TEACHING OF ST. PAUL
57
To the Corinthians he insists upon the fatal character of the sins of the flesh as excluding men from entrance into the kingdom of God, as desecrating the "temple of the Holy Ghost," as bringing judgments on the Church, and as being so infectious that nothing but prompt expulsion of the guilty could preserve the moral soundness of the Church. He even applies to irregular sexual unions the words which were designed to describe the union in marriage, and suggests that such impure connections inflict injury on the enduring self, which survives the decay of the physical nature. The emotion with which he writes indicates the strength of his conviction that the very life of Christianity was imperilled by the moral laxity of the Corinthians:
"The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body: and God both raised the Lord, and will raise up us through his power. Know ye not that your bodies are members of Christ? shall I then take away the members of Christ, and make them members of an harlot? God forbid. Or know ye not that he that is joined to an harlot is one body? for, The twain, saith he, shall become one flesh. But he
