1 Corinthians 5:6

b. Sin, like a pervading leaven, must be purged from the Church, 1 Corinthians 5:6-8 .

6. Your glorying Rather, your ground of boasting; namely, an entire forgetfulness of your disgrace from this sensuality.

Not good Not honourable or noble. It was a base insensibility to moral reproach.

Know ye not A solemn phrase indicating a truth it behooved them well to know: used by St. Paul in this epistle ten times.

Leaven Is a portion of old dough in a high state of fermentation, which, added to a new mass of dough, spreads the fermentation through the whole lump, and so renders the bread, upon baking, porous and light. As this fermentation is a sort of disintegration, and proves so pervasive, the ancients saw in it an image of moral corruption. So Plutarch (quoted by Wetstein) says: “Wherefore is it unlawful for the priest of Jove, called Flamen Dialis, to touch leaven? Because leaven itself comes of putrefaction, and being commingled corrupts the mass; and leaven itself seems, indeed, a putrifying; for by abounding, it altogether acidifies and corrupts the flour.” Wetstein also thus quotes a Jewish author: “Our rabbins call lust a leaven in the lump; for as a little of the yeast impregnates the whole mass and corrupts it, so lust corrupts the whole man.”