ing Christians are. They have
forgotten the altar in their spiritual architecture. Have you got one
in your heart? It is but a poor, half-furnished sanctuary that has
not. Where is yours? The key and the secret of all noble life is to
yield up one's own will, to sacrifice oneself. There never was
anything done in this world worth doing, and there never will be till
the end of time, of which sacrifice is not the centre and
inspiration. And the difference between all other and lesser
nobilities of life, and the supreme beauty of a true Christian life
is that the sacrifice of the Christian is properly a
_sacrifice_--that is, an offering to _God_, done for the sake of the
great love wherewith He has loved us. As Christ is the one true
Temple, and we become so by partaking of Him, so He is the one
Sacrifice for sins for ever, and we become sacrifices only through
Him. If there be any lesson which comes out of this great truth of
Christians as temples, it is not a lesson of pluming ourselves on our
dignity, or losing ourselves in the mysticisms which lie near this
truth, but it is the hard lesson--If a temple, then an altar; if an
altar, then a sacrifice. 'Ye are built up a spiritual house, a holy
priesthood, that ye may offer spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to
God'--sacrifice, priest, temple, all in one; and all for the sake and
by the might of that dear Lord who has given Himself a bleeding
Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, that we might offer a
Eucharistic sacrifice of thanks and praise and self-surrender unto
Him, and to His Father God.

IV. And, lastly, this great truth of my text enforces the solemn
lesson of the necessary sanctity of the Christian life.

'The temple of God,' says the context, 'the temple of God is holy,
which (holy persons) ye are.' The plain first idea of the temple is a
place set apart and consecrated to God.

Hence, of course, follows the idea of purity, but the parent idea of
'holiness' is not purity, which is the consequence, but consecration
or separation to God, which is the root.

And so in very various applications, on which I have not time to
dwell now, this idea of the necessary sanctity of the Temple is put
forth in these two letters to the Corinthian Church. Corinth was a
city honeycombed with the grossest immoralities; and hence, perhaps,
to some extent the great emphasis and earnestness and even severity
of the Apostle in dealing with some forms of evil.

But without dwe