. Hence, it becomes the duty of the growing disciple to impart his knowledge, and the correlative duty of the ignorant disciple to freely receive it.]