reign
alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general,
because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are
orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men
would rather pay board, somewhere else.

No life can be interpreted in language alone. The church is but an
obscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of
its Lord and never to exemplify His deeds. What must heaven think to
see a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building
to sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and
to listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them,
there are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to
whom He sent these people to minister? The doctrines manufactured
about Him have hidden the directions given by Him.

The trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we
have the wrong kind. The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine
things, and the divine truths will take care of themselves.

The kingdom will never come until His will is done. Half-tones of
heaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal
they need. The world will believe in any church that tries to do good.
But the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are
strenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call
spiritual warmth. What they need is plain Christian perspiration. No
man really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality.

But the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally
guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve
on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new
arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies
himself with the cant phrase of irreligion.

We need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to
leave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the
practice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.

THE BUSINESS OF RELIGION

Any religion that will not stand the strain of modern business may have
been good for some other age; but it is valueless in this one. The
test of your piety is not peace in the pews of the church, but power
and direction in the stress of the market, its adaptability to your
activities as well as your meditations.

The problem of the reconciliation