After contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in three verses,
very short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme thing
is.
I ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It
is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of
light and pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come
out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component
colors--red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all
the colors of the rainbow--so Paul passes this thing, Love, through
the magnificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out
on the other side broken up into its elements.