Verse 18
18. The apostle now breaks out in direct address, Flee, O ye Corinthians, your destroying vice, fornication.
Flee As Joseph fled from the wife of his master; for, as St. Anselm says, “other vices are best conquered by fighting, this by running away.”
Without the body Extra of the body. That is, every sin is really committed by the soul, through the will, and the body is only the instrument.
Against Rather, into. Fornication differs not from other sins touching its being committed by the soul; but pre-eminently of all it pours the sin into and throughout the body. And this striking of this sin through the whole body consists not merely in its withering, and wasting, and destroying power upon the body, but in something deeper, more awful, and more truly eternal. As the whole being is satanically unified with the harlot, so the whole body becomes, in its uncleanness, the perfect opposite of the pure person of Jesus the pure. How awfully incapable, then, of coming into mystic oneness with him. And from these views it would seem to follow that lawless love is really more truly opposite to Christ than even lawless hate. Our Corinthians may now infer how detestable is that religion with which their city so abounded, and of which debauchery was one of the consecrated rites.
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