“Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?

“But he spake of the temple of his body.” [202]

In more than one place the apostle Paul has fondly dwelt upon this metaphor.  Thus he tells the Corinthians that they are “God’s building,” and he calls himself the “wise master builder,” who was to lay the foundation in his truthful doctrine, upon which they were to erect the edifice.[203] And he says to them immediately afterwards, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”

In consequence of these teachings of the apostles, the idea that the body was a temple has pervaded, from the earliest times to the present day, the system of Christian or theological symbolism.  Indeed, it has sometimes been carried to an almost too fanciful excess.  Thus Samuel Lee, in that curious and rare old work, “The Temple of Solomon, pourtrayed by Scripture Light,” thus dilates on this symbolism of the temple:—­

“The foundation of this temple may be laid in humility and contrition of spirit, wherein the inhabiter of eternity delighteth to dwell; we may refer the porch to the mouth of a saint, wherein every holy Jacob erects the pillars of God’s praise, calling upon and blessing his name for received mercies; when songs of deliverance are uttered from the doors of his lips.  The holy place is the renewed mind, and the windows therein may denote divine illumination from above, cautioning a saint lest they be darkened with the smoke of anger, the mist of grief, the dust of vain-glory, or the filthy mire of worldly cares.  The golden candlesticks, the infused habits of divine knowledge resting within the soul.  The shew-bread, the word of grace exhibited in the promises for the preservation of a Christian’s life and glory.  The golden altar of odors, the breathings, sufferings, and groanings after God, ready to break forth into Abba, Father.  The veiles, the righteousness of Christ.  The holy of holies may relate to the conscience purified from dead works and brought into a heavenly frame.” [204] And thus he proceeds, symbolizing every part and utensil of the temple as alluding to some emotion or affection of man, but in language too tedious for quotation.

In a similar vein has the celebrated John Bunyan, the author of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” proceeded in his “Temple of Solomon Spiritualized” to refer every part of that building to a symbolic meaning, selecting, however, the church, or congregation of good men, rather than the individual man, as the object of the symbolism.

In the middle ages the Hermetic philosophers seem to have given the same interpretation of the temple, and Swedenborg, in his mystical writings, adopts the idea.

Hitchcock, who has written an admirable little work on Swedenborg considered as a Hermetic Philosopher, thus alludes to this subject, and his language, as that of a learned and shrewd investigator, is well worthy of quotation:—­