not know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? for the two [he says] shall be one flesh" (1 Cor. vi. 13-16). It was surely a very original notion of Paul's to extend to the casual connections formed by the temporary passion the solemn sanction bestowed upon the permanent union of man and wife. It is said in Genesis that a man and his wife are to be one flesh, and this is obviously an emphatic mode of expressing the closeness and binding character of the alliance into which they enter. But what may appropriately be said of married persons cannot of necessity be said of persons linked together only by the most fleeting and mercenary kind of ties. The very evil of prostitution is, that the prostitute and her companion are not one flesh in the allegorical sense in which husband and wife are so; and to condemn it on account of the presence of the very circumstance which is conspicuously absent, is to cut the ground from under our feet. But let us hear the apostle further. "But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee prostitution. Every sin that a man commits is outside of the body [what can this mean?], but the fornicator sins against his own body. What! do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit in you? which you have of God, and you are not your own" (1 Cor. vi. 17-19). Now in this singular argument it is noticeable that the ground taken up is entirely theological. Destroy the theological foundation, and the ethical superstructure is involved in its ruin. Thus, if we do not believe that our bodies are the members of Christ, nor the temples of the Holy Spirit, Paul has no moral reason to give us against the most unlimited indulgence in prostitution. While, even if we admit his premises, it is not very easy to see how his conclusion follows. For why should we not make the members of Christ those of a prostitute, unless it be previously shown that it would in any case be wrong to do so with our own members? It would not (according to Paul himself) be wrong to make the members of Christ members of a wife; why, then, should it be wrong to make them members of any other woman whatever? Clearly this question could not be answered without an attempt to prove, on independent grounds, the evil of promiscuous indulgence of the sexual passion. But no such attempt is made by Paul. He has therefore failed completely to make out a case
