The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-11-01

chicago, OcIODeF 1o.--1nlS SeiilOh lS powerful protest against the abuse of the body through sin and neglect and a plea for it's consecration to Gods ser. vice and to holy and upright living The text is I Corinthians vii 19. Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost"
 More than Westminster abbey is to London or Notre Dame to Paris or the Vatican to Rome or the mosque of St. Sophia to constantinople, more than Di- ana's temple was to Ephesus or the shrine of Athens was to Athens, King Solomon's temple was to the Hebrew neart. It was the one spot about which national pride and religious fervor centerec; It was the place above all others which the Israelite wanted to see; as the Mussulman de- ship once at Mecca before I die.' In it was the Shechinah, the holy of holies, the repository of the covenantal ark. It was Gods footstool, It was like a frag- men of the heavens manifested glories.
 Like the Tai Mahal of India. whose MdllS were OlCt luldtQ Nllll 6oiQ anu PhN- cious stones to the value of millions upon millions of dollars, the Solomonic tenn pie was famous not so much for its size as for its intrinsic worth. The weight of the nails employed in the temple, the book of Chronicles tells us, was fifty shekels of solid gold" Josephus, the se- cular historian, records that its walls were composed entirely white stone; | I.,t II, inc coted with cedar which was covered with the purest gold" So precious were the materials and materials of this wonder full sanctuary that the fame of them spread to foreign lands and excited the cupidity of Shishak and Jehoash, who journeyed to Jerusalem to plunder it. All its glory and grandeur, however, were reduced to ashes when King Nebu- chadnezzar, after stripping it of it's gold and removing its jeweled vessels, appli- ed the torch and its spirits. after an earthly existence of AT years, Elijah-like. ascended toward heaven in chariot of fire. Can we be mistaken in thinking that a building so beautiful and so ex- ceptionally hallowed by the Divine Presence had spirit? Victor Hugo. the author Rf 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Thought that there must be a spirit in that poem in stone.'' Is there not spirit incarnated in St. Paul's. the work of Sir Christopher Wren? In the chaste architecture of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris? In the grandeur of the cathedral of Milan and in St. Mark S of Venice? Why not, then, in that mag nificent edifice in which God dwelt among men?
 A Sacred Temple.
 of oIo ;,, md etOpaq was the temple of Solomon unique. 1t was great in its spiritual associations. It's very site had a sanctity of its own. It was so sacred in the eyes of king and people that when the temple was erected measures were taken to avoid even the ordinary sounds of tools In the book of Kings we read, And the house, when 1t was building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither, so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was building." As the steele bridge today is sent from the foundries with each girder and trestle and beam marked beforehand for it's position, so the temples stones and beams were cut and fitted together miles away from their ultimate destination. When the temples walls were reared. they rose amid the impressive SdCltulitSS Oi SititN.f hoo So- cred was the place that on the day of the temples dedication. on the day when the ark of the covenant was placed with in the holy of holies, "the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord' It filled all the house with a bright cloud: !: it filled the house with the same majestic symbol as that which led the Israelites through the desert, as that which the prophet saw around the throne of God the as that which overshadowed our Lord when he talked with Moses and Elias on the Mount of Transfguration.
 Paul had in mind both the intrinsic value and the surpassinG sanctity of the Solomonic temple in the comparison of the text The physical body of man is temple in both senses of the word. Paul was not one of those who despsed the flesh, as we term the flesh" He did not believe that beautiful is only skin deep and that "ugliness sinks to the bone" He believed that the con nection between the body and the soul is so close that you can not injure one without affecting the other. So Paul, in these words of my text practically says to all men and women. "be careful what you do with that hand; be careful how you misuse that foot; be careful that you do not let the tongue become defieed with wicked words" Know ye not that your body is a great cathedral, more mo- mentous in its functions than that called St John, the Divine, which the Epsco- palian church is erecting in New York city today? Know ye not that your body
 is the place where God looks through the window of the eye and speaks through the trumpet of the throat and feels with the appendages of the fingers? Be care- full of that frame of bone and muscle and sinew-that physical frame of yours, filled with arterial canals through which the blood courses. Know ye not that your