"Leave thou thy sister when she prays
Her early heaven, her happy views,
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days,"
is good morality under certain conditions, but there is too great a tendency on the part of those who retain their "early heaven" to press this conduct upon those whose "faith has centre everywhere, nor cares to fix itself to form." It ought not to be forgotten that but for the Christian disregard of forms, persevered in in despite of the scandal to the Jews, Christianity must always have remained a branch of Judaism.
A peculiar merit to be set to Paul's account is, that he is the only one of all the writers in the New Testament who treats the supremely important question of the relations of the sexes, a subject so remarkably overlooked by Christ himself. Whether the guidance he affords his converts on this head is good guidance or not, he does at least attempt to guide them. Let us notice first what he considers abnormal relations, and then proceed to what he lays down as a normal one. In the first Epistle to the Corinthians he is loud in his denunciations of a man who cohabited with his father's wife, the father being, I presume, deceased. Whether the son had married his stepmother, or merely lived with her, is not altogether clear, since, in either case, the apostle might brand their connection with the title of fornication. However, he condemns it utterly and without reference to any accompanying circumstances, desiring the Corinthian community to deliver up the man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, in the name and with the power of their Lord Jesus, in order that his spirit might be saved at the day of judgment (1 Cor. v). Here then we have an early example of excommunication, accompanied by the formula to be used in performing the solemnity.
That the severe reproof bestowed by Paul upon the Corinthians for permitting such conduct greatly affected them, we gather from the tenderer language employed in the subsequent epistle, where he admits having at one moment repented that he had caused them so much sorrow, though he soon saw that it had been for their good (2 Cor. vii. 8-13). It is gratifying, also, to find that his tone towards the unfortunate individual who had been excommunicated at his desire is greatly softened, and that he desires the Corinthians to forgive him, and receive him back into their body, lest he should be swallowed up with too much sorrow (2 Cor. ii. 6, 7). It would have been interesting had he informed us why he considered cohabitation with a stepmother so terrible a crime, but such a recurrence to first principles was not to be expected. He, no doubt, acted on a purely instinctive sentiment of repugnance to such an arrangement.
A second kind of relation between the sexes which the apostle condemns is that of prostitution. Here he has not left us equally in the dark as to the grounds upon which his condemnation is founded. Not only does he prohibit prostitution to the Christians, but he tells them exactly why they ought not to indulge in it; and his argument upon this subject is sufficiently curious to merit a moment's examination. In the first place, then, he tells his disciples that neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor Sodomites, nor practicers of various other vices not of a sexual nature, will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. vi. 9, 10; Eph. v. 5). Fornication should not even be named among the Christians (Eph. v. 3). They must mortify their members upon earth, for impure connections and sexual license bring down the wrath of God (Col. iii. 5, 6). They must exclude from their society any one who is guilty of such irregularities (1 Cor. v. 9-11). "The body is not for prostitution, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." The bodies of Christians are the members of Christ: "Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a prostitute? God forbid. What! do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? for the two [he says] shall be one flesh" (1 Cor. vi. 13-16). It was surely a very original notion of Paul's to extend to the casual connections formed by the temporary passion the solemn sanction bestowed upon the permanent union of man and wife. It is said in Genesis that a man and his wife are to be one flesh, and this is obviously an emphatic mode of expressing the closeness and binding character of the alliance into which they enter. But what may appropriately be said of married persons cannot of necessity be said of persons linked together only by the most fleeting and mercenary kind of ties. The very evil of prostitution is, that the prostitute and her companion are not one flesh in the allegorical sense in which husband and wife are so; and to condemn it on account of the presence of the very circumstance which is conspicuously absent, is to cut the ground from under our feet. But let us hear the apostle further. "But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee prostitution. Every sin that a man commits is outside of the body [what can this mean?], but the fornicator sins against his own body. What! do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit in you? which you have of God, and you are not your own" (1 Cor. vi. 17-19). Now in this singular argument it is noticeable that the ground taken up is entirely theological. Destroy the theological foundation, and the ethical superstructure is involved in its ruin. Thus, if we do not believe that our bodies are the members of Christ, nor the temples of the Holy Spirit, Paul has no moral reason to give us against the most unlimited indulgence in prostitution. While, even if we admit his premises, it is not very easy to see how his conclusion follows. For why should we not make the members of Christ those of a prostitute, unless it be previously shown that it would in any case be wrong to do so with our own members? It would not (according to Paul himself) be wrong to make the members of Christ members of a wife; why, then, should it be wrong to make them members of any other woman whatever? Clearly this question could not be answered without an attempt to prove, on independent grounds, the evil of promiscuous indulgence of the sexual passion. But no such attempt is made by Paul. He has therefore failed completely to make out a case against even the most unbridled license. Not that his conclusion need therefore be rejected. On the contrary, the danger of his arguments is not that his view of morals is fundamentally erroneous, but that he rests an important precept upon a dangerously narrow basis.
Pass we now to that which he considers as the normal relation between the sexes. The subject may be divided into three heads: that of the formation of such relations, that of their character when formed, and that of their disruption. Upon all of these the apostle has advice to give.
In the first place it appears that the Corinthians had applied to him for a solution of some question that had been raised among them as to the propriety of entering at all into the matrimonial state. In answer to their inquiries he begins by informing them that it is good for a man not to touch a woman. He would prefer it if every one were like himself unmarried. To unmarried people and widows he says that they had better remain as they are. Concerning virgins of either sex he delivers his private opinion that their condition is a good one for the present necessity. A married man indeed should not endeavor to get rid of his wife; but neither should an unmarried man endeavor to obtain a wife. The time is so short till the final judgment of the world that it makes little difference; before long both married and unmarried will be in the same position. Meantime, however, celibacy is the preferable state; and that because celibates care for the things of the Lord, how they may please the Lord; but married people care for one another, and study to please one another (1 Cor. vii. 1-34). Why Paul should suppose that married people, even while studying one another's happiness, might not also endeavor to please the Lord, it is hard to understand. He seems in this passage to lend his sanction to the very dangerous doctrine that a due discharge of the ordinary duties of life is incompatible with attention to the service of God. As if the highest type of Christian life was not precisely that in which both were combined in such a manner that neither should be sacrificed to the other. But, apart from this fundamental objection to his theory it is liable to the remark that the assumptions on which it rests are untrue. Unmarried persons, unless the whole literature of fiction, dramatic and novelistic, utterly belies them, care at least as much to become married as married persons care to promote one another's comfort. Indeed, it would be no less true to nature to say, that the unmarried in general take more pains to please some persons of the opposite sex than husbands take to please their wives, or wives their husbands. Not to dwell upon the fact that courtship involves a greater effort, mental and physical, than the mere continuance of love assured of being returned, there is the obvious consideration that the mere outward circumstances of the unmarried are far less favorable than those of the married to the enjoyment of their mutual society without considerable sacrifice of time. Hence the estimate made by Paul of the relative advantages of the two states is untrue to facts, except in the rare cases of those who have firmly resolved upon a life of celibacy, and who, in addition to this, have so perfect a control over their passions, or so little passion at all, as to be untroubled by sexual imaginations.