THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PAUL THE APOSTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS - Chapter 6 - Verse 8

Verse 8. Nay, ye do wrong, etc. Instead of enduring wrong patiently and cheerfully, they were themselves guilty of injustice and fraud.

And that your brethren. Your fellow Christians. As if they had injured those of their own family—those to whom they ought to be attached by most tender ties. The offence in such cases is aggravated, not because it is in itself any worse to injure a Christian than another man, but because it shows a deeper depravity, when a man overcomes all the ties of kindness and love, and injures those who are near to him, than it does where no such ties exist. It is for this reason that parricide, infanticide, etc., are regarded everywhere as crimes of peculiar atrocity, because a child or a parent must have sundered all the tenderest cords of virtue before it could be done.

{a} "defraud" 1 Th 4:6