Human reason had guessed and hope had dreamed of the soul’s immortality. Christianity gives this hope certainty, and adds to it the assurance of the resurrection of the body. Man’s entire nature is thus redeemed. Chastity takes its due place amongst the virtues, and becomes the mark of a Christian as distinguished from a pagan life. “The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God who raised up the Lord Jesus, will raise us also through His power. Your bodies are limbs of Christ, ... a temple of the Holy Spirit which you have from God.... Glorify God in your body.” So St Paul exhorts the Christians of Corinth (1 Ep. vi.), living in the centre and shrine of heathen vice. This doctrine of the sanctity of the body has been the salvation of the family. It has saved civilization from perishing through sexual corruption, and is still our chief defence against this fearful evil. Our bodily dress, we now learn, is one with the spirit that it infolds. We shall lay it aside only to resume it,--transfigured, but with a form and impress continuous with its present being. This identical self, the same both in its outward and inward personality, will appear before the tribunal of Christ, that it may “receive the things done in the body.” This announcement gives reasonableness and distinctness to the expectation of future judgement. The judgement assumes, with its solemn grandeur, a matter-of-fact reality, an immediate bearing on the daily conduct of life, which lends a powerful reinforcement to the conscience, while it supplies a fitting and glorious conclusion to our course as moral beings. IV. Finally, _the atonement of the cross_ stamps its own character and spirit on the entire ethics of Christianity. The Fatherhood of God, the unity and solidarity of mankind, the issues of eternal life or death awaiting us in the unseen world--all the great factors and fundamentals of revealed religion gather about the cross of Christ; they lend to it their august significance, and gain from it new import and impressiveness.