"Know ye not that ye are a temple of God?"—I Corinthians iii. 16.

IV

A DEVIL'S TRINITY

There are expressions taken from the Bible which, by length of popular usage, become, as it were, independent either of their setting, or of methods of exposition. This usage has its length of days, not always in the sense of the expression so much as in its sound. Those of you who have been accustomed to listen to Christian preaching will have often heard appeals to your manhood, to self-mastery, to kingship over your habitudes, rounded off with this question: "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God?"

In this way it has passed into what I have called popular usage. And whatever it may be as exegesis, it is good admonition. If we may speak of a house made with hands as a dwelling-place of the Most High, we may also claim an equal sacredness for this mortal temple which is the crowning achievement of His creative power. For myself, I have never had the least sympathy with a teaching that almost amounts to a vilification of the body, and which is at the basis of much that passes for religion, both Christian and pagan. Our body is a gift worthy of the Giver. We can do much to mar it in ourselves, and through us for others. Hitherto the one perennial idolatry of the world has been destruction; and if one thing has escaped this insanity less than another, it is the human body. But for all that, we do not deny that a picture may be a work of genius, because any madman could destroy it in less time than it takes to suggest the possibility.

Much is said and written about the duality that is in us; and many of us are Manichean without knowing technically what the term means. The two parts in the same self are represented as East and West, and "never the twain shall meet." We must understand, however, what we mean by this bisection of man. Between the carnal and the spiritual there must be no compromise and there can be no peace. But carnality is not in the body, it is in the principle that uses the body as its medium and expression. We say much about "sins of the flesh"; as a matter of fact there is no such thing. Sin is, before it is wrought out through the flesh. It is not the body that commits adultery or gets drunk, it is the creature which owns it. The same Apostle who tells us that the "flesh lusteth against the Spirit," also speaks about the "redemption of the body"; which means that as the latter can be degraded, so can it be honoured by him who uses it. Hence the people who weaken the body to strengthen the soul begin at the wrong end. Let them guard the life, and the strength of the body will become an agent of pleasure and service, not of sorrow and defeat. It is surely better to ride a fine steed well under control, than find our safety only because we mount a hack. I have heard young men complain bitterly about the disproportion between their bodily passions and their will-power. They overlook two things—first, that will can be acquired, that an act of will means more will; and, secondly, that passion in itself can be, and is intended to be, a great and precious possession. The absence of passion may mean an anaemia, which virtually cuts us off from some of the finest possibilities of human life. Our bodies are part, and the highest part, of a cosmic order which is "sinful only when it refuses to be spiritualized." If we regard the body as an exquisite instrument provided by our Maker for the translation of the things of the Spirit, then so long as the Spirit working by grace is the master, we can hardly attach too much importance to the body as a temple of God.

"If any man defile this temple," says the Apostle, "him shall God destroy." The ways in which it can be defiled are endless, as some of them are fatal. For my present purpose there are three which I want to urge upon your serious consideration. I must try to compress what I have to say about them into one address, because the first I shall mention is something about which no clean-minded person would choose to write or talk without having, what he conceives to be, the gravest reasons for so doing. In this case, the fewer the words the more effective they may be, if they arrest attention, arouse thought, and make some headway with the conscience.

There are three ways, I repeat, in which we may defile this temple, and the first I will venture to speak about is the sin of Impurity. And when I say I will venture to mention it, I quite realize that I am taking some risk. He who would speak with authority and with wisdom on this subject to a mixed audience, should possess a poet's gifts in the art of putting things. But some one must speak, and to whom does the duty fall, if not upon him whose calling it is to stand between the quick and the dead? If the good work of the world must wait to be done by perfect men, the lease of evil has a long while to run. It is, in truth, a sad reflection which should stir up strong protest in every earnest soul, that this sin—so deadly in its nature—should be practically safe so far as the pulpit is concerned. In many cases this is a result of sensitive timidity, or it may be an affectation of refinement which is but veneered coarseness. If it be the first, it should be respected but not yielded to; if it be the second, it should receive no indulgence from us. The great Hebrew prophets, and the Supreme Teacher Himself, did not surrender this stronghold of the soul to the evil one from a shrinking which, if a man cannot conquer, he is no preacher, and still less to a mental indolence that will not seek out acceptable words through which to convey a warning. I speak as unto wise men, and submit it to your judgment whether the preacher who has to any extent the ear of young men can afford this eternal silence concerning a subject that so vitally affects character, society, and the race to which we belong.

