This double attention will give us cause to admire, not the logick only, but the address, of the learned Apostle. I say, the address; which the occasion required: for, notwithstanding that no sin is more opposite to our holy religion, and that therefore St. Paul, in his epistles to the Gentile converts, gives it no quarter, yet, as became the wisdom and sanctity of his character, he forgets not of what, and to whom, he writes.
The vice itself is of no easy reprehension: not, for want of arguments against it, which are innumerable and irresistible; but from the reverence which is due to one’s self and others. An Apostle, especially, was to respect his own dignity. He was, besides, neither to offend the innocent, nor the guilty. Unhappily, these last, who needed his plainest reproof, had more than the delicacy of innocence about them, and were, of all men, the readiest to take offence. For so it is, the licentious of all times have seared consciences, and tender apprehensions. It alarms them to hear what they have no scruple to commit.
The persons addressed were, especially, to be considered. These were Corinthians: that is, a rich commercial people, voluptuous and dissolute. They were, besides, wits and reasoners, rhetoricians and philosophers: for under these characters they are represented to us. And all these characters required the Apostle’s attention. As a people addicted to pleasure, and supported in the habits of it by abounding wealth, they were to be awakened out of their lethargy, by an earnest and vehement expostulation: as pretending to be expert in the arts of reasoning, they were to be convinced by strict argument: and, as men of quick rhetorical fancies, a reasoner would find his account in presenting his argument to them through some apt and lively image.
Let us see, then, how the Apostle acquits himself in these nice circumstances.
After observing that the sin he had warned the Corinthians to avoid, was a sin against their own body; that is, was an abuse and defilement of it, he proceeds, “What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God? And ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price; therefore, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
The address, we see, is poignant; the reasoning, close; and the expression, oratorical. The vehemence of his manner could not but take their attention: his argumentation, as being founded on Christian principles and ideas, must be conclusive to the persons addressed; and, as conveyed in remote and decent figures, the delicacy of their imaginations is respected by it.
The whole deserves to be opened and explained at large. Such an explanation, will be the best discourse I can frame on this subject.
I. First, then, the Apostle asks, What! know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?—This question refers to that great Christian principle, that we live in the communion of the Holy Ghost[171]; not, in the sense in which we all live and move and have our being in God; but in a special and more exalted sense; the Gospel teaching, that God hath given to us Christians the Holy Spirit[172], to be with us, and in us; to purify and comfort us: that we are baptized by this spirit[173], sanctified, sealed by it to the day of redemption[174].
Now this being the case, the body of a Christian, which the Holy Ghost inhabits and sanctifies by his presence, is no longer to be considered as a worthless fabrick, to be put to sordid uses, but as the receptacle of God’s spirit, as the place of his residence; in a word, as his TEMPLE and sanctuary.
The figure, you see, presents an idea the most august and venerable. It carried this impression with it both to the Gentile and Jewish Christians. It did so to the Gentiles, whose superstitious reverence for their idol-temples is well known: and though many an abominable rite was done in them, yet the nature of the Deity, occupying this temple, which was the Holy Ghost, put an infinite difference between him and their impure deities, the impurest of which had engrossed the Corinthian worship. So that this contrast of the object could not but raise their ideas, and impress the reverence, which the Apostle would excite in them for such a temple, with full effect on their minds[175]. And then to Jews, the allusion must be singularly striking: for their supreme pride and boast was, the temple at Jerusalem, the tabernacle of the most high, dwelling between the cherubims, and the place of the habitation of God’s glory[176].