s very little to do with common morality. The taunt has
sharpened multitudes of gibes and been echoed in all sorts of tones: it
is very often too true and perfectly just, but if ever it is, let it be
distinctly understood that it is not so because of Christian men's
religion but in spite of it. Their bitterest enemy does not condemn them
half so emphatically as their own religion does: the sharpest censure of
others is not so sharp as the rebukes of the New Testament. If there is
one thing which it insists upon more than another, it is that religion
without morality is nothing--that the one test to which, after all,
every man must submit is, what sort of character has he and how has he
behaved--is he pure or foul? All high-flown pretension, all fervid
emotion has at last to face the question which little children ask, 'Was
he a good man?'

The Apostle has been speaking about very high and mystical truths, about
all Christians being the temple of God, about God dwelling in men, about
men and women being His sons and daughters; these are the very truths
on which so often fervid imaginations have built up a mystical piety
that had little to do with the common rules of right and wrong. But Paul
keeps true to the intensely practical purpose of his preaching and
brings his heroes down to the prosaic earth with the homely common sense
of this far-reaching exhortation, which he gives as the fitting
conclusion for such celestial visions.

I. A Christian life should be a life of constant self-purifying.

This epistle is addressed to the church of God which is at Corinth with
all the _saints_ which are in all Achaia.

Looking out over that wide region, Paul saw scattered over godless
masses a little dispersed company to each of whom the sacred name of
Saint applied. They had been deeply stained with the vices of their age
and place, and after a black list of criminals he had had to say to them
'such were some of you,' and he lays his finger on the miracle that had
changed them and hesitates not to say of them all, 'But ye are washed,
but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord
Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.'

The first thing, then, that every Christian has is a cleansing which
accompanies forgiveness, and however his garment may have been 'spotted
by the flesh,' it is 'washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.'
Strange cleansing by which black stains melt out of garments plunged in
red blood