There are many reasons why this sin of impurity seems to be on the increase. The old order of town and country is fast breaking up, and practically the whole migration and emigration is to the former. Britain is fast becoming a series of congested centres of population. One consequence is the increasing number of women and girls who find it terribly hard to survive in the pitiless struggle to exist. And we know what this means in so many cases. It is no secret how the scanty earnings of a growing body of girls are eked out. This is not a matter on which to dwell, and while it is serious enough to compel some very searching thoughts, I refer to it in order to say how much I want to see the day when every calling, profession, and trade in which a woman can earn her bread and efficiently make her way, shall be open to her equally with a man. The education of our girls should be the care of parents and the State, every whit as much as the education of our lads. There are positions in which I should not care to see women, and hence I would work all the harder to bring about the economic conditions in which sex, and the means of livelihood, can have some fitting correspondence. This I say, that he who would exclude a woman because of her sex from any place where she can turn to honest account her capacities and industry, is the enemy of women. To the extent you restrict what is called the sphere of a woman who is dependent upon her own toil, you set up temptations which every man worthy the name of man should sacrifice much to make impossible.

There is also the growing reluctance of young men, more especially in the upper and middle classes, to undertake the responsibilities of married life; so rarely now are they content to creep before they walk. They must begin where their parents leave off in position, appearances, and comforts. This often means to defer marriage until these can be secured; but it does not always mean that these men keep a clean record in the meanwhile. A sinister consideration which has much to answer for in the existence of a class of women which, in turn, takes a terrible revenge on its makers! Nor are parents always as free from blame as they might be. I have known fathers and mothers who had the reputation of being good men and women, sternly forbid their daughters to engage themselves to young men who had most things to recommend them, except too much means; and I have known them encourage the advances of men whose past and present should have excluded them from any decent home—only because these men had money.

My purpose, however, in these remarks is not to discuss the sources or temptations to impurity, so much as to say a faithful word to young men about the thing itself. Permit me to counsel you to face the truth and not to fear it, that past a given age in your life and up to another the cravings of our lower nature are tremendously strong. If you would fight the good fight for a clean manhood, make no mistake about the task that lies before you. These cravings implanted in a healthy man or woman are in themselves beautiful and right. All turns upon the control of them. If Nature could have let us off more easily the conflict would have been less searching; but nothing weaker would have secured the perpetuation of the race, and all that it involves in struggle, anxiety, and self-sacrifice.

A young man came to me not long ago to ask for my signature to an application he was making for a certain position. He told me in a few words about the years he had given to the fitting of himself for the place he was seeking, and how anxious he was to get it, because, as he said, he wanted to be married and to make a home for himself. As he talked to me there was something so clean that looked out of the eyes of him, while at the same time he gave me the impression of so modest a self-efficiency, that my entire sympathy and heartiest good wishes were won for him. I mention this incident because I want to hint much that I cannot put into words. As you sight the years of responsibility you will, if you are wise, prepare yourselves by industry, thought, and control, with a view to married life; for marriage, among other things, is the natural, the honourable, and the divine provision for the legitimate cravings of our nature. Whenever I hear a man speak sneeringly of marriage, if I have to conclude that he says what he feels, I may not think him a fool, but I strongly suspect that he is a blackguard. "He who attacks marriage; he who by word or deed sets himself to undermine this foundation of our moral society, must settle the matter with me, and if I do not bring him to reason, then I have nothing more to do with him." So wrote Goethe, and I echo his words in your hearing.

Keep marriage before you as a sacred goal, and as an incentive to put out the best there is in you in order to reach it. Do more than this; resolve that when you enter this covenant you will carry into it as clean a conscience about the past as you expect her to have who gives her happiness into your keeping. One sex can substantiate no claim to licence, or even indulgence in this matter, that can be morally denied to the other. There are events in life that are worth more than it costs to meet them well; marriage is pre-eminently one of them, and you can, if you elect to do so, enter it unspotted men.

