He is thinking here mainly, I suppose, about the devastation and destruction of this temple of God, which was caused by schismatical and heretical teaching, and by the habit of forming parties, ’one of Paul, one of Apollos, one of Cephas, one of Christ,’ which was rending that Corinthian Church into pieces.  But we may apply it more widely than that, and say that anything which corrupts and defiles the Christian life and the Christian character assumes a darker tint of evil when we think that it is sacrilege—­the profanation of the temple, the pollution of that which ought to be pure as He who dwells in it.

Christian men and women, how that thought darkens the blackness of all sin!  How solemnly there peals out the warning, ’If any man destroy or impair the temple,’ by any form of pollution, ‘him’ with retribution in kind, ‘him shall God destroy.’  Keep the temple clear; keep it clean.  Let Him come with His scourge of small cords and His merciful rebuke.  You Manchester men know what it is to let the money-changers into the sanctuary.  Beware lest, beginning with making your hearts ‘houses of merchandise,’ you should end by making them ‘dens of thieves.’

And then, still further, there is another application of this same principle, in the second of these Epistles.  ’What agreement hath the temple of God with idols?’ ‘Ye are the temple of the living God.’

Christianity is intolerant.  There is to be one image in the shrine.  One of the old Roman Stoic Emperors had a pantheon in his palace with Jesus Christ upon one pedestal and Plato on the one beside Him.  And some of us are trying the same kind of thing.  Christ there, and somebody else here.  Remember, Christ must be everything or nothing!  Stars may be sown by millions, but for the earth there is one sun.  And you and I are to shrine one dear Guest, and one only, in the inmost recesses of our hearts.

And there is another application of this metaphor also in our letter.’Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?’ Christianity despises ‘the flesh’; Christianity reverences the body; and would teach us all that, being robed in that most wonderful work of God’s hands, which becomes a shrine for God Himself if He dwell in our hearts, all purity, all chastisement and subjugation of animal passion is our duty.  Drunkenness, and gluttony, lusts of every kind, impurity of conduct, and impurity of word and look and thought, all these assume a still darker tint when they are thought of as not only crimes against the physical constitution and the moral law of humanity, but insults flung in the face of the God that would inhabit the shrine.

And in regard to sins of this kind, which it is so difficult to speak of in public, and which grow unchecked in secrecy, and are ruining hundreds of young lives, the words of this context are grimly true, ‘If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.’  I speak now mainly in brotherly or fatherly warning to young men—­did you ever read this, ’His bones are full of the iniquities of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust’?  ’Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?’