I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.
Read Chapter 3
Ambrosiaster
AD 400
To plant is to evangelize and to bring to faith, to water is to baptize with the approved form of words. To forgive sins, however, and to give the Spirit belongs to God alone. We know that the Holy Spirit is given by God without the laying on of hands, and it has happened that an unbaptized person has received the forgiveness of his sins. Was such a person invisibly baptized, considering that he received the gift which belongs to baptism? Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. I was the first to sow the seeds of the faith at Corinth, and then Apollos coming after me helped it forward ( Acts 18:26). But it was God who gave the inner life and strength of grace for growth and maturity in Christian faith and virtue: this belongs to God alone. Cf. Augustine (in Joan. Tr5).
God gives to plants their increase, not, as rustics suppose, by directly adding some special daily power of growth, but by bestowing upon and preserving to the nature itself of the seed or the root a vigorous power of growth. In other words, He is continually bestowing it and preserving it, and co-operating with it: for the Divine work of preservation is nothing but a continuation of the primal creative power. He does this by ordering and tempering according to His counsel the rain, heat, and winds, and other things needed by the fruits of the ground, so that, as these are tempered, the fruit is larger or smaller. So it is in the sowi...
And there is a divinity present according to nature in the Spirit into wit, what subsists as the Spirit of God-according to Paul's statement, "Ye are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you."
I have been planted in the house of the Lord, I mean in the church; not in the walls but in its doctrines. Everyone who has been planted in the house of the Lord, who has put down roots there, brings forth flowers.
That is, I first cast the word into the ground; but, in order that the seeds might not wither away through temptations, Apollos added his own part. But the whole was of God.
But the new law's wont was to point to clemency, and to convert to tranquillity the pristine ferocity of "glaives "and "lances "and to remodel the pristine execution of "war "upon the rivals and foes of the law into the pacific actions of "ploughing "and "tilling "the land.
