of the soul and the senses with tremendous and overwhelming power. 'Your
bodies and your bodily members,' he argues, with crushing indignation,
'are not your own to do with them as you like. Your bodies and your
souls are both Christ's. He has bought your body and your soul at an
incalculable cost. What! know ye not that your body is nothing less than
the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and ye are not any more
your own? know ye not that your bodies are the very members of Christ?'
And then he says a thing so terrible that I tremble to transcribe it. For
a more terrible thing was never written. 'Shall I then,' filled with
shame he demands, 'take the members of Christ and make them the members
of an harlot?' O God, have mercy on me! I knew all the time that I was
abusing and polluting myself, but I did not know, I did not think, I was
never told that I was abusing and polluting Thy Son, Jesus Christ. Oh,
too awful thought. And yet, stupid sinner that I am, I had often read
that if any man defile the temple of God and the members of Christ, him
shall God destroy. O God, destroy me not as I see now that I deserve.
Spare me that I may cleanse and sanctify myself and the members of Christ
in me, which I have so often embruted and defiled. Assist me to summon
up my imagination henceforth to my sanctification as Thine apostle has
here taught me the way. Let me henceforth look at my whole body in all
its senses and in all its members, the most open and the most secret, as
in reality no more my own. Let me henceforth look at myself with Paul's
deep and holy eyes. Let me henceforth seat Christ, my Redeemer and my
King, in the very throne of my heart, and then keep every gate of my body
and every avenue of my mind as all not any more mine own but His. Let me
open my eye, and my ear, and my mouth, as if in all that I were opening
Christ's eye and Christ's ear and Christ's mouth; and let me thrust in
nothing on Him as He dwells within me that will make Him ashamed or
angry, or that will defile and pollute Him. That thought, O God, I feel
that it will often arrest me in time to come in the very act of sin. It