Get control of your imagination. Be lord over your thoughts. You cannot, as an old Puritan writer says, "prevent the birds from flying over your head, but you can prevent them making their nests in your hair." Which means that while you may not be able to prevent given thoughts from darting into the mind, you can forbid their finding a home there. The danger is not in what comes, but in what is permitted to stay. You have some sense of the training that is needed in certain parts of your nature; and if you join that training to the help of God, you can not only cast evil cravings out of your life, you can do something that is harder still—you can keep them out. Be careful about companionships. Have no friendship with him who boasts of his "amours," the "affairs of the heart," that he can sustain at the same time. Shun, as you would a pestilence, the man of unclean speech. Let it be a truth with you which must not be questioned, that the truest indication of nobility of character is reverence for womanhood. By the sweet and holy thoughts of your mother, by your sacred love and wishes for your sister, I would remind you of words in which the "wisdom of many buried ages lingers": "Keep innocence, keep purity, and do the thing which is right, so shalt thou be brought at the last to thine end in peace." May you watch and pray, that you yield not to temptation. May you watch and pray, that you enter not eternity with that stain upon the soul which no tears of your own can ever wash away, or time blot out of the memory.

Another way in which we may defile this temple of the body is by the habit of Betting. We usually speak of "betting and gambling," but the latter term includes and covers transactions so wide in extent, and complex in their nature, as to make it impossible for me in this address to do more than refer to them.

It must be understood in the few remarks I purpose to offer on this subject, that I confine them to what I have called the habit of betting. I shall not affirm that betting is necessarily a sin, but I do state it as my conviction that its tendency and results are practically always in that direction. William Cobbett—than whom no man has ever written more sensibly to young men—says that "betting is always criminal in itself, or in what it leads to. The root of it is covetousness, a desire to take from others something for which you have given, and intend to give, no equivalent." These statements may be debated, but they appeal to me as essentially sound. A young man says: "If I choose to risk a sum of money which I can afford to lose over a bet with some one else who can afford to do the same, what has talk about equivalent got to do with it? What, or where, is the wrong in such a transaction?" This is a test question, and I am disposed to answer it by saying that I do not think any young man who takes himself seriously will urge it; and when put on a lower plane, the closer you examine it the more rotten it is found to be. Is it wrong to cultivate and indulge a habit that inevitably leads to bad results? And that is what betting does, apologize for it as you may. Putting aside for the moment any considerations about the money you can afford to lose, you cannot afford, either in your own or in the interests of the community of which you are a part, to take the moral risks that are involved in betting. It is to insult our intelligence to deny that, comprehensively speaking, the basis of betting is cupidity, and cupidity of a particularly dangerous kind. There may be exceptions, but they are scarcely worth mentioning; whatever may be the inception of the habit of betting, it almost inevitably roots itself as greed; and it is greed that consumes character like a furnace. It is the black altar on which everything worth being must suffer immolation.

I was told some time ago of a place of worship which had a billiard-table on its premises. Provided at the suggestion of the minister with the best of intentions, it was soon turned into a means of betting. The managers were obliged to take the matter into serious consideration, and out of a regard to the susceptibilities of the young men who used the table, they decided not to prohibit stakes upon a game, but to insist that all winnings should be handed over to the Hospital Fund. The room was soon comparatively deserted. The interest was not billiards, so much as billiards plus the money won or lost in betting on billiards.

When I am told that to stake a trifle upon a game is not for the sake of winning money, so much as to give the due seasoning of excitement to amusement, I have to remark that in a few cases this may be so, but it is not the explanation of betting. Almost entirely it comes to mean the desire to win money for which we have given, and intend to give, no just equivalent. That almost deserted room on the church premises tells the truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a flourishing one, without working for it—a greatly coveted science in these days. It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this way, than by honest toil with head or hands, or both. The notorious fact that betting strikes at the root-principle of worthy and strenuous labour, is not the least of the vicious features of this many-sided evil.

It also creates the most hopeless form of selfishness, and it grows by what it feeds on. The avarice of betting destroys the best part of us. As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers Nature like a rotten branch."

To my thinking, it is a waste of time to ask, and it is an abuse of time to discuss the question, wherein the wrong or evil of betting consists. The practice has evil consequences, and evil consequences only; and they necessarily become the more evil the more widely it is diffused throughout society. What other proof of wrong does a right-minded person ask? My estimate of the effects of betting is such that I would neither employ nor trust any man who is addicted to it.

