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Have you ever reflected upon all that is meant by these words? St. Paul was speaking to those who had but lately been heathens, who were young in the faith, natives of a heathen city, encompassed about with all the sights and sounds, the customs and habits, the fulness of the Pagan life. And what that life was, what those sights and sounds were, I suppose scarcely one of us, certainly none who have not made a special study of those times and of those customs, can even conceive. And we must remember, that it was not only an open external thing, a plague spot in society which people could shun with horror and be left uncontaminated. For the deadliness of this sin is its depths of corruption, the way in which it lays hold of everything, and the external act a sight a sound becomes an inward principle, leaving nothing free. In the midst of this world of impurity, Christianity raised the standard of absolute undoubting purity; and that standard the Church has never lowered. Other sins it may, with some colour of truth, perhaps, be said she has not always repressed; religion may have tended to produce hatred and malice; the Church may have wavered at times from the strict duty of veracity; she may have become corrupted by the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches; but one sin she has never touched, one sin has obtained no foothold in the Christian character, one sin has only lifted its head to be detected and denounced and defied, and that is the sin of lust and impurity. We forget what Christianity has done for us because it has done so much; we forget how natural impurity seemed to the heathen world, how they honoured it, and even deified it; and we forget too, or we have not yet become fully aware, how, with all our Christian experience and civilization, irreligion, and even perverted religion, tend to drag men back into that corruption, from which we are preserved by the protection of the Church's faith and discipline. And this protection is given us above all by the ideal which Christianity holds up to us, the ideal of purity in the Person of Christ. Nor was the purity of Christ the purity of an anchorite; but of One whose work lay among men, and with men, and for men. He who was Purity itself, by His Divine humility condescended to men, not only of low estate, but of sinfulness, impurity, corruption. In this we may see in Him the model for us, whose lives are in the world, who also have to deal with sin, and who also can only be saved by the protecting power of an instinctive purity. But there is a yet further meaning in this active purity. "Unto the pure all things are pure," not only because he cannot be touched and corrupted by what is impure, but because he himself makes them pure. The true Christian saint has been able to go forth into the world of sin and shame, and by the mere unconscious force of his instinctive purity, turn the corrupted and the impure from powers of evil into living manifestations of Christ's grace. Nor is it only our fellow men that we have power to cleanse by means of our own purity and innocence: even the impure things of which the world is full are often, when brought into contact with a stainless mind, turned into means, if not of edification, at least of harmless and innocent pleasure. Remember the noble words of one of the purest of poets (Milton) who reading, as he says, the "lofty fables and romances" of knighthood, saw there "in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence even then I learnt what a noble virtue chastity must be to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up both by his counsel and his arm to secure and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even those books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how, unless by Divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue." Such is the reflection of the ideal purity which Christ has shown us, the ideal which we have to aim at. Not a selfish isolated habit of mind, a bare freedom from corrupt thoughts and foul deeds, which is only preserved by careful separation from the things of the world, but an energising spiritual motive, an impetuous, undoubting living principle of action, which can go with us into the sin-stained world, and by the strength of its own innocence, by the glad assumption of the purity of others can make even the sinner a holy penitent. Every life should be a priestly life. Whatever may be your profession, you will be brought into contact with the sins of impurity, and unless you will share in them or at least condone, you must by your personal example fight against them.

(A. T. Lyttelton, M. A.)

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KJV: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour;

WEB: that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honor,