THE SACREDNESS OF THE BODY
‘What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?’
The beauty of the temple of the body, its real beauty, reflects entirely the inner life of the man. What are features, however delicately formed, without expression? And what makes the expression which we love and admire? What, but thoughts, real thoughts. Love, tenderness, sympathy! Have you ever observed how, as a person becomes more thoughtful, wiser, kinder, holier, that person grows handsomer and lovelier? Or, equally, on the other side, sin lowers, vulgarises, spoils, even distorts the countenance. When is any one so physically handsome as when he or she is saying, or doing, or thinking something of love or kindness. The real beauty of ‘the temple’ after all is its consecration. It is the spirit which is the beauty.
I. What a sacred thing it would be if we always carried with us the thought and the feeling: ‘I am a consecrated being. I am a being set apart for the sake of religion. This beauty of mine is the temple.’ How horrible some sins would look! How inconsistent and how out of place some of our amusements! A temple! the shrine of God here! the shrine of God doing this! What a strength and comfort, what an armour, if we can realise anything of these holy exercises in the conflict with evil! In prayer—‘I am a temple. Poor, weak, miserable sinner as I am, I am consecrated by my baptism—by my own surrender of myself—by the holiness within me. I am dedicate! I am Thine, O Lord; I have appropriated Thee. The structure may be ever so unworthy, but I am a temple.’ Oh! how holy would that man’s life become! how the tongue would speak! how the mind would think! how the heart would beat! ‘It is all a temple! Thine, Lord! And all I say, and all I do, and all I feel, it comes to Thine earthly temple, and goes up to Thine heavenly temple.’
II. And when you are dealing with some fellow-creature, what a difference it would be—what a new character the whole transaction would assume—if you would remember and recognise the fact that that person is ‘a temple.’ However poor and wretched—however weak, I may say however wicked—he is ‘a temple of God.’ Notwithstanding all I say or think, the Holy Ghost may be, nay the Holy Ghost is in that man—working, striving, elevating, ennobling. I am close to the Holy One! I am close to ‘the temple’! What a changed aspect would your intercourse with that man take! what a reverence to the lowest, the most offensive man in the world—to the worst man!
Illustration
‘There is a great danger in religion—as there is in everything else—of a want of proportion. And this disproportion of truth is often the worst of errors. To avoid an extreme on one side, we run into the extreme on the other side, and the reaction is violent. Take, for instance, the relation of the body and the soul. To a man in his natural state the body is much more than the soul. He can see his body; his soul is a matter of faith. The body can give him immediate pleasure; the pleasures of the soul lie chiefly in the future. To the care of the body there is little or nothing to oppose itself; to the care of the soul, the opposition, both from within and without, is very strong. Hence, to keep or restore the health of the body—that is, to provide for that body, to feed it and indulge it, to dress it and to adorn it, to think of it and talk about it—takes by far the greatest part of a man’s life. The soul, at the very best, has just its few minutes, or perhaps a few half-hours, in the course of a week. The body is everywhere every moment. When a man becomes religious these two things change places. The body goes into the shade; it is almost out of sight. The soul is everything. Is it not the one thing worthy of thought? What is the body? A thing to mortify; a thing to keep down; a thing almost to be forgotten, if not to be despised; a mere clog. In all this there is an extravagance.’