I hope and believe that I am talking to young men who have never touched this dangerous thing. Continue to be wise. Others, it may be, have ventured a little way. My message to you is, turn away from it, another step may make retreat impossible. As you value the things that rightly enter into life for attainment and possession—honest enterprise, true success, worthy ambition, upright character, peace of mind, and hopefulness of outlook—bind these words about your neck, write them upon the table of your heart: "He that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."

And once more, we may defile the temple of the body by Drunkenness. Or if this term, and the state it connotes, be unduly aggressive, let me say by an intemperate use of strong drink.

There are those who tell us that any use which passes it through the lips is intemperate. If I offer a word of criticism on this position, it is because I want the assent of your reason in the few things I have to say about this part of the subject before us. The first condition of permanent reform is, that it shall be founded on truth. The peculiar temptation, it has been said, of the ardent reformer is to exaggerate. Intense feeling is apt to build upon a half-truth—the unsafest of all foundations. It is one thing to insist upon the evils that are inseparable from an intemperate indulgence in strong drink, it is quite another thing to assert that it is evil, and evil only, to touch it at all. The latter order of polemic is always liable to bring about a reaction which is terribly prejudicial to the good we desire to accomplish.

I have no warrant to question a man's loyalty to the forward movements of our time, who conscientiously for the sake of health, as he thinks, or social arrangements, cannot recognize it as his duty to forswear drink altogether. When a man claims his liberty to be the arbiter of his habits in his home, or in society, for me to arrogate the right to censure him may be impertinence; and, so far as I am concerned, to read him out of Christian consistency may be to make myself, as St. James puts it, a judge of evil thoughts. When a man has reached fifty years of age, and has worked hard and lived sparingly, if he should consider it advisable to relax somewhat the severities of earlier years, I have nothing to say to him unless it be to remind him of the example he owes to others, and of the need there always is to keep before us the warning: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."

I think it right to put this side of the question in its just evidence, and having done so I willingly dismiss it with the remark that I am not talking to middle-aged nor to old men. My appeal is to young men, and I say to you without qualification, without a suspicion of mental reservation, you do not need strong drink. There are conceivable circumstances where it may be medically prescribed, but such prescription from competent men has well-nigh reached the vanishing-point. Near as any statement can get to its ultimate, I affirm that you never have need of this drink. Keep it, then, out of your blood in your threshold years, and you will have less or no craving for it at all in those that are travelling your way. If you should imagine that you inherit the craving, there is, at any rate, one rampart which, if held, the craving cannot force—that is, total abstinence from the thing craved. Range yourselves with the abstainers, and be proud of your legion. It will be better for you in every way, whether it be in physical health, mental efficiency, moral force, or spiritual attainment. Settle it with yourselves, that there are no conditions in your life which can be called normal, and few that are abnormal, where you need the drink, and that to trifle with a thing so unnecessary, and yet so dangerous, is moral idiocy.

I plead with you to take high ground in your conceptions of the duty you owe to yourselves, and to your day and opportunities. As a nation we have to conquer drunkenness, or it will go far, as it is doing now, to conquer the nation. And we have a right to look to you young men to lead us forth to this great victory. We have the right to ask you to quit yourselves like men in mighty attack upon this devil's trinity of impurity, gambling, and drunkenness. I have said little in this address on what is called its distinctively religious side. The religion is in the subject itself. Realize what it is that needs to be done in yourselves and in the world around you, and I will trust religion to take care of itself. Face this work of conquest first by self-conquest, and you will find the need of a help not yourselves and greater than yourselves. And the help will come: "I can do all things," said the Apostle, "through Christ which strengtheneth me."

"I wish he would find the point again in this speaking man, and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy, for there is need of him yet." So wrote Thomas Carlyle of the preacher. "Could we but find the point again—take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, the soul-devouring, world-devouring devils are." I have tried, however imperfectly, yet faithfully, to talk to you about three of these "soul-devouring, world-devouring devils." Give them no inch of foothold in your life, and do a brother's part for others who, perhaps weaker than you, are waging the same conflict in the interest of the things that are sacred, and kingly, and divine. And when your brief mortal life is over you shall have the noble satisfaction of knowing that you have done something to make sure and real the power of that new day when our "sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth, and our daughters shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace."