at all, and
without much of the vanity and pride which cause them. For
recollect that a man may act for his own amusement, as well as for
other people's. Children do so perpetually, and especially when no
one is by to listen to them. They delight in playing at being this
person and that, and in living for a while in a day-dream. Oh let
us take care that we do not do the same in our religion! It is but
too easy to do so. Too easy; and too common. For is it not play-
acting, like any child, to come to this church, and here to feel
repentance, feel forgiveness, feel gratitude, feel reverence; and
then to go out of church and awake as from a dream, and become our
natural selves for the rest of the week, till Sunday comes round
again; comforting ourselves meanwhile with the fancy that we had
been very religious last Sunday, and intended to be very religious
next Sunday likewise?

Would there not be hypocrisy and play-acting in that, my friends?

Now, my dear friends, if we give way to this sort of hypocrisy, we
shall get, as too many do, into the habit of living two lives at
once, without knowing it. Outside us will be our religious life of
praying, and reading, and talking of good things, and doing good
work (as, thank God, many do whose hearts are not altogether right
with God, or their eyes single in his sight) good work, which I
trust God will not forget in the last day, in spite of all our
inconsistencies. Outside us, I say, will be our religious life:
and inside us our own actual life, our own natural character, too
often very little changed or improved at all. So by continually
playing at religion, we shall deceive ourselves. We shall make an
entirely wrong estimate of the state of our souls. We shall fancy
that this outward religion of ours is the state of our soul. And
then, if any one tells us that we are play-acting, and hypocrites,
we shall be as astonished and indignant as the Pharisees were of
old. We shall make the same mistake as a man would, who because he
always wore clothes, should fancy at last that his clothes were
himself, part of his own body. So, I say, many deceive themselves,
and are more or less hypocrites to themselves. They do not, in
general, deceive others; they are not, on the whole, hypocrites to
their neighbours. For their neighbours, after a time, see what they
cannot see themselves, that they are play-acting; that they are two
different people without knowing it: that