"My dear Reding," said Carlton, astonished, "you are running into Gnosticism."
"Not knowingly or willingly," answered Charles; "but understand what I mean. It's not a subject I can talk about; but it seems to me, without of course saying that married persons must sin (which would be Gnosticism), that there is a danger of sin. But don't let me say more on this point."
"Well," said Carlton, after thinking awhile, "I have been accustomed to consider Christianity as the perfection of man as a whole, body, soul, and spirit. Don't misunderstand me. Pantheists say body and intellect, leaving out the moral principle; but I say spirit as well as mind. Spirit, or the principle of religious faith and obedience, should be the master principle, the hegemonicon. To this both intellect and body are subservient; but as this supremacy does not imply the ill-usage, the bondage of the intellect, neither does it of the body; both should be well treated."
"Well, I think, on the contrary, it does imply in one sense the bondage of intellect and body too. What is faith but the submission of the intellect? and as 'every high thought is brought into captivity,' so are we expressly told to bring the body into subjection too. They are both well treated, when they are treated so as to be made fit instruments of the sovereign principle."
"That is what I call unnatural," said Carlton.
"And it is what I mean by supernatural," answered Reding, getting a little too earnest.
"How is it supernatural, or adding to nature, to destroy a part of it?" asked Carlton.
Charles was puzzled. It was a way, he said, towards perfection; but he thought that perfection came after death, not here. Our nature could not be perfect with a corruptible body; the body was treated now as a body of death.
"Well, Reding," answered Carlton, "you make Christianity a very different religion from what our Church considers it, I really think;" and he paused awhile.
"Look here," he proceeded, "how can we rejoice in Christ, as having been redeemed by Him, if we are in this sort of gloomy penitential state? How much is said in St. Paul about peace, thanksgiving, assurance, comfort, and the like! Old things are passed away; the Jewish law is destroyed; pardon and peace are come; that is the Gospel."