1 Corinthians 15:19 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

We are of all men most miserable.— Most pitiable. Doddridge. It is quite foreign to the purpose to argue from this text, as some have done, that if there were no future state, holiness and virtue would make men more miserable than they would otherwise be. It is evident that St. Paul here speaks not of the case of good men in general, if we could possibly suppose that their hopes of future happiness should, after all, be disappointed; but of the case of the Apostles, and other first preachers and professorsofChristianity,if,amidstalltheir hardships and persecutions, they were not supported by this hope. To be a Christian, in those days, was to be an example of well-tried holiness and virtue, of true wisdom, and of consummate fortitude; to be exposed to scorn, to infamy, and to death; to be pointed at as a fool, a madman, an enthusiast; to be reviled as an atheist, and an enemy to all religion; to be punished as a robber and murderer; to lose fame, and friends, and comfort; and to be exposed to every thing at which human nature shudders, and which a person of the greatest courage, unassisted by divine grace, would certainly endeavour to evade. Destitute therefore of the hope of the resurrection amid these sufferings, they must have been perpetuallysubjected to the upbraidings of their own minds, for sacrificing every view of happiness in this world, to advance what they knew to be a pernicious falsehood. Perhaps there never was a set of men on earth so wretched as they must have been on this supposition.