i94 THE BODY FOR GOD
The Christian conscience would settle with prompt and per- emptory decision matters which would long perplex and mislead the Christian intellect. Know ye not, he says, " that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost? . . . glorify God, therefore, in your body." l
I.
The Body.
Of all the visible and tangible wonders of the universe, the human body ranks the first. It is the centre and home of all the sciences. All things, by ministering to it, unanimously consent that it is " head over all." It is the throne of all laws ; and comprehends every form. Only let it be added that, for the exquisiteness of its lines, it excels all forms, and surpasses everything that exists, whether in the vegetable or in the animal world. Hence one may pass for a good artist in the representa- tion of mountains, clouds, streams, trees, and cattle; and yet have very little capacity to represent the subtle and delicate lines of the human face. The human face is the triumph of beauty. It is visible, but it expresses the wisdom, love, and grace of the invisible world. It is on the sky-line between the two worlds, where matter and spirit exquisitely blend.
1. Consider the honour of the human body.
(1) It is a bit of the handiwork of God. — Men of science, whose study is in the forms of life, tell us that in these there is visible a struggle upwards through innumerable forms, but the goal of the struggle is man, the human form Divine. Contrivances which are only experiments lower down in the scale are complete in the human body, and its hundreds of different parts are com- pacted together into a machine so perfect that it may go some- times for a hundred years without going wrong. But just as the flowers and plants of Eden were made originally all very good, but required the cultivating hand of Adam, and as plants and many other works of God require human culture in order to bring them to the most complete perfection, so does the body. The body requires cultivation; but is it not a splendid reason for giving it this, to remember that we are fellow-workers with God
1 H. Hensley Henson.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 195
in so doing, that we are carrying out His ideals and bringing His handiwork to perfection ?
^ In the interests of his intelligence man's mind has been sheathed in a sensitive body. Through the things that he has felt and suffered in his body he has come into the mastery of the things that made him feel and suffer, so that now they do him service. So it is with character. In the interests of his spirit man's soul has been sheathed in his body. It is given him for moral discovery, for the shaping of character. All moral great- ness and moral power come first in the form of control of the body. To eat, to drink, to rest, are all of them good, but because each of them may be abused into selfishness and sin, there is moral danger in each of them. We are shaping our moral character, and are determining our moral possibilities, by our use of the body. It is the earliest arena and instrument of the spirit's training. Through the body also men learn to suffer and to be strong, and through suffering to find a farther and a finer moral and spiritual beauty. It is our business to be at our physical best for God's sake — our religious business, for the functions of life are only perfectly performed in health. But it is very easy for us to overrate the physical; and, lest we be betrayed into folly, we may remember that some of the greatest and the noblest men and women have been physical weaklings. To read their story is to understand that through their sufferings and bodily disability, they came into their nobleness, learned to consecrate suffering, and compel it to the holy ministries of spiritual culture. Through the pain and the patience of disabled years they worked out their own salvation.1
(2) The body is the indispensable instrument of the mind. — The body is not a part of the mind, nor a function of the mind, as some teach in our day. The mind is not inevitably bound up with the body, as we can see by the fact that the most splendid minds have often lodged in the plainest and even the most deformed bodies. The mind is not going to go down in the dissolution of the body, but to survive " the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds," and yet in many respects the mind is dependent on the body. It is through the body that it receives all its knowledge, and it is only through the members of the body that it can act on the outer world. The mind is dependent on the body for its share in all that is done beneath the circuit
1 T. Yates, Sculptors of Life, 106.
i96 THE BODY FOR GOD
of the sun. Neglect of the body or ill-treatment of it may shorten life, or it may debilitate life and make it a burden to its possessor.
TI We have probably yet to learn how much we owe to those humble, obscure, and too often slighted friends, the senses, whether they be five or seven. Are they indeed only doors and windows, gateways of knowledge, messengers conveying intelli- gence to some inner, directing power, or are they in themselves as noble, as important, as any other part of man, as necessary to the soul as it is to them ? Of one thing I am intimately con- vinced, that it is to the agency of the senses that man owes many of his sweetest feelings of affection, his loftiest aspirations after excellence. It cannot be doubted that the purest affections of the heart are closely linked with our physical nature, and fed by what ministers to its delight. Those whom we really love are as dear to us in their bodies as they are in their souls ; it is to sight, hearing, contact, we greatly owe that irresistible charm which makes the presence of a person we love to be desired by the heart, above all else that life can give it. The sovereign attraction lies in what an old writer calls " the continual comfort of a face," in the sound of a voice, the touch of a hand, so that we may truly say that it is presence, not absence, which is the real test of love, and that affection is better gauged by our feelings about people when we are with them, than by our thoughts about them when we are separated.1